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'Honk for peace' case tests
limits on free speech
Bob Egelko
SF
Chronicle
Tuesday May 15, 2007
When one of Deborah Mayer's elementary school students asked her
on the eve of the Iraq war whether she would ever take part in a
peace march, the veteran teacher recalls answering, "I honk
for peace."
Soon afterward, Mayer lost her job and her home in Indiana. She
was out of work for nearly three years. And when she complained
to federal courts that her free-speech rights had been violated,
the courts replied, essentially, that as a public school teacher
she didn't have any.
As a federal appeals court in Chicago put it in January, a teacher's
speech is "the commodity she sells to an employer in exchange
for her salary." The Bloomington, Ind., school district had
just as much right to fire Mayer, the court said, as it would have
if she were a creationist who refused to teach evolution.
The ruling was legally significant. Eight months earlier, the U.S.
Supreme Court had decided in a case involving the Los Angeles district
attorney's office that government employees were not protected by
the First Amendment when they faced discipline for speaking at work
about controversies related to their jobs. The Chicago appeals court
was the first to apply the same rationale to the classroom, an issue
that the Supreme Court expressly left unresolved.
But legal analysts said the Mayer ruling was probably less important
as a precedent than as a stark reminder that the law provides little
protection for schoolteachers who express their beliefs.
As far as the courts are concerned, "public education is inherently
a situation where the government is the speaker, and ... its employees
are the mouthpieces of the government," said Vikram Amar, a
professor at UC's Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco.
Whatever academic freedom exists for college teachers is "much,
much less" in public schools, he said.
A recent case from a Los Angeles charter school offers more evidence
of the limits teachers face in choosing curricula or seeking redress
of grievances. The school's administrators forbade seventh-graders
from reading aloud at a February assembly the award-winning poem
"A Wreath for Emmett Till," about a black teenager beaten
to death by white men in 1955.
In an online guide to teaching the poem in grades seven and up,
publisher Houghton Mifflin recommends telling students that it will
be disturbing; administrators said they feared it would be too much
for the kindergartners in the audience and then explained that Till's
alleged whistle at a white woman was inappropriate. When social
studies teacher Marisol Alba and a colleague signed letters of protest
written by students at the largely African American school, both
teachers were fired.
The Mayer ruling was disappointing but not surprising, said Michael
Simpson, assistant general counsel of the National Education Association,
the nation's largest teachers' union. For the last decade, he said,
federal courts "have not been receptive to arguments that teachers,
both K-12 and higher education, have free-speech rights in the classroom."
That's unacceptable, said Mayer, 57, who now teaches seventh-graders
in Haines City, Fla. She said she's scraped up enough money, by
selling her car, to appeal her case to the Supreme Court, though
she doubts the justices will review it.
"If a teacher can be fired for saying those four little words
-- 'I honk for peace' -- who's going to want to teach?" she
asked. "They're taking away free speech at school. ... You
might just as well get a big television and set it in front of the
children and have them watch, (using) the curriculum the school
board has."
On the other hand, said Francisco Negrón, lawyer for the
National School Boards Association, if teachers were free to express
their viewpoints in class, school boards would be less able to do
their job of determining the curriculum and complying with government
demands for accountability.
"Teachers bring their creativity, their energy, their skill
in teaching the curriculum, but ... a teacher in K-12 is really
not at liberty to design a curriculum," said Negrón,
who filed arguments with the court in Mayer's case supporting the
Bloomington school district. "That's the function of the school
board."
The incident occurred in January 2003, when Mayer was teaching
a class of fourth- through sixth-graders at Clear Creek Elementary
School. As Mayer recalled it later, the question about peace marches
arose during a discussion of an article in the children's edition
of Time magazine, part of the school-approved curriculum, about
protests against U.S. preparations for war in Iraq.
When the student asked the question about taking part in demonstrations,
Mayer said, she replied that there were peace marches in Bloomington,
that she blew her horn whenever she saw a "Honk for Peace"
sign, and that people should seek peaceful solutions before going
to war.
A student complained to her father, who complained to the principal,
who canceled the school's annual "Peace Month" observance
and told Mayer never to discuss the war or her political views in
class.
Mayer, who had been hired after the semester started and had received
a good job evaluation before the incident, was dismissed at the
end of the school year. The school said it was for poor performance,
but the appeals court assumed that she had been fired for her comments
and said the school had acted legally.
"Teachers hire out their own speech and must provide the service
for which employers are willing to pay," a three-judge panel
of the Seventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said Jan. 24. "The
Constitution does not entitle teachers to present personal views
to captive audiences against the instructions of elected officials."
Mayer, the court said, was told by her bosses that she could teach
about the war "as long as she kept her opinions to herself."
Like the Los Angeles district attorney's employee whose demotion
led to the Supreme Court's 2006 ruling, the appellate panel said,
Mayer had no constitutional right to say anything on the job that
conflicted with her employer's policy.
Mayer's lawyer asked for a rehearing, saying the evidence was clear
that the school had no such policy when Mayer answered the student's
question. The court denied reconsideration in March without comment.
Mayer, who had taught for more than 20 years, couldn't afford to
keep her Indiana home after being fired and left the state. She
got another teaching job in Florida, but lost it after disclosing
her previous dismissal, and didn't get another position until last
fall.
As all parties to Mayer's case recognize, her statements would
have been constitutionally protected and beyond the government's
power to suppress if she had been speaking on a street corner or
at a public hearing.
But in the classroom, as in the workplace, courts have upheld limits
on speech. In both settings, past rulings have taken into account
the institution's need to function efficiently and keep order, and
the rights of co-workers and students not to be subjected to unwanted
diatribes.
In 1969, the Supreme Court upheld a high school student's right
to wear a black armband as a silent protest against the Vietnam
War and barred schools from stifling student expression unless it
was disruptive or interfered with education. The court retreated
from that standard somewhat in a 1988 ruling upholding censorship
of student newspapers, and will revisit the issue in a pending case
involving an Alaskan student who was suspended for unfurling a banner
outside the school grounds that read, "Bong Hits 4 Jesus."
The Supreme Court has never ruled on teachers' free speech. In
lower courts, teachers have won cases by showing they were punished
for violating policies that school officials never explained to
them beforehand or invented after the fact. A federal appeals court
in 2001 ruled in favor of a fifth-grade teacher in Kentucky who
was fired for bringing actor Woody Harrelson to her class to discuss
the benefits of industrial hemp, an appearance that school officials
had approved.
But teachers who were on notice of school policies they transgressed
have usually lost their cases. In one Bay Area case, in August 2005,
a federal judge in San Jose rejected arguments by Cupertino elementary
school teacher Stephen Williams that his principal had violated
his freedom of speech by prohibiting him from using outside religious
materials in history lessons.
Unless the Supreme Court takes up Mayer's case, its legal effect
is limited to federal courts in Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin,
the three states in the Seventh Circuit. But Amar, the Hastings
law professor, and others said the ruling could be influential elsewhere
because there are few appellate decisions on the issue, and because
the author, Chief Judge Frank Easterbrook, is a prominent conservative
jurist.
"Very few schools are going to be that harsh in muzzling or
silencing their teachers," but the ruling indicates they would
be free to do so, Amar said.
Simpson, the National Education Association's lawyer, said the
ruling, though within the legal mainstream, was bad for education
because teachers are not "hired to read a script." The
case might interest the Supreme Court, and the NEA will probably
file a brief in support of Mayer's appeal should the justices take
the case, he said.
Beverly Tucker, chief counsel of the NEA-affiliated California
Teachers Association, said she doubts that federal courts in California
would take as conservative a position as the court in Mayer's case.
But she expects school districts to cite the ruling in the next
case that arises.
"If I were a public school teacher, I would live in fear that
some innocuous remark made in the classroom in response to a question
from a pupil would lead to me being terminated" under such
a ruling, Tucker said.
As for Mayer, she isn't sure what rankles her most -- the impact
on her life, the stigma of being branded a rogue teacher, or the
court's assertion that a teacher's speech is a commodity purchased
by the government.
"My free speech," she said, "is not for sale at
any price."
INFOWARS:
BECAUSE THERE'S A WAR ON FOR YOUR MIND
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