You Tube Debate Questions on Education Not that Bad

Okay, I lied, one more post on the presidential race and then I will stop (for a while), I promise.

So, I was browsing around You Tube and I started noticing a lot of the same type of Videos popping up. It turns out, this crazy CNN/You Tube Debate(s) that is coming up next week for the Democrats and in September for the Republicans is generating a lot of interesting questions on education. I am surprised how many teachers took advantage of this opportunity to make their questions heard. Probably, they will take at least one question on education and there are a lot of great questions from teachers to choose from. I am pleasantly surprised and excited to see how this works in a presidential debate.

                                                 
Click PLAY to hear Anderson Cooper's explanation of the debates and how to submit your video. If you want to submit, you need to hurry as you only have until the end of the week.

Here are some of my favorites, but feel free to browse around You Tube yourself to find your favorite questions.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukgfeotSZeM (school funding generally)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuOGeSLMx20 (federal funding)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BoeP_ewVk0 (military recruiting in schools)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usLvMXZW7_s (teacher pay/merit pay)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9Byspwtyu4 (college access and preparation)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADVDVbaeoJk (school safety)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IrUnAweDeE (parent asking about school vouchers)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zgn-VmBWZIg (role of Federal Government in education)

Abstinence Education & Sex Education: Back on the Radar?

Couple of interesting things today on abstinence education and sex education; other news items below.   

First, the NY Times today did a front page story
on the issue. There are lots of internal links and audio clips within
the article. Here is the relevant educational law portion of the
article:

For the first time, however, Virginity Rules and 700 kindred abstinence
education programs are fighting serious threats to their future. Eleven
state health departments rejected abstinence education this year, while
legislatures in Colorado, Iowa and Washington passed laws that could
kill, or at least wound, its presence in public schools.

                                   

Second, and I hate to reference the election two days in a row, but since it is related to the issue, Barack Obama spoke on the issue of sex education at a Planned Parenthood meeting in DC and ABC News provided the video. He supports "age appropriate, science-based" sex education and is not in favor of abstinence only education. ABC News runs the headline: "Sex Ed for Kindergarteners 'Right thing to do' says Obama." Story.

The curricular issue of sex education programs has almost been a back-burner issue for the past couple of years, but perhaps it is making a comeback now that Intelligent Design seems to be in a lull.

In other news...

LA Unified's legal battles with charter school advocates continue: LA Times story.

A Maine school is under Federal Investigation for Title IX violations for alleged sexual harassment of a second grade student: Boston Globe story.

Finally, I am sure you did not notice amid all the Senate debate yesterday, last night and this morning over Iraq, but the Student Loan issue was on the floor of the Senate today and will likely come to a vote tomorrow. The President will not support the latest bill however, so a veto is possible. Here is Senator Kennedy's statement on the bill and a breakdown of the possible votes at MyDD.

Suing the NEA over Retirement Benefit Kickbacks

A couple of major papers are running a story in their education sections today on a lawsuit initiated by two teachers against the National Education Association over the NEA's recommendation of retirement plans.

Here is the gist from the LA Times:

The National Education Assn. faces a federal lawsuit accusing it of
breaching its duty to members by recommending a high-cost retirement
plan in exchange for millions of dollars from the managers of the plan.

The
suit, which seeks class-action status, was filed by two of the 57,000
schoolteachers who the suit says invested $1 billion in a so-called
403(b) retirement plan endorsed by the NEA.

The suit says the teachers were lured to invest in the plan by
assurances that the NEA "conducted an extensive review of numerous
financial services companies to find the best provider." But the NEA's
member benefit unit "received millions of dollars … as the quid pro quo
for NEA's exclusive endorsement," the filing says.

Continue Reading.

Here is a different story on the same issue at The NY Times.

Here is a quick read at The Teacher Advocate blog, written by a financial planner for teachers.

It will be interesting to see what happens with this, but to be sure, it is more negative publicity for teacher's unions and given that we are in an election cycle and all the major Democratic Candidates just got finished addressing (videos)the NEA national convention (where Barack Obama told them we need to move to merit pay), it is certainly the kind of negative attention they don't need.

Interesting First Amendment Debate at Volokh Conspiracy on Cancelling Elections

There is an interesting First Amendment issue being debated at the Volokh Conspiracy, my favorite constitutional blog. The case, Husain v. Springer, is getting quite a bit of play around the blogosphere. It concerns a recent Second Circuit ruling concerning student run newspapers, student elections and a university president's power to cancel the election -- and, oh yeah, and the First Amendment. It is quite a "chilling" decision. Especially interesting is the dissent in which the Chief Justice of the Second Circuit admitted "I have not read [the majority opinion ... because] this case is about nothing." More on the dissent at the TaxProf Blog.

Facebook in Yearbook

As noted by NSBA Legal Clips, the Washington Post had a story on a student yearbook staff in Bethesda, MD using Facebook pictures to fill in the empty space in their annual yearbook. 



Besides the obvious usage and crediting problems the yearbook now
faces, this is an interesting case because of the shady gray line between on-campus and
off-campus speech. Increasingly, students are engaging in activities
(such as Internet activities) off-campus, which are being drawn into the school. As this article shows, these instances of speech or other activity are often being drawn on-campus by other students and sometimes by school personnel (I know several principals who troll myspace and facebook looking for student speech that affects the school). In this case, the yearbook staff (apparent facebook members) pulled a few pictures of their friends and put them in the yearbook (including one with students at a party holding plastic red cups).

Anyway, it begs a couple of questions. First, can we hold students accountable for speech/activities that occurred off-campus that were brought on-campus by other students? Yes, clearly we can (think of a threat to the school). However, perhaps the better question is should we hold students to a lesser standard in those cases? What if the little red cups were beer bottles? Should we punish? Is it really affecting the school so much that it warrants administrator intervention? Is this not a parental responsibility?

Secondly, however, what do we do with the students that are bringing the speech on-campus? Are these students not contributing to the disruption by talking about the speech? If they had never accessed and published the speech around campus, the school would never have been disrupted. They are a but-for cause of the school disruption. However, now that I have you thinking that way, let me again refer to the threat to the school scenario where we clearly want students to report. A rule punishing the student bringing the speech on campus might limit students from speaking up about legitimate threats the students see off-campus.

These are very, very shady gray lines indeed and I am more and more convinced that the present off-campus speech analysis is incapable of handling all but the most clear-cut scenarios. These rules were born in a time before the Internet, before camera phones, before text messages, before e-mail. These rules were born in a time when a student's only method of bringing off-campus speech on-campus was to actually bring the written document or actually speak on the topic. However, that time is over and the world is a much different place for students growing up today in terms of how they can communicate with their friends. Frankly, it is time to consider some new rules specifically for off-campus speech issues to address these vast gray areas where principals are largely left to their own devices without any clear guidance from the courts.

One last comment however. Schools need to be extremely careful here. All the school officials I talk to on this issue are gung-ho about prosecuting anything and everything that they can. They feel it is their duty as principals. Not so. There are still some elements of a child's life that are not the school's responsibility. For instance, it is not really the school's responsibility to regulate online conversations between students. If the online conversation is a threat or substantial disruption to the school, fine. But otherwise, the school should leave it to parents to regulate these activities. Not only is that a parent's right and responsibility, it will make their jobs as principals a lot easier.

One of our own on the move: E. Gordon Gee to The Ohio State Presidency

E. Gordon Gee, currently Chancellor at Vanderbilt, is moving to the presidency of Ohio State University. Here is the article in the Washington Post and The Tennessean. This will be his second tenure in the presidency at Ohio State.

Why is this worthy of posting on the Edjurist? Well, Gordon Gee's background is educational law. Perhaps you are familiar with this work (with T.K. Daniel also at Ohio State):

                                                         

Gordon Gee has published on various other education law topics as well. Although his work in higher education administration has taken precedence over his education law work in recent years (his education law publishing is limited to once sentence in his Vanderbilt bio, also check out his Wikipedia page - that is a rare treat for us educational lawyers), it is always good to see one of our own in such prestigious positions. Congradulations.

Oregon's New Protection for Student Journalists

Andrew Paulson over at Board Buzz, as well as USA Today, are reporting that Oregon is about to pass a law that would help protect high school and college students in their choice of content for school-sponsored publications.

Whether or not you think the law is a good idea (NSBA clearly does not), it does represent a new tact for legislatures which is probably in response (at least to some degree) to the general trend in the courts, including the Supreme Court, away from students rights, especially speech rights. Although the Morse v. Frederick Supreme Court decision came down after this legislation was already well-underway, it could not have hurt in coalescing the necessary votes to pass the legislation and in getting the governor's signature.

Personally, I don't think this law actually changes that much legally, except, perhaps for creating the private right of action. While it has a lot of language about what schools can still limit, in the eyes of the courts, it is probably not that much different from the existing Hazelwood standard. However, student's already had a right of action under the Constitution to sue their schools if they infringed on their First Amendment rights. In practicality, schools are probably just going to be somewhat more lenient when it comes to allowing material that they feel is not in line with the educational mission of the school. I do not think it will create the flood of new lawsuits that Paulson implies it will, and even if it does, I am not sure that is necessarily a bad thing. The line on student speech is extremely blurry at the moment a little more litigation to clear that up probably wouldn't hurt. 

Anyway, judge for yourself: here is the text of the bill that supposedly will be signed by Gov. Ted Kulongoski on Friday. And here is the relevant section:

Except as provided in subsection (4) of this section,
student journalists have the right to exercise freedom of speech
and of the press in school-sponsored media, whether or not the
media are supported financially by the school or by use of school
facilities or are produced in conjunction with a high school
class.
(3) Student journalists are responsible for determining the
news, opinion and feature content of school-sponsored media
subject to the limitations of subsection (4) of this section.
This subsection does not prevent a student media adviser from
teaching professional standards of English and journalism to the
student journalists.
(4) Nothing in this section may be interpreted to authorize
expression by students that:
(a) Is libelous or slanderous;
(b) Constitutes an unwarranted invasion of privacy;
(c) Violates federal or state statutes, rules or regulations or
state common law; or
(d) So incites students as to create a clear and present danger
of:
(A) The commission of unlawful acts on or off school premises;
(B The violation of school policies; or
(C) The material and substantial disruption of the orderly
operation of the school. A school official must base a forecast
of material and substantial disruption on specific facts,
including past experience in the school and current events
influencing student behavior, and not on undifferentiated fear or
apprehension.
(5) Any student, individually or through the student's parent
or guardian, enrolled in a public high school may commence a
civil action to obtain damages under this subsection and
appropriate injunctive or declaratory relief as determined by a
court for a violation...

Just as background, the student press law center in the USA today article cites a Seventh Circuit case called Hosty v. Carter, which limited some rights of students in school-sponsered publications only to publications deemed open-forums. The seminal case on school-sponsered expression is Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier, which gave school authorities broad discretion in limiting school-sponsered speech in alignment with the school's educational mission.

Finally, here are a couple of other posts and articles on the issue you might find interesting: Washington Journalism Education Association; Oregon Daily Emerald (U. Oregon's Student Newspaper); First Amendment Center.

Parking - A Mandatory Subject of Bargaining?

So, last Friday I got a parking ticket at the University that I work for. I was none too pleased about it, but the whole thing is resolved now and I wound up paying an additional $31.50 to get the whole thing resolved.

                                                 

Anyway, I have a long standing hatred for university parking systems so when I stumbled across a recent Illinois Supreme Court case on the issue, I did not forget it. Since my parking wound is still fresh, I thought I would recount the Illinois case and its outcome in the hopes that unions may take some control over these parking systems away from universities, so that it might not cost over $300/year for a parking space in a small college town in the middle of the midwest.

In the case 2 of the unions (the SEIU & FOP) whose employees work at the University of Illinois sued the University of Illinois because the university refused to bargain parking. The unions claimed that parking affected their "wages, hours & terms and conditions" of their employment. The Illinois Supreme Court agreed, overruling the lower courts, which agreed with the University that parking was an inherent managerial right. The Supreme Court reasoned that parking was integral to the employees' jobs to the extent that they should have a right to bargain over it, even though it was initially provided voluntarily on the part of the University. Thus, at least in Illinois, parking at universities is a mandatory subject of bargaining for negotiations between the universities (and possibly all public schools) and their collective bargaining units. Of course, this may have no implication for non-collective bargaining units, such as students, but given the present state of parking operations at most universities, it can't get much worse so just about anything has to be an improvement.

University of Illinois v. Illinois Educational Labor Relations Board.

If you have ELA membership you can see my summary of the case in the July edition of the School Law Reporter, page 140.

The EU & Their Fundamental Right to Education

Well, since it is summer, my reading list has a decidedly non-academic
tone, at least not an education law related tone. Anyway, this weekend
I took up The United State of Europe,
by T.R. Reid (2004), which I have been wanting to get to for a while.
If you don't want to read the whole book, here is a decent interview
with Terry Gross on NPR's Fresh Air. I recommend the book, although the author frequently repeats himself and dwells on some things too long.

Anyway, the point I wanted to make is that the EU has decided that there shall be a fundamental right to a free education (164). Here is the relevant text from the EU Charter on Fundamental Rights.

Article 14

Right to education

1. Everyone has the right to education
and to have access to vocational and continuing training.

2. This right includes the possibility to receive free
compulsory education.

3. The freedom to found educational establishments with
due respect for democratic principles and the right of
parents to ensure the education and teaching of their
children in conformity with their religious, philosophical
and pedagogical convictions shall be respected, in accordance
with the national laws governing the exercise of such
freedom and right.

Also, here is the EU's page on education.
Yes, you are right that the individual states of the EU still get to
set most of their specifics on education and the EU's Charter can be
somewhat seen as merely guidance. However, the EU does have a Court of Justice of the EU Communities to enforce these fundamental rights.

I knew that education was more valued in other countries, even though the US was the first to make public education work (see my July 4th post),
but making education a fundamental right has extremely serious
implications. The US has decided that education shall not be a
fundamental right, at least that is the present precedence existing in
the US Supreme Court from the case San Antionio v. Rodriguez. In
the wake of the latest Supreme Court rulings, the U.S. seems to be
going the opposite direction from the EU. While it is impossible to
know which approach is better given all the considerations and
implications that flow from this type of difference, the EU's rise and
their fundamental social guarentees certainly now stand in stark
contrast to U.S. education policy.

By the way, want to know who is a protected class in the EU? Check this out:

Article 20

Equality before the law

Everyone is equal before the law.

Article 21

Non-discrimination

1. Any discrimination based on any
ground such as sex, race, colour, ethnic or social origin,
genetic features, language, religion or belief, political
or any other opinion, membership of a national minority,
property, birth, disability, age or sexual orientation
shall be prohibited.

2. Within the scope of application of the Treaty establishing
the European Community and of the Treaty on European Union,
and without prejudice to the special provisions of those
Treaties, any discrimination on grounds of nationality
shall be prohibited.

Article 22

Cultural, religious and linguistic diversity

The Union shall respect cultural,
religious and linguistic diversity.

Article 23

Equality between men and women

Equality between men and women must
be ensured in all areas, including employment, work and
pay.

The principle of equality shall not prevent the maintenance
or adoption of measures providing for specific advantages
in favour of the under-represented sex.

Article 24

The rights of the child

1. Children shall have the right
to such protection and care as is necessary for their
well-being. They may express their views freely. Such
views shall be taken into consideration on matters which
concern them in accordance with their age and maturity.

2. In all actions relating to children, whether taken
by public authorities or private institutions, the child's
best interests must be a primary consideration.

3. Every child shall have the right to maintain on a regular
basis a personal relationship and direct contact with
both his or her parents, unless that is contrary to his
or her interests.

Article 25

The rights of the elderly

The Union recognises and respects
the rights of the elderly to lead a life of dignity and

independence and to participate in social and cultural
life.

Article 26

Integration of persons with disabilities

The Union recognises and respects
the right of persons with disabilities to benefit from
measures designed to ensure their independence, social
and occupational integration and participation in the
life of the community.

Interesting Little Find Today Re: Education Law Association

Today, I was wanting to take a quick look at the School Law Reporter published by the Education Law Association. I know they website: www.educationlaw.org, but I decided to take an easier route. So, as with all things these days, I quickly typed ELA into Google and ... scrolling ... scrolling ... hit next page ... ohh, found it, on Google's second page. Go ahead, try it for yourself - I'll Wait.

Now, a lot of educational institutions are not the first ones listed if you type in their acronym at Google. For instance, ECS is the second one listed, as is CEP. Also, not every educational association comes up first. UCEA comes up second, CIES comes up fourth, but ASHE, AEFA, and of course AERA all come up first. Anyway, the point is that the educational organization's acronym is usually one of the first five to come up on Google so it can be immediately seen a clicked on, redirecting the user to the site they wanted.

So, who are these other ELAs that are coming up on Google before our ELA? Well: ELA Lighting (Hollywood, CA);  ELFA's "We've Moved" page; an ELA group of landscape architects in Pennsylvania; the Ethel Louise Armstrong Foundation; ELA (some British band I never heard of); the "Extended Live Plugin" of some French blog; Technorati's ELA search results; and the homepage of the Edinburgh Landlord Accrediation site. Umm.....yeah.....not good.

This might be no big deal, except that on their front page the Education Law Association presents themselves as "ELA" so you would think they would pop up in a search for ELA. Also, if you are aware of the algorythm that Google uses, you will know that it is based on the number of other sites that refer to it. In this way, Google determines a level of importance, and accordingly ranks and presents those results to you when you search. But, just in case you think this is just a Google problem here are some other engines: Yahoo, second page No. 13, MSN, bottom of page 3, Vivisimo (meta search engine), No. 122; Ask.com, page 12 (I actually was not sure if I was going to find it at all on Ask.com!!!).  So, Google is actually doing the best job for ELA.

So, what this means is that according to Google (and the other search sites), all those other ELAs listed above are more important that our ELA because other highly relevant sites are not linking to the Education Law Association, which is sort of embarrassing.

By the way, our ELA's motto pastered right on the front page: The premier source of information on education law.

Happy 4th of July

Happy Fourth of July everyone!!! It is my favorite holiday because it is the day we get to celebrate our nation's accomplishments. To think in just 200 short years this nation went from a band of ragtag states to our present status is quite remarkable. While it is certainly key to remember the important documents in our history, the wars we fought and won, and the individuals that made that all possible, let's not forget education's central role in this republic. Public schools were operating 150 years before the nation was founded and the U.S. (by its associated states) was the first country to establish mass schooling through the use of common, public schools. On this national holiday, as you reflect on the U.S. and its oldest serving constitution in the world, also think about the United States' oldest system of public schools. It somehow seems, at least to me, that there is a signifigant correlation there. I am not totally sure one could exist without the other. Happy 4th of July.

Some Video on Morse v. Frederick & Parents Involved in Community Schools

Here are some recent video and blogs that have been posted
about the Morse v. Frederick case and the two K-12 Affirmative Action cases.



Morse v. Frederick



ACLU Video of Activities Outside Supreme Court on Day Case Was Argued.

Jim Lehrer

Some good blog entries: Eugene Volokh and Orin Kerr's back and forth at the Volokk Consipracy really gets at the heart of the issue.

Seattle & Louisville School Assignment Cases

Jim Lehrer

Jim Lehrer: Analysis of Current Supreme Court Issues (Includes Goodwin Liu)

Time.com: Can Schools Still Achieve Diversity

Some good blog entries: Balkinization, Is that Legal?, Dorf on Law 

Finally, Richard Cohen (a center-left columnist
for the Washington Post) wrote this Op-Ed column Tuesday that concerns
both the recent race-based admissions cases as well as the democratic
positions on education. I found it moldly interesting and would like to
see other reactions.

Did I miss some? Post as a comment.

No More Education News?

I am sure I am the only one to notice this, but CNN has demoted both education and the law*.

Here is the March 2007 news categorization banner: here.

And here is the current, redesigned banner: here.

Why is this important? Well, CNN was the last major news organization whose website had "education" as a separate news category with a direct link from their mainpage. MSNBC, CBSNEWS, ABCNEWS & FOXNEWS never had listed education as a separate classification of news. Usually, education is a subtopic under the "U.S. News" category. Thus, readers of these sites are unlikely to find education news unless they are specifically looking for it. The big education news will still grab the headlines, such as the VT shootings and the Supreme Court decision on Affirmative Action, but lesser known stories will reach fewer news readers.

So, who will report the nation's education news? Well sites run by newspapers are doing a slightly better job. Both the NYTimes and the Washington Post feature education slightly more prominently. However, much of the education news in these papers is specific to the location of the paper and thus, national readers are unlikely to continue to click these sites for their national education news needs.

None of this is anything to write your congressman about, but this latest demotion of education by CNN is notable in that mainstream media just do not have a place for education news. Thus, mainstream news consumers will also get less education content on a daily basis making the fight to keep education news (both good and bad) prominently on the national stage that much harder.

* ABCNEWS is presently the only one to list "The Law" as a separate category.

Did you know 2.0 - Great Video About Technology's Upcoming Impact on Education

Check out this amazing video about how technology will affect education. Even though it is a little afield from a direct educational law topic, I showed this video in my Advanced Educational Law class the other day as part of my future directions lecture and the students (K-12 principals) were just in shock. So, I thought it was worth sharing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMcfrLYDm2U

Also, a new version has been published, Did You Know III. I don't like it as much as I liked 2.0, but it is still good. It has a little more about blogs and wikis and podcasts and other technology content and it directly addresses education a little more.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7J_ereCiTo

Finally, the people that put this video (edit: the first video only) together and are responsible for starting this important discussion are Karl Fisch and Scott McLeod (of At the Schoolhouse Gate fame). Anyway, here is a link to their wiki on the presentation and how you can get more information and engage in more discussion about education technology issues: ShiftHappens.

Anyway, enjoy. I know I did.

Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District is Up on Supreme Court Site.

The K-12 affirmative action case is on the Supreme Court site. It is 185 pages long and also has multiple concurrences and dissents, much like Morse v. Frederick (this is certainly an extremely divided court). At first blush, before I have had time to digest it all, it looks as though neither Seattle nor Louisville's race based admissions plan was constitutional, however, at least in theory affirmative action in K-12 schools seems to have survived because of a seperate concurrence by Justice Kennedy. Kennedy in analyzing the Jefferson County (Louisville) case found that if they were more specific in terms of their plan and they could clearly articulate the compelling interest at state, he may have approved the plan. Similarly, in the Seattle case, although there was more specificity in terms of the plans procedures, Seattle did not have a justification for the classifications of "white" and "nonwhite" in a district that is already fairly diverse. Had Seattle's district been a high majority of white (and similarly narrowly tailored on the procedures) he may have approved it. Kennedy then went on to state that the Roberts opinion went to far in dismissing the use of race by the government to promote legitimate goals. He said,

"In the administration of public by the state and local authorities it is permissible to consider the racial makeup of schools and to adopt general policies to encourage a diverse student body, one aspect of which is its racial composition ... If school authorities are concerned that the student-body compositionsof certain schools interfere with the objective of offering an equal educational opportunity to all of their students, theyare free to devise race-conscious measures to address the problem in a general way and without treating each student in different fashion solely on the basis of a systematic, individual typing by race.

School boards may pursue the goal of bringing together students of diverse backgrounds and races through other means, including strategic site selection of new schools;drawing attendance zones with general recognition of thedemographics of neighborhoods; allocating resources forspecial programs; recruiting students and faculty in a targeted fashion; and tracking enrollments, performance, and other statistics by race. These mechanisms are race conscious but do not lead to different treatment based on a classification that tells each student he or she is to be defined by race, so it is unlikely any of them would demand strict scrutiny to be found permissible. ... Executive and legislative branches, which for generations now have considered these types of policies and procedures, should be permitted to employ them with candorand with confidence that a constitutional violation does not occur whenever a decisionmaker considers the impacta given approach might have on students of different races. Assigning to each student a personal designation according to a crude system of individual racial classifications is quite a different matter; and the legal analysis changes accordingly." Kennedy, Concurrence

The other opinions are worth noting too and more analysis will be coming in the days ahead as scholars begin to interpret how this will play out for schools.

An early analysis by Bill Mears at CNN can be found here.

The Saga Continues: Morse v. Frederick

Morse v. Frederick, a.k.a. "Bong Hits 4 Jesus," is a another victory for school administrators. After almost two decades of silence from the Supreme Court on student free speech rights, the High Court is still reluctant to expand student speech rights at the expense of legitimate educational and social policies. While this case presented a good opportunity for the Court to clarify how off-campus speech incidents are to be addressed, the Court did not capitalize on this opportunity. Thus, inquiring minds are left to ponder how off-campus speech cases, such as student Internet speech, are to be handled. Once again, it is reaffirmed that students are not absolutely free to express themselves during any time that can be considered school time.

New Education Law Blogs

Since we last spoke, the blogosphere has nearly doubled in terms of sites devoted to educational law, and there are some really good new blogs!!! My favorite new education law related blog is At the Schoolhouse Gate. It is run by Scott McLeod, who is an educational leadership professor at the University of Minnesota. It posts on all topics related to educational law, but does a particularly good job of analyzing educational technology issues in terms of the law.

Also, another general educational law blog, "Educational Law & Policy" is being run out of Chicago by a lawyer and Ph.D. student named Jason Odeshoo. It seems to just be getting started, but it has a nice analysis of all the different concurrences and dissents in the Morse v. Frederick case here. Let's hope for good things from this blog.

Finally, one last one to mention. A friend of mine, Jim Gerl, has started the "Special Education Law Blog." It is pretty focused on special education due process issues, but given that Jim is one of the most respected national experts in this area, the information in it should be very helpful. Jim is a little concerned about this new blogging experience, so go over and support his blog.

Other blogs that I keep on my Technorati favorites list related to educational law include: Board Buzz (from the NSBA); the other "Special Education Law Blog" written by Charles Fox an attorney in Illinois, which has been a consistently good blog for going on two years now; and finally at The FAPE Page, Sanford Hausler has been going strong providing good information on special education law for three years. As soon as I get this new webbuilding softward to cooperate with the sidebar, I will post a blogroll of all these links.

Okay...I hear the calls for encore, encore -- so just one more new one. I really like the Higher Ed Law Prof Blog, which is run by James Castagnera (Rider University) and Patrick Cihon (Syracuse University). They have some interesting recent thoughts on higher ed security issues in the wake of the VT shooting.

Okay, that's what I am watching in the educational law blogosphere. What are you watching. Let us know if we missed one of your favorites.

The Edjurist Relaunch

Welcome back Edjurist Readers. You will notice some changes to the format of the blog. First, there is a new title: The Edjurist Accord. This title modification was necessary because the Edjurst has moved beyond its humble beginnings as a single author blog and is now a multiple author blog written by a number of scholars in educational law. Also, you will notice the topical coverage of the blog has become much more limited to only issues directly related to educational law. Many of the previous topics that related to broader educational policy issues will no longer be covered in this forum. We suggest consulting other educational policy blogs, some of which are listed in the links section to the left, for general information on educational policy. Finally, we value your input. Please add comments with what you would like to see in this blog and let us know when we are doing well or when you think we can make improvements. As always, your readership is valued. Thank you for taking time to read The Edjurist Accord.

Morse v. Frederick Comes Down

The Morse v. Frederick case was published today by the Supreme Court. It is a limited decision solely on the issue of drug use.

ECS Presidential Merry-go-round

Around and around we go at 700 Broadway, Denver, CO; the picturesque
location of the Education
Commission of the States. The latest is that Piedad Robertson is planning
to step down from the helm of ECS. Things are beginning to get scary for ECS,
the 40 year old education policy center that serves states and is primarily
funded by state compacts.

                                                                         


Recently, high level analysts resigned noting the lack of leadership, see a
previous post here.
In addition, it seems at least, that staffing levels around ECS have been down
lately, and no positions are presently listed on the ECS employment pages. This
is likely a reflection of funding levels, which, mostly, have been down.



The Education Week article
on the issue states that ECS will reconsider the "essence of its
mission." Speaking as someone who has served at ECS in the past, I at
least feel ECS needs to get back to being a general resource for states, on all
education related issues, and forget some of the special interest projects and
institutes ECS is currently devoting resources toward. These projects and
institutes serve only small parts of the education community, such as Gov.
Huckabee's Arts and Education Initiative, which in tight financial and testing
times, is simply out of touch and does not inspire states to continue to pay
for ECS’ services.



But, more than anything, ECS needs leadership. The kind that Frank Newman
offered ohh so long ago. But who will take the job? Who can right the ship? ECS
needs to find someone who can inspire states and can serve as a resource for
all education entities. Anyone can run an organization, what ECS needs is
someone who can organize all the running into a steady march towards
education's future.