Reading, writing, and ... war?

[CShine]

The first dust-ups over the war and teachers came in early 2003. As the nation prepared to enter combat, teachers complained they weren't welcome to express their opinions through buttons, pins, and posters. In the Chicago suburb of Evanston, according to one news report, a high school actually banned teachers from wearing war-related buttons.
The role of educators came under the spotlight again in May when high school teachers in several states - including Texas, California and Alabama - came under fire for allowing students to watch the full video of the decapitation of Nicholas Berg, an American visitor to Iraq. Those teachers appear to have attracted little support from their colleagues and legal precedent suggests they would find little support in the courts.

Although judges have expanded the concept of "academic freedom" beyond college professors to schoolteachers, they didn't transfer it whole. Educators don't have much leeway to present material deemed to be inappropriate for the maturity level of students, nor can they ignore the required curriculum or discuss irrelevant topics. But school districts aren't all-powerful. In 1969, the US Supreme Court weighed in on campus free-speech rights in a famous case involving three Iowa students who wore black armbands to protest the Vietnam War. While the case is often cited as providing protections for schoolchildren, it did the same for teachers. The court said "it can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate."

So what are the right times and places for political discussions on campus? Policies differ from district to district, depending on interpretations of the law, legal challenges, and labor contracts. (Because they aren't funded with public dollars, private schools can set greater restrictions on employees.) While buttons were banned in Evanston, Ill., the American Civil Liberties Union successfully sued the school district in Albuquerque last year after three teachers and a counselor were suspended for posting antiwar materials at area high schools; one put a sign in her classroom window saying "No War Against Iraq." The four educators got paid for their time off.

"Teachers are asked to show students what the lay of the land is regarding a controversial topic like that with regard to different sorts of opinions and attitudes," says Peter Simonson, executive director of the ACLU's New Mexico chapter. "Their responsibilities as teachers shouldn't preclude them from being able to locate themselves on that map, to show students where their own personal opinions lie."

http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0610/p11s02-legn.html