Most of the issues that spring to mind when we talk about improving American public education have some obvious connection to what happens in American classrooms. Depending on the speaker, the audience, and the current itch that needs scratching, we focus on topics ranging from teacher competence and budget constraints to curricular rigor and school discipline, as well as broader societal factors like student complacency and the state of the union as seen in the average American home.

Each of these issues deserves consideration. Incompetent teachers shouldn’t be in the classroom, and complacent, unmotivated students shouldn’t be surprised when they don’t learn much there. Neither should their parents and elected officials. While many districts do waste money investing in irrelevant, expert-hyped, jargon-heavy programs that offer no educational return, schools increasingly grapple with substantial staff and materials budget cuts that weaken the education their students receive. Reformers ideologically intent on purging content and fundamental skills from our classrooms have gutted curricula for decades, and too many discipline models dwell on counseling offenders rather than protecting their classmates from them.

Let’s set all that aside this time.

Let’s start instead with some recent court decisions. Last summer, after several conflicting decisions by judges in the same circuit, a federal court of appeals found for two students and against their schools in a ruling that essentially “states that you cannot punish students for off-campus speech simply because it offends or criticizes” school officials. Students can be held accountable for speech, on or off-campus, that constitutes a threat or is likely to cause a “substantial disruption” of the school and the educational process for which schools exist.

I’m as big a fan of the First Amendment as the next guy, even if the next guy is James Madison. My history class recently studied a 1978 headline case in which federal courts ruled that Skokie, Ill., a predominantly Jewish town, many of whose residents had survived the Holocaust, could not stop a corps of visiting Nazis from holding a political rally in its town park. The point of the lesson, and the ruling, was that the First Amendment doesn’t allow government at any level to ban speech simply because people, even a majority of people, find it offensive.

There’s a difference, though, between protecting political speech, even Nazi political speech, and enlisting the First Amendment to protect what the students in these cases had to say on MySpace.

One of the victorious civil libertarians, an eighth-grade student, had twice been punished for violating her school’s dress code. She retaliated by posting a MySpace profile of her principal, using his photograph, in which she falsely portrayed him as “having sex in his office,” “hitting on students and their parents,” and “being a sex addict.” She then extended her vulgarity to include his wife and son. Another student elected to wrap himself in the First Amendment after using MySpace to falsely accuse his principal of being a “drunk,” using illegal drugs, and shoplifting.

Both students were suspended until the courts intervened. While a dissenting judge lamented that the ruling “allows a student to target a school official and his family with malicious and unfounded accusations about their character in vulgar, obscene, and personal language,” the majority found that the postings, “while lewd and offensive,” were “online parodies” protected by the First Amendment.

Mort Sahl does parodies. Saturday Night Live and Mad magazine do parodies.

Accusing your principal of being a pedophile isn’t a parody.

The judges in their wisdom determined that the insults were so “outrageous” that “no one took it seriously,” a bizarre stab at reasoning which suggests that they might have sided with the school if the eighth grader’s lies had been a little less vicious. The court was further swayed when the student herself testified that she only meant the whole thing as a “joke.”

It’s frightening when federal judges can’t tell the difference between the truth and a convenient, self-serving adolescent lie. They’re also dangerously out of touch with reality if they imagine that empowering students to get away with publicly insulting, humiliating, and defying their principal doesn’t cause “significant disruptions at school.”

Federal courts, including the Supreme Court, which upheld the lower court’s ruling, have already articulated categories of speech that don’t enjoy First Amendment protection. Reckless speech, like falsely yelling “Fire” in a crowded theater, isn’t covered if it poses a “clear and present danger” to public safety. “Fighting words” that don’t convey ideas but serve only to provoke aren’t covered. Speech that materially disrupts the educational process is just one of those special cases the courts have already identified.

I don’t think James Madison intended his First Amendment to cover an insolent 12-year-old publicly tweaking her principal’s nose with gross obscenities and slanders.

I’m not a jurist, and I’m not versed in all the case law and precedents that undergird the court’s majority decision to rule against public schools. But there’s only so much undermining any institution can sustain before it collapses in chaos.

Chaos is descending on our public schools. And the lunacy that besets them isn’t confined to the Internet. Every day principals and teachers are verbally assaulted and threatened, and school decisions extorted and dictated, by a fringe of irrational parents, intent solely on their own selfish grievances and unbalanced perceptions. Their weapon is the telephone. Their weapon is public whispering and rumor. Their weapon is the lawsuit. Their weapon is intimidation and harangue. Their weapon is the public lie that can’t be refuted because the rules of confidentiality imposed on schools prohibit schools from publicly refuting it. If a parent makes a public charge, then schools should be permitted to answer that charge publicly with evidence.

Instead the lies stand, the irrational stand, and schools fall. And with them fall our students.

If the vast host of responsible parents and taxpayers actually knew how much time and money is held hostage and consumed each day in the principal’s office and in classrooms by a handful of ungoverned malefactors, both adults and students, and the devastation they leave in their wake, we would rise up in righteous indignation and put an end to it.

It’s time.



Peter Berger teaches English at Weathersfield Middle School. Poor Elijah would be pleased to answer letters addressed to him in care of the editor.