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.
Read more on Third Rail: https://newsletters.theatlantic.com/the-third-rail/email/96e63fbd-9583-4be0-bf84-2637c748bc6e/