Classrooms, Cel Phones and YouTube

All you teachers and administrators out there, you must check out a compilation of cel phone videos of classroom disputes between teachers and students that Scott McLeod at Iowa State put together at Dangerously Irrelevant . I would say it is shocking ... but it isn't. I have not only seen these kinds of incidents on YouTube before, but I have also witnessed them myself when I was teaching in high school.

Scott asks the question:

Do we want students bringing to public attention these types of
classroom incidents? Should students be punished or applauded for
filming and posting these?

My initial response of course is to protect the school, so my first instinct would be to punish these students. I am sure there are cel phone bans (or at least requirements to turn them off) in most of these schools, so if you want to punish under those rules, if they exist, fine.

But, to the larger question of should the public be clued into what is going on in our classrooms? Why not? A parent could come into a classroom to observe. The principal should be observing. The classroom is a closed forum, but that does not mean it is a private place. Schools put video cameras into hallways and parking lots on the basis that it is a public place, so they should not be that surprised when the tables are turned on them. If there are bad teachers in classrooms and students legitimately want to expose what they consider to be unfair or overly aggressive practices, then I don't think we should be punishing them for what they consider to be doing the right thing. If there are minor consequences, such as serving a detention or something for having their cel phones on during class, that is fine by me, but I don't think we should be subjecting these students to major consequences. These will be judgment calls on the part of the school administrator, but I do think they should consider that some students who post these classroom incidents think they are doing the right thing my exposing the activities.

Loving Students' Creativity

Sometimes, you just got to hand it to the kids. This is one of those times. A group of 29 students in New Jersey, upset over shortened lunch periods, decided to pay for the their lunch in pennies ... 200 of them ... for a total of 5800 pennies for the 29 lunches. The superintendent initially decided to punish them, but has since changed his mind. On this one, the students just got the better of him, but in a cute and acceptable way.

That's why I love this job working with schools and students. It is something new everyday. Students will always find new ways the push the envelope, sometimes they will win, sometimes they will lose, but it is always interesting.

And, sorry, I can't help myself but to post the Seinfeld episode this reminds me of, enjoy:

A Student Bill of Rights?

Pete Reilly at Ed. Tech. Journeys has an interesting post on a students bill of rights he ran across in the UK (also check out today's post on the budget and deficit). The UK bill of rights flier contained the basics and was predicated on the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. The flier caused him to wonder, however, what a student's bill of rights would look like in the U.S.:

We have a Patients’ Bill of Rights, a Consumers’ Bill
of Rights, and an Airline Travelers’ Bill of Rights; but who speaks for
our students? For those of us that advocate K-12 public school
transformation, isn’t a Bill of Rights an important step?

So, what would you include in a Student’s Bill of Rights?

He had some interesting responses, but the content concerns me less than the idea. This idea, of having a U.S. Student's Bill of Rights, really strikes me as a good one. Let's put aside the content debate for a minute and assume all the Bill of Rights would do is reiterate the existing constitutional provisions as applied to education. So, a right to free speech, a right not to be searched unreasonably, a right not to be discriminated against without a compelling justification, a right to due process ... the basics. This would still be a great statement for the incoming president to make in his first 100 days in office. Why is it important, you might ask, if all the student's bill of rights did was reiterate existing rights? Well, let me remind you of Justice Thomas' concurrence in Morse v. Frederick. Let me just give you some of his exact words:

MORSE v. FREDERICK via kwout

And...

MORSE v. FREDERICK via kwout

Justice Thomas clearly wants to un-apply the Constitution to students. It took us over 150 years of American history to start recognizing that students, as citizens themselves, had rights, and there is no reason whatsoever to go back. It may be that a large percentage of the country does not support the removal of constitutional rights from students, but clearly some (and some extremely important individuals) do. A presidential statement on a student's bill of rights would unequivocally put an end to this notion that students are not protected by the constitution when in schools, not only from a legal standpoint, but also from a philosophical standpoint. It would be a great statement for a future president to make for a number of reasons, especially one riding a wave of student activism (ahem, Mr. Obama). (And yes I do know of the Students Bill of Rights Act of 2006 proposed by Sen. Dodd, but that was more a school finance bill than a statement of constitutional rights). If the president approached it as just a reiteration of constitutional law for students and did it in an executive order, much of the political battle of school finance and desegregation could be avoided (which is what I am sure has prevented this kind of statement up to this point).

Additionally, this would raise awareness amongst children of their rights as students. Just like what Pete saw in the UK, it is something that can be put on a flier. I know the administrators reading the blog are cringing right now, but students do have rights and failing to inform students of their rights is as bad as not giving them rights in the first place. If we say that we as a country value student speech, then let's actually value student speech and let students know they can speak their minds freely within constitutional bounds.  I think telling students what their rights are, and not just in a student handbook or code of conduct that gets tossed, is the right think to do ethically. Let's tell them that we want them to speak freely, but if their speech causes a disruption, we will punish. Not only is it ethical, it is honest.

I could go on, but I will save you the reading. I just think this is a good idea all around and I am surprised we have not implemented something to this effect at the federal level yet. I know K-12 students don't vote, but they do eventually, and what better statement to give them about American Democracy than being honest and upfront about their rights as students. I would be interested in the thoughts of others on this, but I think it is something we should push for right away.

NY School Attorney Investigation Continues to Expand

The investigation of school attorneys in New York continues to expand. The list of districts required to submit information on how their school attorneys were compensated has now expanded to Westchester County as well, brining the total number of districts required to report information on school attorneys to 172, reports Newsday (via the ABA Journal's Martha Neil). Also, a federal investigation is ongoing into the payment practices and since my last post on this issue another NY school attorney has been brought into the investigation.  Mark Walsh at the School Law Blog has also picked up on the story.

We'll see where this all ends (and it is not ending soon), but right now I am afraid the quotes are just too juicy to pass up. Consider this statement by Mr. Cuomo's spokesman:

"In our experience, inappropriate practices that exploit the system are
not limited to a single jurisdiction. They tend to spread throughout
the state. We are committed to uncovering the full scope of these
problems and developing a solution that ends them."

I warned (here and here) that this was a juicy political nugget that could be exploited by politicans looking to make some headlines. The school attorneys that did wrong should be caught and punished, but look for more and more statements to come from the N.Y. Attorney General's office.

More on Going Online with Law Journals.

A week or so ago I wrote a post about Publishing 2.0 and about how the faculty of the Harvard University Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted to retain the copyright of their work so that it could be posted freely online.  At the time I advocated for electronic, peer reviewed journals as a possible way to meet both needs. Anyway, Mitchell Rubinstein at the Adjunct Law Prof Blog (who somehow manages to post much more frequently than I do and frequently on better topics - check out this one from a day or two ago on a student class rank case), picked up on it, agreed and disagreed (I am willing to conceded his point on advertising on electronic journals if that is undesirable - I am not a big fan of it either, but I was just suggesting it if money was the problem kind of thing...), but, more importantly, triggered my thinking further, which I posted in a comment response to his post. Anyway the comment became a bit long and convoluted, but I thought it was important enough to share here. So here is my response:

Thanks for the thoughts, and obviously I agree with your position that most should be available online and searchable by google's algorithms. Probably, the LII or a similar entity should house them in a database that is searchable in itself so that people wanting legal scholarship have a single resource to trust. Obviously, we are a long way from that happening, but we should be making movement in that direction and the more movement the better. But, there is a circle of law schools, publishers, law libraries that exists that generates dollars (funded by law student tuition and state allocations ultimately, if not by client billing). Clearly a lot of publishers and law schools have a vested interest in keeping this circle going, so it will be hard to break.

But, therein lies the true rub. Whose interest is being represented by continuing this system in its present form when possibly superior alternatives are available. Is the interest of the publishers and law schools superior? Or is the interest of the public superior? At this point, I would find it very hard to fathom an argument that the public's interest is served by keeping this offline. Even if you make the financial woe-is-me argument that some law journals would have to close in light of this new economic frame and thus the total amount of scholarship would be reduced (and the kids capable of contributing to that - something we need to remember)  -- I still think even in light of reduced scholarship and law journal positions, the public would be much better served (much, much better) if the remaining scholarship went online.

Consider the barriers to law. There are lots of barriers that an average person has in trying to understand how the law applies to him or her (believe me, I teach undergraduate, pre-service teachers - breaking down barriers to the law is what I do for a living). High on that list of barriers is the fact that the law is highly dispersed. On any given topic (say education, my favorite) there are hundreds of applicable statutes, thousands of applicable regulations and hundreds of thousands of applicable cases. Even assuming they somehow had access to this dispersed information (say they happened to live in the same town as a law library) how is the average person to set about understanding that morass in any meaningful way? How do they even know what to look for? Where do they start?

There are 3 major law journals in K-12 school law (South Carolina, BYU and West's Education Law Reporter). Those journals contain the best information the educational law scholarly community can offer. I know the educational law scholarly community and they are brilliant people with brilliant ideas. Those journal articles could really be helping teachers and the whole system condense, collate, and comprehend that morass of educational law. But, as it is, they are off limits to teachers (and most of the education system). In order for your average teacher to have access to that information, it has to be filtered through multiple parties. First the teacher has to take that problem to the principal, then the principal has to consider it important enough to pass along to the superintendent level, then the superintendent level has to consider that problem important enough to use the school attorney for, then the school attorney will get back to you in 3 days (for a price). This legal information obtained by the school attorney from a scholarly article (that one of my friends wrote) then has to pass back down the chain before it reaches the teacher. That is most frequently the basic filtering mechanisms that take place from the teacher's legal issue to the teacher getting an answer. Maybe it takes 3 days, maybe it takes 3 weeks. Maybe information is corrupted in the filter, or maybe it is not. Anyway, in light of the possibility of the teacher obtaining the necessary information in a matter of minutes, this whole filtering process looks rather silly (in today's world, our gut reaction to these multi-step, multi-filter, mutli-middle man mechanisms is distasteful - and this is no different). Of course I recognize that serious legal problems will still need to filter to the legal counsel, but there may be a whole host of minor ones that releasing the 3 K-12 school law journals could resolve or at least provide better information for. If nothing else, it gives the teacher the confidence to pursue the legal issue to the legal counsel to get the right answer ... instead of just making an uninformed judgment call. That could help, right? Better information in the hands of these street level bureaucrats would be good, that's the idea as I understand it, right? Now, imagine if we did that not only for education, but for health care, for bankruptcy, for traffic accidents, for insurance, for wills ... well, that would almost be like democracy in action ... right? If we say, honestly and literally, that ignorance of the law is no excuse, well, than anything to make the general population better informed is a good thing in a democratic society.  

In the end, I don't write scholarly articles for school attorneys. I write scholarly articles about educational law for the education system. Now, school lawyers are part of that education system, but so are principals, board members, policy makers, teachers, parents and even students. All of those members of the education system do not have access to the work that I spend hours and hours doing, which is incredibly frustrating to me (especially when I know I can post that same scholarly article here and get lots more readers). If there were no communication device capable of bridging that gap, fine, the school lawyer filter/chain is the best we can do and I can live with that. Before the net, that argument might have been plausible. But, given the communication device that does exist, to keep this information out of the hands of these end users is absolutely ridiculous and either an extreme case of laziness, ignorance, or if neither of those, than unethical.

I think eventually they will get around to it. As Web 2.0 savvy folks get into leadership positions at law schools, I think you will see more and more go online. So, it is not like there is no reason to hope. We are making progress, it is just excruciatingly slow. Meanwhile, when my teachers as me where they can find information on education law after they leave my classroom, I am going to continue to have to tell them not much is available and certainly nothing peer reviewed. I don't want to have to be making those same kind of statements at the end of my career.     

Drew Carey, Watts, Charters, Unions and School Boards - Yikes

Yeah - not kidding. But, not that bad either. Worth a watch, especially if you are a future administrator or anyone affiliated with a charter school.

See, Ed. Law Blogs Have a Purpose

Here is a testimonial from Lon in Oregon on using special education law blogs in his practice as an educator. Although it refers to a different educational law blog, the idea behind it (especially the 3rd paragraph below) is exactly why I publish here.

I have had several comments, emails and
conversations come up recently that have led to issues of special
education law. I know enough about it to (hopefully) stay in compliance
when I am working on cases within our schools and regional programs but
there are probably things that we do as professionals unknowingly that
are on the edge...

I am finishing up a two-year school
administration program through Lewis and Clark College in Portland,
Oregon. My School Law class was taught by a former principal who is now
in a District Office in a supervisory role. He was witty, knowledgable
and a great example of what I think a school administrator should be
like. he taught me a lot about how to think in cases that could be full
of potential landmines.

So
where can we go for legal information? If you have an attorney in the
family, that's nice, but special education law is a niche that needs
specific knowledge. I refer to a blog site called: "Special EducationLaw Blog."
This blog is a resource for case examples, advice, news and parent
advocacy by Charles P. Fox, an attorney in Chicago, Illinois. He
has other guest authors as well. I am putting his link on my important
links list on the sidebar. I would highly recommend going there if you
are researching something of a legal nature.

Using Lon's words ... educational law is a "niche that needs specific knowledge." Even his professor, a former principal needs access to this niche of specific knowledge before he can pass it along to his students. Most of that knowledge is not freely available on the Internet, and if it is, it is not centralized for easy access. This is where blogs are stepping in. Blogs bring information to a central resource, from which it can be redispersed in the near term and categorized and filed for the long term. There are only a few of us bloggers toiling away at the moment, but the pool of educational law bloggers is rapidly expanding (it easily doubled in the last year). As the pool expands and the amount of knowledge and information deepen, educational law blogs will be a central resource for educators, just as it is for Lon in Oregon. Thanks Lon, for the post. 

Individualized Suspicion - Where art thou?

Well, our little hot streak of educational law news continues today. A whole class of students in Kentucky was patted down and asked to remove their shoes and socks after an envelop containing five dollars went missing from a teacher's desk.

Okay ... quick quiz. What is wrong with this search?

The first thing that probably comes to mind is that the intrusiveness of the search was not justified given the amount of money in question (see a similar issue from the 9th Circuit that the Edjurist is following here). Well, that is probably right, although it is a judgment call based on the expectation of privacy (see arrows below). In the actual event, the school in Hopkinsville, KY did have a policy that stated that physical touching of students for searches was only permitted if students were threatened and the four teachers that conducted the searches were given written reprimands.

But, what else was wrong with that search? Something more fundamental ... yeah, individualized suspicion.  Teachers too frequently forget this vital component of 4th Amendment law, as articulated by New Jersey v. T.L.O. When a teacher wants to search a student, she typically must have an individualized, reasonable suspicion that the individual student (or student's possession) you want to search contains the item you are looking for.  Blanket searches like this one in Kentucky are almost always unconstitutional unless there is a pressing and imperative reason to do so. Such reasons where blanket searching can be constitutional is where students are in immediate danger. So, if the $5 were a gun, sure, that would be reason enough to engage in a non-individualized blanket search. But, given it was only $5 and no students were in immediate danger, the appropriate thing to do would have been to conduct an investigation, get an individualized, reasonable suspicion, and then search individual student(s) as necessary. I see way too much blanket searching in schools and I know we are violating the 4th Amendment way too often in that regard.   

I just gave a presentation at Franklin College last week on Teachers and the Law, and here is the slide I used to teach this issue. It may be a helpful reference for teachers and professors on this subject.

Democratic Debate sans Education

I watched the last (perhaps) Democratic primary debate last night. I am interested in the election generally, but over the past few weeks I have been noticing that education seems to be taking a back seat. Education was not a huge topic in the first democratic debates of the season (there have been 20!), but it usually made it into a question or two. In the CNN/YouTube debate, if I remember right, there was even 4 questions related to education.

But last night, there was a grand total of ... zero. In fact, I can't remember a question related to education since it was down to Sen. Clinton and Sen. Obama (the last 3 debates) and I can't specifically remember a question on education when it was down to 3 (including Sen. Edwards). Now, on occasion, the candidates have interjected a small element of education policy into their answers (Obama's merit pay for teachers or repudiating NCLB have come up a couple times recently) but largely the topic has been forgotten. I don't know if I consider that a bad thing (I am a big supporter of state's rights in education as regular readers know), but it is worth noting because it indicates either 1) the democratic candidates don't have recognizable differences on education (likely) or 2) education is not as important as some of the other issues in the mind of the candidates and the media (also possible).

We'll see if this changes in the general election debates when there should be real differences between the candidates (Sen. McCain has finally listed Education as an issue on his website), but as of now education is not getting much play. Of course, this all is ironic because education is likely the first major domestic policy item that any of these candidates will have to address in their presidency as it is more than likely that NCLB reauthorization will wait until after the election and be a first 100 days issue.

If you have an hour and a half to spare, you can watch the whole debate from last night below (it was mildly entertaining - mostly because Sen. Clinton seemed frustrated about everything).

UPDATE: Apparently, I was not the only one that noticed. BoardBuzz has Wendy Puriefoy from PEN, with an editorial to the same effect in the USA Today.

It Comes in Waves Sometimes

Well, just a day or two ago I was thinking to myself how quiet it has been on the educational law news front. I should have known better. I have been blogging for a couple years now and one thing I have learned is that educational law news comes in waves sometimes. It seems to be heating up the last couple days ... in fact, you could say its on fire... because also up on the DrudgeReport today is the story of a Connecticut student setting her teacher's hair on fire . The teacher is okay and it only singed his hair, but the student has been charged with several crimes as a result.

Kindergartener Suspended for Mohawk

A kindergartener in Parma, Oh outside Cleveland has been suspended for his Mohawk. The Cleveland Plain Dealer has the story and a picture. The school said the boy's haircut caused a disruption.

Andrew Paulson at BoardBuzz, um, sort of defends the school and attacks the parent.

Also, Jonathan Adler picked up the story and the comments at the Volokh Conspiracy are sort of funny. But, some of the commenters have a point. A lot of people these days are sporting Mohawks (it's not my taste, but hey, I am sort of a nerd anyway so who am I to speak to fashion). It is becoming (again) a part of society. No longer is it only the deviants of society that are sporting this look. Lots of athletes and musicians are doing it now (Sean Combs - Diddy - even sported one when he ran the N.Y. marathon for charity and just a couple days ago Greg Oden, the #1 pick in last years NBA draft, broke out his). The point is that school authorities have to be hip (sorry for the pun) to society - as least as much as they can. Society moves at a quick pace these days and stuff that was deviant two years ago is now mainstream.

Interesting Bill on Teacher Decertification in Washington State

There is a bill in the Washington State Legislature that would make it easier for schools to decertify teachers for various crimes, mostly related to child abuse. I read the bill and it is pretty standard stuff. So standard, in fact, that the Washington NEA associate is backing the bill. So, why did I put it on the Edjurist ... well, I just found this an odd statement in the Seattle Times Article:

Jarvis [Superintendent of Tacoma Schools] would like to see school districts required to report
problems with teachers, even if the problem is a "boundary invasion"
that likely would not get the teacher in legal trouble. He also wants
the state to allow school superintendents to file professional-practice
complaints against employees in other districts.

The bill would address these issues as well as broaden the list of
crimes for which a conviction can result in automatic firing and loss
of credentials.

So I investigated a little. Here is the section of the Bill that, I guess, would give them authority to report all such "boundary invasions" (only underlined part is new - I added the bold).

  9  Sec. 5. RCW 28A.410.090 and 2005 c 461 s 2 are each amended to
10  read as follows:
11  (1)(a) Any certificate or permit authorized under the provisions of
12  this chapter, chapter 28A.405 RCW, or rules promulgated thereunder may
13  be revoked or suspended by the authority authorized to grant the same
14  based upon a criminal records report authorized by law, or upon the
15  complaint of any school district superintendent, educational service
16  district superintendent, or private school administrator for
17  immorality, violation of written contract, unprofessional conduct,
18  intemperance, or crime against the law of the state. School district
19  superintendents, educational service district superintendents, or
20  private school administrators may file a complaint concerning any
21  certificated employee of a school district, educational service
22  district, or private school and this filing authority is not limited to
23  employees of the complaining superintendent or administrator.

Boundary invasions, of course, means something different to me than "immorality, unprofessional conduct, or intemperance." I certainly understand the idea the superintendent is referring to and I am not against calling teachers out when they cross the line, but it seems to me that boundary invasions can be interpreted pretty broadly (so broadly that if this actually was part of the bill I really would be shocked to see the WEA back it). In fact, the superintendent in his quote even specifically says he interprets this bill as giving him the authority to report incidents that would not have legal implications (something beyond immorality, unprofessional conduct, or intemperance, I assume). In fact, it appears to me that superintendents have no additional authority to report teacher boundary invasions under this new bill - which is pretty much directly contrary to what the article says. Luckily, the term "boundary invasions" was not included in the law and will not be considered by judges in hearings after teachers are fired (although that is not to say ill-informed superintendents might not mess with a teacher's career before it gets to court), but this is a good lesson on 1) how school leaders interpret legislation and 2) how the media chooses to report such interpretations as fact, even when such a simple task as reading the bill would have told them otherwise.

NY Investigation of School Lawyers Expands Across Long Island

Oh boy. The New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has caught wind of the school attorney scandal in a few districts on Long Island (see my earlier post) and is now requesting records on payments to school attorneys from all school districts across Long Island, reports Newsday and the ABA Journal. Newsday uncovered additional attorneys that have been on multiple district payrolls and this has triggered a systemwide investigation.

This could get ugly quickly, I am afraid. Certainly I support Mr. Cuomo's investigation and lawyers that were improperly billing schools should absolutely be punished (disbarring seems a likely and justified outcome). But, this could easily turn into a witch hunt. How nice for a politician to claim that they are protecting your children by eliminating the nasty lawyers that steal their money. Makes for a real nice headline, doesn't it. I certainly support this investigation and I am really looking forward to the data it will generate on legal usage by school districts, but I just want to point out that this could be the start of something really ugly if this spreads across New York and into other states. Schools, communities, and lawyers already have a tenuous relationship. Already I get suspect looks from school leaders when they find out I am an attorney. A national scandal like this could easily become would really harm the work that I and others across the country have been doing over the past few decades to strengthen those relationships. The fact is we need school boards, school leaders and school attorneys working closely together in the operation of schools and the better the relationship between those entities is, the better off the school system and our kids are. Let's find and punish those that did wrong, but let's not start with the supposition that every school district attorney is corrupt. It seems to me that Mr. Cuomo is not very far away from that supposition with this investigation.

Puerto Rican Teachers on Strike - Yeah, the Whole Island

Teachers across Puerto Rico are on strike. Because of their centralized education system (in which strikes are illegal) collective bargaining decisions are made at the state level; so, the strike is an Island-wide, illegal strike by the FMPR, a 42,000 teacher strong association. Their press release says that 26,000 teachers went on strike late last week and 85% of schools across Puerto Rico are not functioning property. The strike has even included a little violence as teachers were injured and arrested in clashes with authorities.

Cruz at Daily Kos has an opinion on the issue and a petition you can send to Puerto Rican authorities.

Anyway, it presents an interesting picture of what would/could happen if states moved to a centralized system for collective bargaining decisions instead of keeping the decentralized, local school board decision making system in place. As collective bargaining and teacher compensation become a bigger and bigger issue in the States, this is something to keep in mind.

The Restrictiveness of Student Speech Codes

There was an interesting back and forth between Thomas Sowell ( RealClearPolitics - their daily summary is one stop shopping for political articles) and Eugene Volokh (the Volokh Conspiracy - my favorite legal blog). The debate is over the relative restrictiveness of campus speech codes in schools, universities in particular. Not surprisingly, the debate started with Berkeley and their recent rebuke of Marine Corp recruiters. This event of course irritated conservatives (check out this Tucker Carlson tirade) including Thomas Sowell who had this to say:

Liberals in general, and academics in particular, like to boast of
their open-mindedness and acceptance of non-conformity. But they mean
not conforming to the norms of society at large.

They have little or no tolerance to those who do not conform to the
norms of academic political correctness. Nowhere else in America is
free speech so restricted as on academic campuses with speech codes.

In response, Eugene Volokh said:

I have often criticized campus speech codes -- but I think we need
to put them in perspective: Speech on campuses (at least outside graded
class projects, which necessarily must be evaluated based on their
content) is generally far more free of institutional punishment than
speech in many other places.

The obvious example, which probably affects about ten times more
people than do campus speech codes, is restrictions on speech in
workplaces. In most workplaces (again, university workplaces are in
some measure something of an exception) speech is quite seriously
restricted.

...

We notice campus speech codes, I think, in part precisely because
student speech is otherwise so generally protected, both at public and
private universities. In my experience, academics -- certainly
including liberal ones -- are actually quite tolerant of a wide range
of criticism, and generally speaking wouldn't try to restrict the sort
of speech that is routinely restricted in workplaces (again, consider
most criticism of the institution or even of named faculty members).
Against this decades-old tradition of broad student free speech, the
restrictions on allegedly racist, sexist, anti-gay, and similar speech
stand out as exceptions. I'm glad they stand out, and I'm happy to
condemn them as generally unconstitutional (in public universities) and
generally improper (in all universities). But we shouldn't let these
exceptions blind us to the broader rule, and view campuses as unusually
speech-restrictive places, where in reality they are quite
speech-protective places.

 
I certainly have to agree with Eugene here. You can attack schools and universities for being a lot of things, but overly restrictive of free speech probably isn't one of them. How many business do you know that set up and area on their campus for daily protests? How many businesses do you know that would allow employees to wear Korn and ICP other t-shirts (sorry that was the popular t-shirt to wear when I was in the classroom, it may have changed by now). The point is that student speech, while sometimes not as protected as adult speech such as in K-12 schools, is generally not as restricted as speech in other places, such as the workplace and now even public workplaces under Garcetti. You can make the argument that academic institutions are too liberal, but to say that such liberalness has become legally restrictive of conservative views is a bit too far.

English Language Learners & Litigation

One of the biggest challenges facing schools today are English Language Learners and the increased attention this group has received under NCLB. Next to special education, the English Language Learner population is the AYP subgroup most frequently responsible for schools being classified as in need of improvement. Not that these students should not be receiving special attention, because they should and the disaggregation of the ELL data under NCLB has really been a help. But, integrating these students and still meeting federal accountability demands has been particularly troublesome for school leaders as they try to keep their schools in the AYP passing column. .

Well, this issue is now at the center of a controversy between the federal government and Chicago Public Schools. In their latest filing in an ongoing desegregation fight, the Justice Department claims that CPS was not providing native language instruction to ELL students.

On Feb. 16, the Department of Justice unleashed its biggest filing
to date -- a motion and hundreds of pages of exhibits accusing CPS of
violating agreements involving "English Language Learners'' who must
receive certain services in their native language under the decree.

The latest motion contends that last school year, close to 3,000
children who were still learning English did not receive required
services, or were given inadequate or untimely service. CPS has been
aware of the problem since a 2002 analysis, but since then, the number
of such children has grown, the motion contends.

Continue Reading ...

The English Language Learner aspects of No Child Left Behind is where we are going to continue to see increases in litigation as schools try to navigate the requirements. While under the current laws I don't think ELL litigation will ever rival the volume of special education litigation, it is going to become a larger and larger specialty of educational law.

Two Million Minutes: A Global Comparison

A new documentary, Two Million Minutes, is starting to get a lot of play. It follows the high schools years of students in India, China, and Carmel, Indiana (a rich Indianapolis Suburb). The movie has been released and I ordered a copy today and will report back when I watch it, but here is the trailer for the movie:

Also here is an ABC News Interview with the Authors (Sorry about the Advertisement) and below is a local news story on the documentary:

Also, for those of you that have not seen it yet, here is a link to Did You Know (I) and Did You Know 2.0. I think the Did You Know Series will wind up being the Nation At Risk of our time, so it is sort of important that you begin paying attention to the issues of globalization and education. Anyway, I will report back a few days from now on the movie and with some more thoughts on globalization and education.

And This is Why We Get a Bad Name ...

So, this is why we lawyers get a bad name. A school district lawyer in New York has been suspended from his law firm and is under investigation for being employed by multiple school districts as well as law firms as outside counsel. Apparently, he was hired as a full-time employee in five separate school districts at the same time and the ABA Journal reports he was credited with working 1,286 days in one year.  So ... yeah, not good.

One thing I have been seeing more and more of lately, though, are attorneys being hired as actual district employees, as this fella was. Used to be that only some of the largest districts in the country employed General Counsels, your Chicago's, LA's and whatnot, and everyone else just retained law firms. But, now many medium sized districts are beginning to employ an attorney as part of the district leadership team. This is something new and does warrant some investigation. What are these attorneys at these medium sized districts doing? How are they prepared for this job? Are they working for multiple districts (preferably under agreements which reduce their time for each instead of what this New York guy did). Just how much influence on the decisions of the district do they control? These are all questions that I am not really sure we have answers to at the moment and for any of you young edjurists out there, this would make a really nice study.  We need to get our head around this issue of K-12 school district general counsels. It is becoming a large enough pool of individuals that we need to start examining them more in depth. As long as we are blind to this issue, there will be more room for shady individuals, like this one in New York, to game the system.

Paying for Term Papers

Well, my infatuation with AfterEd continues. In a new video, they look into the term paper industry. (Here is the transcript of the chat).

Couple thoughts. First, I am highly, highly concerned about this type of activity in educational leadership programs. Although I don't have any research to cite, the anecdotal evidence I have heard from many professors in educational leadership programs raises alarms. I have not heard a professor tell me that they had students actually purchase a completed term-paper online (although as the video shows, adult students in education programs are a large percentage of the online term paper market), but I have had professors tell me that many of their students pay to have their research done for them. We are not just talking about computing the math, we are talking about actually paying someone to find something interesting in a dataset that is dissertation worthy and then run those numbers and transfer that completed analysis to the student, who then writes it up in text form and turns it in. I have actually heard accounts like that from multiple sources to the point that at some places it is the expected norm in dissertation writing. Obviously, highly concerning.

Second,  again, I just want to continue to point out that there is a difference between plagiarism and cheating. Buying a term paper online is not plagiarism, it is cheating (and clearly academic misconduct). While their continues to be some debate about how to catch and punish plagiarism, there is no debate that cheating should be punished or how we catch it. Online sites like TurnItIn are really not designed to catch cheating, they are only designed to catch plagiarism. The only way we can really catch cheating is to have engaged teachers. The idea of someone else doing your homework for you is not really new -- this has been happening for hundreds of years. Our only line of defense against this type of misconduct are engaged teachers that know students and their work and intuitively know when something is not right. While technology may make it easier for students to cheat, it does not change the teacher's job.

Publishing 2.0

Check out this interesting vote by the Harvard University Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Basically, the move is designed to subvert the copyright power that scholarly journals have to limit access to scholarly research only to paying customers. This move allows professors and researchers on the faculty to post much of their research online, freely available to worldwide audiences. Cool, right? Here are the concerns. First, it takes money to pay editing staff. Most of the top journals employ editors (some journals don't). To keep these editors employed the journal has to make money somehow. Also, there is some concern that academics just publishing their work online without peer review will affect the quality of the work. These are legitimate concerns.

Here is the solution (or at least one possible solution) ... electronic, peer-reviewed journals. Keep the peer-review because it really is a decent way of ensuring quality, but put it online for free. If a journal needs to make money on it, do online advertising. If your journal really is that important and well read it should generate enough online advertising revenue to pay a staff. Heck, this might even force academic journals to be more creative ... for instance, instead of just dry black and white letters on a page, how about posting a video of an interview done with the authors? There really is a whole world of media possibilities that are currently not being employed that could be possible in an online format. The point of academic research (at least from this researcher's perspective) is to make a difference in the world, however small. Usually, the best way to do that is to get as many people to read your journal as possible. Andy Carvin at Learning.Now thinks this is the shot heard round the world signaling the beginning of Publishing 2.0 in the academic world. I tend to agree with him.