Texas Teacher Law

Student Discipline or Free Speech Infringement?

I admit I haven't been posting regularly, maybe something to do with summer, or hot, or lots of kids at home apparently incapable of making the simplest decision without checking with mom (am I fooling myself to think this will continue when they're 16 and out with friends late at night?), but I have been working and keeping up with the news.

One interesting piece of news is the Supreme Court decision in the "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" case Monday. Briefly, this case involved a group of high school students being released from class during the school day to attend the Olymip Torch Relay parade being held on the stree outside the school. School staff followed the students oustide to the parade.

One student, in a self admitted attempt to get on TV, unfurled a pre-prepared banner with the above statement on it. The school principal told him to take it down, he refused, and she suspended him. He appealed his suspension, arguing the banner was protected speech, and the dispute ultimately wound up before the Supreme Court.

The Court's ruling was very limited. It upheld the suspension on the basis that the speech itself could reasonably be interpreted as advocacy of illegal drug use, which was against school policy and had been the basis of the suspension. Significantly, the Court did not find any political statement in the banner, merely the illegal drug use advocacy. Had there been a political statement on drug policy within the statement, even if there had also been a reasonably arguable urge to illegal drug use, the Court would probably have ruled in favor of the student. It's probably important to also note that many people, the justices included, have observed that the statement itself doesn't make any sense and doesn't really say anything at all.

Context is important is determining political content. The student himself had stated his purpose was to get on TV, and the event was unrelated to politics or policy or religion or even public debate.

So how should this affect teachers? First, students clearly have a constitutional right to express political opinions. Public schools cannot discipline students for the content of their political expressions. In other words, what the student says cannot be the basis of the discipline. Private schools are not necessarily bound to this same rule.

Some examples:
If the banner had been unfurled in the classroom, during class, the student could be disciplined for being disruptive, regardless of the content.
If the banner had said "Bong Hits 4 Cancer Patients", it would probably have been protected speech.

Teachers and Privacy

Teachers are public employees, and as such, much of the information kept by the state and the local districts is subject to the Texas Public Information Act (TPIA).

However, teachers have great professional organizations that have successfully lobbied for, and won, exceptions to the TPIA for teachers. Ten years ago, anyone who wanted to ask could get a copy of any teacher's evaluation. Not so anymore - and any memo a teacher receives that "evaluates" his or her performance is also off limits.

Teacher's college grades are also inaccessible to the public now. I could get a copy of your transcript to see what classes you took and where you went to school, but all your individual course grades will be blacked out.

This legislative session, a small exception was made for the scores on teacher certification tests. No longer can I or any other member of the public get copies of the actual test scores received by individual teachers.

As individuals, we all want our privacy. As teachers, you have a large lobbying force in Austin to work for your privacy. Not all state and local government employees have that lobbying force, so I could still get performance evaluations of lots of other public employees. Which makes teachers look like a special group, and that can lead to resentment - which we see in this Houston TV station interview with the legislator who sponsored the latest privacy gain for teachers.

Birth Rate Down, Divorce Up

Believe it or not, this headline is taken from information in a leaflet published in 1899, one of the many original documents available in the Library of Congress' online digital collection. No longer do you need to travel to DC to share in the fascinating pursuit of historical treasures. This particular leaflet notes that it is rare to find the ten and twelve children families of yesteryear, that men and women both are marrying later because of the economic situation fueled by the entrance of women in great numbers intot he workforce, which was haing the effect of pushing wages down for all workers to a level less than required to "sustain life." (The players are different, but it's exactly the same analysis we're looking at today in the debate over illegal immigration and the efffect on the border states.)

This wonderful collection can be found here.

If you don't have time or prefer not to do your own research, the Library also has lesson plans and other resources developed specifically for teachers.

Professional Development

I need your help.
If you are setting up professional development for your district, or if you know who is working on that, I'd love to hear from you. I have programs that I do for teachers that I want to share.

I have one program in particular that teachers love and that their administrators love them to have - How To Document For Successful Student Discipline.

Let's face it, some of my programs are great for teachers but they scare off the administrators, who may not want their teachers to know when their rights are being trod upon and what to do about it. Those programs don't get presented in official school settings too often. But my program on documenting for discipline helps teachers get the right information down on paper in the right way, which menas the principal can take action quickly, easily, and with little chance of being overturned. That's good for everybody, including the student who needs a little "extra guidance."

So let me know who to talk to in your district about bringing this great professional development opportunity to you.

Minimum Wage Going Up

Hourly employees in some school districts may be getting a raise in the next couple of years. A couple of weeks ago, President Bush signed into law an increase in the minimum wage. By the end of this summer, the federal minimum wage will increase from the current $5.15 per hour to $5.85 per hour.

Twelve months later, the federal minimum wage will increase to $6.55 per hour.

Finally, twelve months after that, the last stage of the increase becomes effective, and the federal minimum wage will increase to $7.25 per hour.

In the districts that pay below the new minimum, wages will of course go up right away. Depending on how many employees are affected, those districts may have to shift funds from other uses to cover the increases.

The raise in the minimum wage means employers have to pay at least that much, but it does not require that hourly employees get a raise if they are already making more than the minimum.
It’s interesting to compare this to teacher pay increases. The state of Texas has a minimum wage for teachers – commonly known as the step scale. The legislature sets these minimum steps, but it does not set the actual wage paid by each district. Since many districts pay teachers more than the minimum step amount, an increase in that minimum does not guarantee that those teachers already making more than the minimum get a raise. So in the last 10 or 15 years, whenever the legislature raises the minimum, it has also specified that teachers should continue to receive any amount above that minimum that their individual district is paying, effectively guaranteeing a raise for all teachers, whether or not they already make above the minimum or not.

But that’s not what happened to the hourly employees affected by the federal minimum wage. The change simply ensures that the lowest paid workers get paid a little more.

Why You Really Can Learn From This

I saw two more stories in the news today about teachers engaged in inappropriate relationships with students. This one is about a teacher in east Texas who was just arrested for sexual acts with a student whose age was not revealed. The story also doesn't give the age of the teacher, but she looks relatively young in her photo, and the headline calls the incident an "affair," so this may be one of those high school - young teacher situations. The other story details the life sentence given a former teacher for molesting a ten year old boy in a particularly heinous set of facts. The abuser here is a true pedophile, with a long list of molestations of young kids.

Besides a reminder that teachers should be vigilant to any signs of problems in the students and co-workers around them, you may be wondering how any of these stories are relevant to you, the average, well-behaved, normal school teacher? Let's talk about that, because there really is a lesson in there for everyone.

The true pedophilia cases are always a concern, because pedophiles are attracted to jobs where they are around children. But those cases are relatively rare, and tend to be committed by persons who would commit them whether they were a teacher or not. In other words, people who enagage in predatory, non-consensual sex are predisposed to do so.

What is of greater concern to the average teacher are what I refer to as the crimes of temptation. These are the "relationship" cases, where a teacher has an affair of some type with a student that crosses the emotional and sometimes physical line. The motives and psychology behind these cases vary, but they are almost all committed by people who, in another situation, might not have done so.

These are especially dangerous situations for teachers right now, because of several converging factors. First is the heightened sexual savvy and awareness of our teenagers. While teenagers have always been in a sexually vulnerable position due to their developmental stage, our teenagers today simply know a lot more, thanks to the booming information age. And because of internet and cable, rural teenagers know just as much as urban teenagers.

Second, our society, at least in Texas, seems to be far less tolerant of teacher/student relationships than at any time since probably the Victorian age. Witness the enactment of Texas Penal Code section 21.12 in 2003, which made it a felony offense for an employee of any primary or secondary school to enagage in a sexual relationship with a student at the same school, regardless of the age of the student and regardless of whether the sex was consensual.

Third, a tremendous amount of the communication we do these days is recorded and accessible to anyone who knows how to get it. Gone are the days of hiding cute notes in a box at the back of your closet - these days everything is on your computer hard drive, your cell phone text memory, or the internet somewhere in chatland waiting to be seen by the wrong eyes. What this means is that any communications you have with a student outside the normal school channels might - and probably will - be seen by someone else, and if there is anything that can be interpreted as flirtatious or inappropriate, whether or not you meant it that way, then you may be in trouble.

Fourth, the internet has broken down some of our standard social barriers, making it easier for teachers to either cross the line or to be seen by a student as crossing the line. Most teachers are careful not to socialize with students and not to put themselves in situations where they are alone with students. But many teachers are beginning to use social networking sites, personal websites, and blogs, and many of those teachers include their students in the interactions. The informality of communication in these forums can confuse the ordinary student/teacher boundaries, making inappropriate banter more likely.

If you think you would never cross the line, you should still act as if you might, and stay vigilant. If you think I'm wrong, answer this: how many of you or your friends and family members said when they got married that they'd never be unfaithful and they'd never cheat on their spouse? Now think about how many perfectly nice and honorable people you know that have found themselves in affairs while they were married or with a married person.

Things happen to those who don't pay attention.