Last week, the Supreme Court heard the case of Joseph Kennedy, a football coach at a public high school who used to pray on the field after games. After some students voluntarily began joining him, the school district asked him to stop; the ensuing dispute eventually resulted in litigation. At the legal heart of the issue is the 2006 Garcetti v. Ceballos decision, in which the Supreme Court granted governments broad rights to control the speech of public employees. David French argues that the court ought to moderate this ruling, and let Coach Kennedy pray:

The case isn’t mainly about prayer. Rather, it’s about the extent to which the state treats public-school teachers as citizens or entirely as subjects under government control during every meaningful moment on the clock.

Combine a doctrine that deprives teachers of any freedom in their teaching with a school district that declares that virtually any public speech at school is professional and not personal, and you create a legal environment that treats teachers as pure instruments of state expression, required to spout only state-approved ideas from the moment they walk onto campus until the moment they leave.

A vision of public education that walls students off from their teachers’ personal expression doesn’t prepare them for pluralism. It does precisely the opposite. It teaches them that majorities can and should control speech, and that the remedy for exposure to offensive ideas is an appeal to state authority to quash personal expression.

This is the fruit of Garcetti in public schools. The alternative to an expansive reading of Garcetti isn’t a free-for-all, with teachers saying whatever they want to say to students, regardless of age or subject matter. But on a spectrum that ranges from “all speech is permitted” to “no speech is free,” the present case law for America’s schoolteachers is overweighted toward censorship. Coach Kennedy’s case represents an opportunity to adjust that balance.

Early Friday morning, Israel attacked military installations near the Iranian cities of Isfahan and nearby Natanz, the latter being one of the hubs of the country’s nuclear program. Jerusalem is not taking credit for the attack, and none of the details are too certain, but it seems that the attack involved multiple drones, likely launched from within Iran, as well as one or more missiles fired from Syrian or Iraqi airspace. Strikes on Syrian radar systems shortly beforehand probably helped make the attack possible, and there were reportedly strikes on Iraq as well.

Iran itself is downplaying the attack, but the S-300 air-defense batteries in Isfahan appear to have been destroyed or damaged. This is a sophisticated Russian-made system positioned to protect the Natanz nuclear installation. In other words, Israel has demonstrated that Iran’s best technology can’t protect the country’s skies from the IDF. As Yossi Kuperwasser puts it, the attack, combined with the response to the assault on April 13,

clarified to the Iranians that whereas we [Israelis] are not as vulnerable as they thought, they are more vulnerable than they thought. They have difficulty hitting us, but we have no difficulty hitting them.

Nobody knows exactly how the operation was carried out. . . . It is good that a question mark hovers over . . . what exactly Israel did. Let’s keep them wondering. It is good for deniability and good for keeping the enemy uncertain.

The fact that we chose targets that were in the vicinity of a major nuclear facility but were linked to the Iranian missile and air forces was a good message. It communicated that we can reach other targets as well but, as we don’t want escalation, we chose targets nearby that were involved in the attack against Israel. I think it sends the message that if we want to, we can send a stronger message. Israel is not seeking escalation at the moment.