Private: Garcetti v. Public School Teachers: Garcetti Wins and We all Lose

By Paul M. Secunda, an associate law professor at Marquette University Law School.

Although the United States Supreme Court expressly decided not to weigh in on the issue in Garcetti v. Ceballos in 2006, the first major decision by an appellate court has been decided on whether or not Garcetti's holding (that there is no First Amendment protection when public employees speak pursuant to their official job duties), applies to public school teachers in the classroom.

The decision is what I would expect from a court closely following the teachings of the Garcetti precedent: yes, Garcetti applies. In Evans-Marshall v. Bd. of Educ. of Tipp City Exempted Vill. Sch. Dist., a case involving a high school English teacher who claimed her employment was unconstitutionally terminated by an Ohio school district in retaliation for her choice of student reading selections (including Herman Hesse's Siddhartha) and teaching methods, the court (per Judge Sutton and two other Republican appointees - two appointed by Bush I, the other by Bush II) decided yesterday that:

[T]he right to free speech protected by the First Amendment does not extend to the in-class curricular speech of teachers in primary and secondary schools made "pursuant to" their official duties.

Without doing any legal analysis, just wrap your mind around that statement for a second.

The people we entrust with teaching our children how to think, read, write, behave, become citizens, etc., have no ability, zero, to say what they wish in carrying out this crucial exercise of representative government. Now don't get me wrong, I understand that such environments require some discretion and decorum so that young impressionable minds are handled carefully, but to say that there is NO First Amendment right is absurd. At the very least, whatever interests the school district has should be balanced against the speech rights of the teacher - the holding in Pickering v. Bd. of Education - that makes much more sense, no?

And I don't want to hear about the floodgate of litigation that will ensue if we permit such balancing. Balancing in this regard has been the norm since the Pickering case in 1968, and I have not seen a tidal wave of such cases overwhelm the federal courts yet (partly because it is so difficult to win these cases).

But think about it for a second now from a policy perspective - what incentives are being established ex ante through this legal rule. At least two that trouble me. First, if you know that you speak outside of the school (say to the newspaper like Mr. Pickering himself did way back when), you are clearly protected in your speech to speak on matters of public concern. That means that public school teachers now have an incentive to air their dirty laundry in public rather than seek resolution within their schools or with the school board. That makes no sense.

Second, and no less troubling, is the fact that public employees will no doubt feel muzzled by this legal rule (and rightfully so). They speak out, they could lose their jobs. That means that the people who are best positioned, and best experienced, to tell us what is going on in our school districts, have now been gagged. We all lose.

Look, this decision was inevitable since Garcetti was decided in a razor-thin 5-4 decision by a conservative majority in 2006. As I and many other have predicted, the inevitable result has been a ceaseless cutting back on the constitutional rights of public employees. Helen Norton and others have explained how this has occurred through the Roberts' Court's grossly inflated use of the government speech doctrine and it is no surprise that Judge Sutton relied on it here.

So you might say, "Don't worry, Paul, this will surely be legally challenged." Let me point out that the teacher was acting pro se in this case and really never had a chance. I guess we will see if someone steps up and takes her case to the Supreme Court. I almost hope they don't. Given the current make-up of the Supreme Court, such a challenge would just further ensconce this horrible, and not very well supported, piece of constitutional law.

We need to remember that public employment is not a privilege whereby the government can force individuals to forego the exercise of their constitutional rights in order to secure government employment. This is true with any government employment, but especially true with a public school teacher who we want to be able to show through example how to engage in criticial thinking and constantly push the contours of knowledge. We want our school teachers to engage in robust debate with their students and expand the spectrum of knowledge.

Never before have I been so concerned that Justice Jackson's admonition in West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette is no longer being heeded:

[Schools may not] prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion.

And as Justice Blackmun wrote eloquently in his concurring decision in Board of Educ. v. Pico, (and to which I firmly subscribe):

Keyishian v. Board of Regents, -- a case that involved the State's attempt to remove "subversives" from academic positions at its universities, but that addressed itself more broadly to public education in general -- held that "[t]he classroom is peculiarly the ‘marketplace of ideas"'; the First Amendment therefore "does not tolerate laws that cast a pall of orthodoxy over the classroom." And Barnette is most clearly applicable here: its holding was based squarely on the view that "[f]ree public education, if faithful to the ideal of secular instruction and political neutrality, will not be partisan or enemy of any class, creed, party, or faction."

The Court therefore made it clear that imposition of "ideological discipline" was not a proper undertaking for school authorities.

In combination with more generally applicable First Amendment rules, most particularly the central proscription of content-based regulations of speech, see Police Department of Chicago v. Mosley, the cases outlined above yield a general principle: the State may not suppress exposure to ideas -- for the sole purpose of suppressing exposure to those ideas -- absent sufficiently compelling reasons.

That principle has not been followed today and, as a result, we are all made poorer by the Sixth Circuit's knee-jerk extension of the Garcetti holding to the public school context; it does nothing less than cast a pall of orthodoxy over the classroom and makes an obscene joke of academic freedom in the primary and secondary classroom environment.

Constitutional Interpretation, First Amendment, Labor and Employment Law