Legal Decision
Oct 1, 2007 - A teacher whose contract was not renewed in 2003 after telling her class on the eve of the Iraq war that "I honk for peace" lost a U.S. Supreme Court appeal today. (TT - Despite SF Gate headline, she was not fired.)
From the San Franciso Chronicle:
The justices, without comment, denied a hearing to Deborah Mayer, who had appealed lower-court decisions upholding an Indiana school district's refusal to renew her contract in June 2003. The most recent ruling, by a federal appeals court in Chicago, said teachers in public schools have no constitutional right to express personal opinions in the classroom.
A teacher's speech is "the commodity she sells to an employer in exchange for her salary," the Seventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said in a 3-0 ruling in January."The Constitution does not enable teachers to present personal views to captive audiences against the instructions of elected officials."
The appellate ruling is binding only on federal courts in Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin...
TT - Indiana appellate court decision.
The United States Court of Appeals for 7th Circuit decision 06-1993 (Dated Jan 24, 2007)
Fact: Mayer was a probationary teacher who had worked one year for the district. In writeup of the court decision, the SG Chronicle distorted the appellate court decision. The whole paragraph expounds on the "speech as a commodity."
Final paragraph:This is so in part because the school system does not “regulate” teachers’ speech as much as it hires that speech. Expression is a teacher’s stock in trade, the commodity she sells to her employer in exchange for a salary. A teacher hired to lead a social-studies class can’t use it as a platform for a revisionist perspective that Benedict Arnold wasn’t really a traitor, when the approved program calls him one; a high-school teacher hired to explicate Moby-Dick in a literature class can’t use Cry, The Beloved Country instead, even if Paton’s book better suits the instructor’s style and point of view; a math teacher can’t decide that calculus is more important than trigonometry and decide to let Hipparchus and Ptolemy slide in favor of Newton and Leibniz.
Beyond the fact that teachers hire out their own speech and must provide the service for which employers are willing to pay—which makes this an easier case for the employer than Garcetti, where speech was not what the employee was being paid to create—is the fact that the pupils are a captive audience. Education is compulsory, and children must attend public schools unless their parents are willing to incur the cost of private education or the considerable time commitment of home schooling. Children who attend school because they must ought not be subject to teachers’ idiosyncratic perspectives. Majority rule about what subjects and viewpoints will be expressed in the classroom has the potential to turn into indoctrination; elected school boards are tempted to support majority positions about religious or patriotic subjects especially. But if indoctrination is likely, the power should be reposed in someone the people can vote out of office, rather than tenured teachers.At least the board’s views can be debated openly, and the people may choose to elect persons committed to neutrality on contentious issues.
That is the path Monroe County has chosen; Mayer was told that she could teach the controversy about policy toward Iraq, drawing out arguments from all perspectives, as long as she kept her opinions to herself. The Constitution does not entitle teachers to present personal views to captive audiences against the instructions of elected officials.
It is enough to hold that the first amendment does not entitle primary and secondary teachers, when conducting the education of captive audiences, to cover topics, or advocate viewpoints, that depart from the curriculum adopted by the school system.
