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School Efforts to Stem Violence Offer A Textbook Case of Limits on Speech

by By Dan Slater

With the nation's school systems roiled by
campus shootings over the past decade, and on
the lookout for conflict, students are being
asked to check a broader array of free-speech
rights at the door -- raising questions about
what lesson that is teaching them.

Public-school administrators are hewing to a
zero-tolerance policy on expression they
believe incites violence, and they are doing so
with the backing of the courts. Controversial
clothing has been a common casualty. Struggling
with racial tensions at his high school, a
principal in Maryville, Tenn., banned
depictions of the Confederate flag in 2005 and
was supported by a federal court. Last month,
the Aurora Frontier K-8 School in Aurora,
Colo., suspended an 11-year-old who refused to
remove a homemade T-shirt that read, "Obama is
a terrorist's best friend." The shirt caused "a
very loud argument on the playground,"
according to a statement from the school.

Since such actions stem from a concern over the
safety of adolescents, even free-speech
advocates acknowledge a need for some degree of
deference to educators. But an argument of
imminent danger is hard to make in many of
these cases. Some think educators may be
inadvertently teaching children that
suppressing speech is the ready solution to
ideological conflict.

The Supreme Court's history in addressing free
speech in schools goes back at least to the
Vietnam War era. In 1969, the court struck down
a move by schools in Des Moines, Iowa, to ban
black armbands worn to protest the war,
concluding there was no reason to believe the
armbands would cause "substantial disruption."
Since then, the court has largely sided with
schools in a variety of bans on expression.

"As long as courts hear the word 'disruption,'
they'll almost always side with
administrators," says Lucy Dalglish, executive
director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom
of the Press.

It isn't clear that censorship of controversial
clothing diminishes violence in schools.
Serious violent crime in schools decreased 62%
between 1994 and 2005, according to the
National Center for Education Statistics. That
could mean school efforts to crack down on
violence, including dress codes, are working.
But critics of such bans say that very decline
in violence suggests that administrators are
overreacting.

Dewey Cornell, who oversees the Youth Violence
Project at the University of Virginia, says
dress codes don't curtail school violence as
much as an overall structured environment does.

Late last month, a federal judge in
Pennsylvania sided with a school district in
its decision to bar a student from wearing a T-
shirt imprinted with images of guns and phrases
such as "Volunteer Homeland Security" and
"Terrorist Hunting Permit...No Bag Limit."

The teen and his parents said the T-shirt, a
gift from an uncle serving in Iraq, was worn in
support of the troops. The judge, in rejecting
the suggestion of a First Amendment violation,
wrote: "Students have no constitutional right
to promote violence in our public schools." He
noted that, following massacres at Columbine
High School and Virginia Tech, among others,
schools have had to be more vigilant.

In the Tennessee case, the Confederate flag had
long been established as a "battle call,"
according to Steve Lafon, the principal. Mr.
Lafon says that before he arrived, the school
had "a lot of tolerance-type programs," but
that problems such as racist graffiti and a
fight between a black student and a white
student at a basketball game "set the stage."
At that point, he says, banning the symbol was
the only option. Mr. Lafon says he would now
consider banning any item that could be
"racially divisive," including a Malcolm X
shirt.

Dr. Cornell says: "The argument that 'I tried
[education] and it didn't work' is not a
convincing one. No program, treatment or method
works in all cases."

The Pennsylvania case suggests that perceptions
of school violence may be leading courts to
defer to school administrators. The school
district made no showing that the student had
evinced violent tendencies or even that
violence was a problem at the school, though
the court noted that a female student had told
a teacher that the shirt made her
uncomfortable. The court determined that the
shirt lacked a "constitutionally protected
political message."

"Throughout American history, there's been a
willingness to give up freedom for security,"
says Leonard Brown, the lawyer who represented
the student in the case. "We need to recognize
that we're losing something, even though no
court likes to say that."




— Dan Slater
Wall Street Journal
2008-10-16


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