The leading advocate for the scholastic free press says in a guest column in the Des Moines Register that students around the country are being routinely punished, even suspended or worse, for expressing controversial ideas or making statements critical of school administrators or school policies. The promise of the Supreme Court’s landmark decision, Tinker v. Des Moines, in affirming students’ Constitutional right to free speech has not been realized. -DB
Des Moines Register
By Frank D. LoMonte
Feb. 24, 2009
When Sarah Palin’s teen-mom daughter, Bristol, recently declared to a network TV interviewer that expecting teens to abstain from sex before marriage is “not realistic at all,” her comments stirred a lively discussion about the effectiveness of abstinence-based sex education in schools.
Unfortunately, the people most impacted by this discussion – typical teenagers, unlike the daughters of national political figures – are too often excluded from participating in it. Had Bristol Palin submitted the same comments as a guest column to her student newspaper, many (if not most) principals would have tossed it in the trash, believing that student media have no right to discuss anything more controversial than next week’s lunch menu.
Forty years ago today, the Supreme Court issued one of its most historic and far-reaching First Amendment rulings, declaring that public school students do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.” The Feb. 24, 1969, ruling in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District affirmed that “students are ‘persons’ under our Constitution,” and that they “may not be regarded as closed-circuit recipients of only that which the State chooses to communicate.”
Tinker stands as a monument to the resolve of three Des Moines students – John Tinker and Chris Eckhardt at Roosevelt High School and Mary Beth Tinker at Harding Junior High School – who wore black armbands to school in support of a cease-fire in Vietnam, then pressed their case to the Supreme Court after they were unlawfully suspended in violation of their First Amendment rights.
Regrettably, it is hard to know whether to mark Tinker’s anniversary with a birthday party or a wake. Although Tinker remains the law of the land, reaffirmed as recently as 2007 by eight of nine Supreme Court justices, its protections have been hollowed out by later court rulings and the disregard of school administrators. One federal judge’s recent ruling sums up their dismissive attitude: “The contribution that kids can make to the marketplace in ideas and opinions is modest.” (Perhaps someone forgot to assign this judge to read “The Diary of a Young Girl,” excerpted from the writings of Anne Frank, the work of a teenager whose impact on the world has been far from modest.)
Many school principals and their lawyers insist that, First Amendment or no, they must pre-approve everything in student newspapers and yearbooks so that, like journalists in the adult world, students have the benefit of editing to teach them professional journalistic standards. The reality is that the most common reason principals give for killing material is not that the journalism is erroneous or poorly written, but that it – accurately – makes the school look bad. Where is the teaching of professional journalism standards in that?
In just the past few months, here are some items that high school students have been told are unacceptably controversial to publish in their campus publications: A column encouraging students to join a nationwide campaign to sit with new friends of a different race in the lunchroom for a day. A column questioning why the new high school was built without a library, forcing students to drive across town to check out books. An editorial urging the school to teach more grammar in its English classes so students would be better prepared for standardized tests.
Students’ lives are being damaged and teachers’ careers destroyed by out-of-control censorship. Just last week, I met a remarkable Yale Law School student who as a high school senior in 2003 was told she had no right to publish a column questioning U.S. intervention in Iraq. When she insisted on publishing the column anyway, she was suspended from school, and a notice was sent to colleges that had accepted her, alerting them that she had “disrupted school.” All but one college rescinded her admission.
It is no answer to say that, because students have the outlet of the Internet, they no longer need campus media to express themselves. School attorneys are now taking the radical position that even speech on off-campus blogs and Web sites is subject to school censorship, if the speech is disrespectful of school administrators or provokes a buzz of discussion at school. In January, a federal district court in Connecticut decided that a high school junior could be punished for writing what the court believed was an exaggerated description of her dispute with school officials on her personal blog.
If the 40 years since Tinker have taught us anything, it is that vigilantly questioning our government is the highest duty of citizenship. Students do not flip a switch at adulthood and learn that lesson, if they are taught for the preceding 18 years that the government gets to decide when and how it is criticized.
Frank D. LoMonte is executive director of the Student Press Law Center, www.splc.org, a nonprofit advocacy group.