School Law Position at Tennessee

For those interested. 

Love to have a great school law person as my southern neighbor. 

Sanity with Zero-Tolerance (Finally)

I hate zero-tolerance policies. Always have. They are just wholly unnecessary, legally silly, probably discriminatory, generally bad for kids and, on top of all that, don't even work. 

So, to my delight, finally zero-tolerance seems to have the worst of it in policy circles lately. Credit to Arne Duncan and the U.S. DOE for releasing new guidance last week that tries to put the brakes on mandatory suspensions and expulsions. I think the Secretary has intelligent things to say in this release video:   

The bottom line is that the law entrusts principals and other school leaders with the discretion to make appropriate decisions toward novel situations amongst kids. These disciplinary decisions can be incredibly difficult with intense lobbying on all sides. Many tears are shed and sleepless nights suffered over how to appropriately discipline kids. But, that is the job. It is a core function of a school leader and the manifestation of the trust provided to that position in our society. To attempt locally to shirk that responsibility through the use of hastily adopted zero-tolerance policies is cowardly. The policy position may appear tough, but it actually speaks to the weakness of the proposer. 

I am glad to see the light at the end of the dark, dark tunnel of zero-tolerance. 

Complying with Copyright Just Got Easier

One of the huge areas of potential copyright violations if you are a techy like me are around images. I post images to the blog, add them into my powerpoints, upload them to sites, ... so available images to use are important to me. All those same uses also apply to our kids and teachers in schools everyday.

On the web, only a few images are available to use without a direct copyright violation though. I usually try to find those images when producing documents, but it can be difficult. Compflight is a great tool and there are others such as the Creative Common search. These search engines take extra time to search and their search functions are not as powerful as core search giants like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. 

Well, Google has made this process easier by adding a licensure limitation on your image search directly on the search page (see image). Here is the procedure:

(1) run a search (such as "education law" below),

(2) go to "Images,"

(3) click "search tools," 

(4) use the "Usage Rights" drop down to select the licensure category. 

Now, this is not a fool proof method in that Google is not guaranteeing the license.  To be safe you need to independently check the license, but it is a great time saver and a really good step by Google during this Copyright Week to make the world a slightly more functional place (even if this doesn't address the core issue of the broken copyright system). 

Finance Conference RFP Deadline Tomorrow

Just a heads up that the deadline for submissions to the National Education Finance Conference is tomorrow, Jan. 15. The conference this next year is in Louisville, which of course is awesome for me. I've thus proposed a retelling of Bruce Baker and my brief on virtual school finance. 

Anyway, if you are interested in education finance, particularly from a legal perspective, it is can't miss conference. 

Copyright Week

Today is the start of Copyright Week, as sponsored by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a host of other digitally interested organizations such as Creative Commons and Wikimedia, as well as other organizations interested in more open information such as the American Library Association. Here is a press release on the start of it. 

Whether or not you follow along this week, you should be aware that even as the Internet has made information more openly available than ever before in human history, many interests, specifically Hollywood, are pushing to make information increasingly protected behind copyright law. Congress has a tendency to want to listen more to Hollywood than well, common sense, so copyright law is only becoming more strict. Schools are sort of left in the middle of this and the result is that many teachers and students are technically criminals for copyright violations.  

If you want a basic introduction to copyright and education, here is a short article I did last year on it from T.H.E. Journal. 

Open Records & Academic Freedom in the Chronicle

The Edjurist's dear friends (Neal, Jeff & Karen) have a fascinating op ed. in the Chronicle of Higher Education today on the controversial request for university professor email and other documents by a conservative advocacy organization. 

Some thoughts of theirs: 

The problem with the unfolding episode in North Carolina isn’t the desire to challenge Nichol’s views and assertions. The problem is using an open-records request as a strategy to suppress debate. A law intended to add transparency and openness to government operations has been used to harass and silence.

Be sure to check out more thoughts from Neal, Jeff, Karen & their team at our sister blog, HigherEducationLaw.org. 

SnapChat is Sending Images to the Government

Our kids really need to know that. Like now. Our younger teachers do as well. In your next legal training on anything related to social media, you should mention this. I teach a pre-service law course starting next week; I am definitely going to mention this in there. 

I'm not a user of snapchat myself, but I know that many of our students are heavy users somewhat on the premise that whatever they send will go away quickly. Well, no so much. 

Details here. H/T: Bethany Smith