Landmark Case on Student Free Speech Still Resonates 50 Years Later

Mary Beth Tinker and her brother John were suspended with three other Des Moines, Iowa, high schoolers in 1965 for wearing black armbands to protest the Vietnam War. In this 1968 photo, the Tinkers display armbands to which they had later added peace symbols.

—Corbis/Bettman/AP-File

By Mark Walsh

February 21, 2019

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Fifty years ago this month, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a decision on student speech that was emblematic of its era, but has also reverberated and remained relevant for generations of public school students—and administrators—that followed.

In Tinker v. Des Moines Community Independent School District, the court ruled 7-2 to uphold the right of several students in Des Moines, Iowa, to wear black armbands in school to protest and draw attention to the Vietnam War. The court said the armbands were symbolic speech protected by the First Amendment as long as school was not substantially disrupted.

“It’s hard to believe it’s been 50 years,” John Tinker, now 68, said in an interview from his home in Fayette, Mo., shortly before he left to attend more than a week of school appearances and other events in Des Moines and around Iowa to observe the anniversary.

“I’ll be encouraging young student activists in these audiences to pay attention to the world around them,” he added.

Mary Beth Tinker, John’s 66-year-old sister, was reached just after she had arrived in Iowa this week from her home in the District of Columbia.

“It’s very emotional to be here in Des Moines where we grew up,” she said. “I never get tired of talking about our case because it has to do with one of the main interests in my life, which is to promote the input of young people into the policies that affect their lives.”

Back to Harding Junior High

It’s probably good that the Tinkers don’t tire of speaking about the landmark case, because this week they had eight visits to Des Moines schools on their schedule, plus several panel discussions, a national livestream, and a live interview on C-SPAN, to be followed next week with visits to the state’s main college towns, Ames and Iowa City.

On Sunday, Feb. 24, the actual anniversary of the Supreme Court ruling, the Tinkers will participate in several events at Warren Harding Middle School in Des Moines, where Mary Beth Tinker was a 13-year-old 8th grader in late 1965 when the plan to wear armbands was devised.

As the Vietnam War was escalating in late 1965, a group of Des Moines students agreed on a plan to wear black armbands to school as a silent protest of the war but also to mourn those who had died and to support a Christmas truce.

School administrators learned of the plan, and the district’s five high school principals adopted an ad hoc policy prohibiting the wearing of armbands in school.

Mary Beth wore her armband to Harding Junior High on Dec. 16, largely without incident until she reached her afternoon math class with Richard Moberly, who had warned students not to wear armbands in his class. Mary Beth was sent to the school office, where, she always points out to students today, she felt so intimidated she removed the armband at an administrator’s request but was suspended anyway.

Several other students wore armbands that day, including Christopher Eckhardt, who faced down threats from members of the football team at Roosevelt High School. (Eckhardt, who was the third student, along with the Tinkers, to take the case all the way to the Supreme Court, died in 2012.)

John Tinker, then 15, wore his armband to North High School on Dec. 17, over his white dress shirt, and despite some supportive words from his principal, he was disciplined.

The Tinkers, Eckhardt, and several other students were suspended, the Des Moines school board affirmed the ban, and the Eckhardt and Tinker families sued the district with the aid of the Iowa Civil Liberties Union. They lost in federal district court and a federal appeals court. By the time the case reached the U.S. Supreme Court, in 1968, opposition to the Vietnam War had grown, but so had the establishment’s concerns about protests on campuses and in the streets.

Writing for a 7-2 majority in the Tinker decision, Justice Abe Fortas said, “In our system, state-operated schools may not be enclaves of totalitarianism. School officials do not possess absolute authority over their students.”

And in the opinion’s most often quoted line, Fortas wrote, “It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.”

‘A New Revolutionary Era’

Justice Hugo L. Black, normally a strong advocate of free speech, drew a line when it came to minors in school, and he wrote a particularly angry dissent.

“If the time has come when pupils of state-supported schools, kindergartens, grammar schools, or high schools can defy and flout orders of school officials to keep their minds on their own schoolwork, it is the beginning of a new revolutionary era of permissiveness in this country fostered by the judiciary,” Black wrote.

Justin Driver, a law professor at the University of Chicago and the author of The Schoolhouse Gate, a recent book examining student constitutional cases in the Supreme Court, said in an interview that the Tinker decision “was a momentous one, particularly for how Justice Fortas emphasized that students speaking to one another about the issues of the day was not a disruption but a vital part of the educational process itself.”

“On the other hand, one can ... lament that it didn’t go far enough in terms of protecting student speech.”

The issue arises frequently. The Supreme Court has since limited the scope of Tinker with three notable decisions. In Bethel School District No. 403 v. Fraser, in 1986, the court upheld the discipline of a high school student who delivered a speech full of sexual innuendo at a student assembly.

In 1988, in Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier, the court ruled in favor of a Missouri principal who read a high school newspaper in advance of publication and ordered the deletion of articles on divorce and teenage pregnancy. And in Morse v. Frederick, the justices in 2007 ruled that a student could be punished for displaying a banner interpreted as a pro-drug message (“Bong Hits 4 Jesus”) at a school-supervised event.

In a concurrence in the Morse decision, Justice Clarence Thomas said he would overrule Tinker.

“In the name of the First Amendment, Tinker has undermined the traditional authority of teachers to maintain order in public schools,” Thomas wrote.

But it’s not clear that even every conservative member of the Supreme Court would go that far. Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. has expressed concern for the free-speech rights of students, and in 2013, he warmly introduced John Tinker and Mary Beth Tinker at a lecture on their case at the court.

In the Des Moines school district, which now has about 33,000 students, there is a degree of pride over the landmark Tinker decision. Harding Middle School dedicated a locker to Mary Beth Tinker in 2013.

Thomas Ahart, the current superintendent, said a new generation of Des Moines students were looking forward to hearing firsthand from John and Mary Beth Tinker.

“It was special what they did,” he said. “Here in Des Moines, we do attach a certain responsibility to keeping that legacy alive.”

Reflecting on History

As the anniversary approached, the Tinkers reflected on the case’s legacy.

John recently launched the John Tinker Foundation to help spread the story of the case. Some school administrators, he said, “see the Tinker decision as an impediment to be gotten around. But it doesn’t have to be that way.”

Mary Beth recently unearthed her suspension notice from Harding Junior High, as well as a lengthy letter her mother, Lorena Tinker, wrote to Black in response to the justice’s fiery dissent.

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She is gratified that some students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., who have been outspoken about gun control, are participating in this week’s events in Des Moines.

“Each of us has to decide what consequences we are willing to accept to take a stance. It might be wearing an armband that is ultimately upheld, or it might be walking out of school, which would be considered disruptive and a form of civil disobedience.”

“I didn’t necessarily understand all that when I was 13 years old,” she said.

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'Grit Is in Our DNA': Why Teaching Grit Is Inherently Anti-Black

COMMENTARY

'Grit Is in Our DNA': Why Teaching Grit Is Inherently Anti-Black

—Diego Cadena Bejarano for Education Week

What a trip to Ghana taught me about education in America

By Bettina L. Love

February 12, 2019

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Teachers and school leaders need to abandon teaching students to embrace "grit." In my new book, We Want to Do More Than Survive, I spend an entire chapter explaining how these quick fixes pathologize African-American children and are inherently anti-black. I argue that the idea of grit seems harmless at face value—we can all agree that children need grit to be successful in life, regardless of how you define success—but is actually the educational equivalent of The Hunger Games.

Measuring African-American students' grit while removing no institutional barriers, then watching to see who beats the odds makes for great Hollywood movies (i.e., "Dangerous Minds," "The Blind Side," "Freedom Writers") and leaves us all feeling good because the gritty black kid made it out of the 'hood. But we fail to acknowledge the hundreds of kids who are left behind because we are rooting for what we are told is an anomaly. However, if teachers knew how enslaved Africans made it to the United States and how we as African-Americans fight every day to matter in this country, I believe they would understand why questioning whether African-American kids have grit is not only trivial but also deeply hurtful.

This year marks 400 years since the first documented Africans arrived on U.S. soil in Point Comfort, Va. When we teach about slavery, if allowed to teach it at all, we frame it as a thing that happened to Africa. There is often no mention of Africa before slavery or what enslaved Africans endured to arrive in bondage in the New Americas. To revisit that history is to tell a story of terror, trauma, labor, and, of course, grit.

"Questioning whether African-American kids have grit is not only trivial but also deeply hurtful."

My revelations about Africa and grit came when I traveled to Ghana in December, especially when I arrived at Assin Manso "Ancestral" Slave River Park (also referred to as the "Last Bath"). After walking hundreds of miles in shackles, captured Africans arrived at the Last Bath, home to the Donko Nsuo, which literally means slave river. There, they were inspected, fed, branded with hot-iron steel, and given the last bath they would receive until they arrived, months later, in the New Americas. Africans who did not survive the trip to the Last Bath were left as prey, tied to trees to be eaten alive by wild animals. Those who made it to the Last Bath were beyond strong; they were determined to live. Once they left the Last Bath, they still had to travel another 34 miles on foot in shackles to the coast of Ghana to be housed in dungeons.

There were approximately 40 dungeons in Ghana, West Africa. Though they are often referred to as castles, they are a far cry from the stuff of legends and fairy tales. I visited the Cape Coast dungeon, which stands on a site first occupied by the Portuguese in the mid-1500s. The Swedish, Dutch, and British all at one point in history controlled this site of terror, as they fought each other for the ability to profit from the sale of human bodies.

From the outside, the Cape Coast dungeon looks like a grand tourist attraction with large white walls, lush trees, and the sound of huge waves slamming into the rocks along the coastline. But that beauty is all a façade to hide some of the most hideous and unthinkable terrors of which human beings are capable.

Up to 1,000 male and 500 female enslaved Africans could be jammed into the dungeons at any given time. In dark, poorly ventilated holding cells in the pits of the Cape Coast dungeon, after walking upwards of 200 miles to get there, men and women were held captive in their own waste and served just enough food to keep them alive. The women were routinely raped.

Above the dungeon where the men were held was a church. Next to that sanctuary was a small, dark cell waiting for anyone who resisted their fate. In this hole, they would receive no food, no water, no reminder of the sun. They were simply left to die. After walking hundreds of miles and spending weeks in the dungeons, those who were still alive walked through the "Doors of No Return" to be loaded on ships as cargo. They were shackled to prevent rebellions that were, amazingly, common. After all they endured, all the attempts to weaken their bodies and their spirits, they still fought.

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The African bodies that arrived in this country were superhuman. They survived diseases, starvation, beatings, and the human loss of never returning home again.

The Character Lab, founded by grit guru Angela Duckworth, defines grit as "perseverance and passion for long-term goals." Revising an essay repeatedly or not quitting a sport in the middle of the season, according to the Character Lab, are examples of gritty behavior.

But what if your long-term goal is fighting to live, fighting racism? Is 400 years long enough? You cannot measure this type of grit, nor should you ignore it. African-Americans are resilient and gritty because we have to be to survive, but it is misleading, naive, and dangerous to remove our history on both sides of the water from the conversation about grit.

We have rebelled, fought, confronted, pleaded with the courts, marched, protested, and boycotted all just to survive the United States of America. Grit is in our DNA. Ghana taught me that. But grit alone will not overthrow oppressive systems of power. We need teachers, school leaders, and policymakers who have grit for justice. We need educators who understand the legacy of African-Americans' grit—that we have survived because of it, and the surviving is not enough. Black people and brown people deserve the right to use their grit to thrive, not just survive.

Bettina L. Love is an associate professor of educational theory and practice at the University of Georgia. She is the author of We Want To Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom, which will be published this month by Beacon Press. She wants to thank Cynthia Dillard and Henry Oppong for the opportunity to travel to Ghana and see herself for the first time.

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Schools With Segregationists' Names: Where They Are and Who They're Named for

  

Many politicians from Southern states signed the Southern Manifesto, a document that vigorously opposed the integration of public schools following the U.S. Supreme Court running in Brown v. Board of Education. Among the members of Congress who signed the pro-segregation document, 22 are the namesakes of public schools in eight Southern states.

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COMMENTARY

What Is Social Justice Education Anyway?

—Getty

We cannot talk about schools without addressing race, class, gender, ability, sexuality, and politics

By Crystal Belle

January 23, 2019

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The notion of social justice pedagogy has become pertinent in education, especially in urban communities that have a history of being oppressed through schooling. To practice social justice teaching and learning practices is to truly see students for who they are and where they come from. But what does it mean to seestudents? Seeing students requires teachers to recognize them as valuable contributors to the classroom space, as opposed to social, cultural, and academic burdens on the so-called master in the room—the teacher.

A social justice education is centered in democracy and the freedom to exercise one's full humanity. Conceptions of equity and democracy have always been practically and theoretically connected to the field of education, which is often perceived as the greatest human equalizer. Although there is some truth to this, it is important to understand that the notion of meritocracy is flawed, especially when you come from economically marginalized communities. If you work hard and get straight As in school, it does not automatically mean that you will attain social mobility. This is the very nature of capitalism: Somebody wins, and many people lose. This is particularly true if you are from a poor or working-class community.

"Many people think that social justice education is optional, something cool to do during a special professional-development session."

What I am describing here is social reproduction theory, developed by Karl Marx, to illustrate the ways that social inequality is passed on from one generation to the next. What does this have to do with education? Well, we must begin to look at education intersectionally. We cannot talk about schools, without addressing race, class, gender, ability, sexuality, and politics, because education is a political act. To ignore intersectionality within schools erases the very identities present in our classrooms and in our respective communities, every day.

As the director of a teacher-education program, one of my primary goals upon stepping into this role was building a vision that honors social justice teaching and learning practices. In one of my courses on curriculum and instruction, I implore students to look at curriculum as a primary mechanism for making the world a more equitable place.

We learn curricular theories from the likes of John Dewey and bell hooks. We use these theories as lenses to better understand ourselves, those who are different from us, and the various communities we all represent. Through this process, students begin to come to terms with the ways that their own education has been oppressive, while thinking through solutions for not repeating the cycle, once they step into the classroom.

However, I must admit that this work is not easy, primarily because many people think that social justice education is optional, something cool to do during a special professional-development session. As I continue to push for social justice education across all urban teacher education courses, everyone initially agrees to do this work. But agreeing and implementing social justice pedagogy are two different things.

One can agree that education is a great human equalizer, yet there are still schools that have significantly fewer resources and less funding than others. There are still many students, predominantly Black and Brown, who are stereotyped as "below standard" before they are loved, taught, and respected. Teachers are still underpaid and overworked, often blamed for all of the failings of the public education system. However, the problems of the public education system are layered and connected to policymakers, school districts, parents, teachers, students, and deeply entrenched racist ideologies. A surefire way to penetrate the racialized and class-based problems of urban school systems is by adopting a social justice pedagogy.

So what exactly does a social justice pedagogy or model look like?

Here are five social justice-based strategies that will help create a more humanizing, welcoming, and intellectual learning environment in your classroom across grade levels and content areas.

1. Acknowledge who is in the room.

In order to truly teach your students in a way that is humanizing and affirming, you must know who they are and where they come from. This means learning about their respective communities, cultures, and families.

2. Start with the knowledge your students have.

Your students are coming into your classroom with prior knowledge tied to various content areas that are connected to their culturally relevant understandings of the world. Embrace what they already know by implementing it into the curriculum, while building new knowledge alongside them.

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3. Create unit plans and curricular maps for the entire year.

Planning for your students ahead of time is key to having the most critical and engaging school year. By using a backwards-design framework centered in equity and inclusivity with regard to your content area, you want to think of where you want your students to be by the end of the year, and work backwards to develop the assessments and activities that will accompany objective mastery.

4. Be honest about who you are and your biases.

We all have biases as a result of living in the United States, which was founded upon white supremacy. As such, it is important to reflect on your personal prejudices. Acknowledging and healing your biases will make you a better social justice educator.

5. Encourage students to question everything, including your teaching.

A social justice classroom is one that is critical in nature, thus, we should be constantly encouraging students to question the world around them as well as the schools they attend. Give students opportunities to critique and construct their own opinions and interpretations of your teaching and the overall school culture.

If we truly want to change the world we live in, education is the best place to start. Considering the rapid transformation of the United States socially, culturally, racially, and linguistically, the only pathway to a more just education system is by adopting a radical and relentless pursuit of social justice teaching and learning practices.

Crystal Belle is the director of teacher education at Rutgers University-Newark. She has worked as a teacher, activist, and professor for the past 13 years.

Confronting our beliefs about poverty and discipline

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On Pedagogy and Expertise: Enduring False Dichotomies in Education

On Pedagogy and Expertise: Enduring False Dichotomies in Education

English educator Lou LaBrant taught in a wide variety of contexts for 65 years while also producing a significant body of scholarship from the 1920s into the late 1980s. Her career was nearly as prodigious as her attitude.

Writing in 1931, for example, LaBrant announces: “The cause for my wrath is not new or single” (p. 245). Her “wrath” was pointedly aimed at the rise of the project method in the early decades of the twentieth century.

Projects, LaBrant noticed, began to dwarf, and even replace, time students spent on authentic literacy—students reading and writing by choice, the practices LaBrant advocated for over decades as “scientific.”

As I write this 9 decades later, project based learning (PBL) is, once again, all the rage. And from my perspective, similar to LaBrant’s, I watch as teachers and students are put in impossible teaching/learning situations all in the service of “doing PBL.”

While PBL flourishes in my home state of South Carolina, I also have witnessed throughout the past four decades a mind-numbing parade of new standards, new high-stakes tests, and new regulations and processes for certifying and evaluating teachers.

Formal teacher education and K-12 education suffer from the same problem LaBrant wrestled with her entire career—the misapplication of scientific principles in the pursuit of codifying “good teaching” and “student achievement.”

The current teacher evaluation rubric (with over 400 indicators) SC teacher educators and evaluators must navigate is disturbing proof that we have chosen The Hulk (the monster misguided science produces) over Bruce Banner (the measured scientist) in our unbridled lust to control how teachers teach and how students learn.

The Incredible Hulk 1 (vol. 1) offers a powerful contrast between the scientist and the potential monster science can produce.

LaBrant resonates with me because I have existed in the field of education for almost 40 years now in a constant state of “wrath” because of one of the most disturbing dichotomies that define the field—the disconnect between pedagogy and expertise.

This disconnect, or false tension, is best reflected in the on-going discussions about teaching writing. To teach writing well, many of us argue, teachers must have some authentic experience and expertise in writing themselves; without that expertise, all the pedagogy one can attain is ultimately inadequate.

Expertise grounds teaching, I think, in authentic goals, also essential for any pedagogy or program to be effective.

For example, best practices in writing instruction, a well-planned and implemented workshop model, is for naught if teachers are mandating students produce five-paragraph essays that are driven by a prompt and rubric mandated by the teacher.

Now here is the problem: A seasoned and active professional writer would fair little better if tossed into a teaching situation with no experience or expertise in evidence-based pedagogy.

This false dichotomy is well represented by the contrast between K-12 teaching and higher education. K-12 is dominated by the belief that anyone can teach anything if equipped with pedagogy, programs, and accountability (see The Hulk rubric now governing teaching in SC I have confronted in the link above); higher education embraces a laissez-faire norm that anyone can teach when equipped with expertise.

My second career as a teacher educator has proven to me what I long suspected as a high school English teacher for 18 years: There are profound limits to our urge for discovering and prescribing “good teaching” and “student achievement.”

I have railed against this often, but I call this our technocratic urge, a perverse and dangerous form of “scientific” (again, The Hulk, not Bruce Banner).

During the early decades of LaBrant’s career, there was a relatively balanced tension among educational philosophies and theories that included at least two factions using the term “scientific” in dramatically different ways.

John Dewey’s progressivism, which LaBrant practiced, argued for an amorphous, classroom-based approach to what today we would call action research (each teacher is a researcher-in-practice with every different class of students). The goal here recognized that students and learning are fluid and relative.

To teach, Dewey tried to advocate, is to experiment, perpetually. What works for one student today may not work for another on that same day, in that same lesson. And what works in a lesson or unit this year may inform a future lesson or unit, but it certainly can never be reduced to a template for future teaching.

Dewey’s scientific lost, however, to the efficiency educators who sought a different type of “scientific”—one that identified a fixed prescription for what “good” teaching must look like and what “student achievement” must conform to.

Today as a teacher educator in SC, I am supposed to learn The Hulk rubric and then I am supposedly equipped to visit any teachers classroom, regardless of grade level or content, and be able to make a credible assessment if the teacher is effective or not.

This cult of pedagogy, I think, has only one compelling quality, efficiency. This is the same problem with education’s pursuit of “the” program, such as PBL. Design a program, detail the parameters of what make the program “work,” and then anyone can observe to simply verify if the program is being met.

Having taught now about an equal time—almost two decades each—as a K-12 teacher and a college professor, I am far more disturbed by the cult of pedagogy in K-12 than the laissez-faire, and even dismissive, attitude about pedagogy in higher ed.

A colleague in economics once confessed to me that he held conservative ideologies in economics and liberal social beliefs. As a result, he had decided to function mostly as a Democrat because, he believed, it was easier to teach Democrats better economics than to make Republican “give a damn” about human suffering.

I find this fits the false dichotomy I have examined here. I worry that we have two problems in teaching and learning—fostering expertise in “generalist” teachers (K-12) and fostering a greater understanding of and respect for pedagogy in experts (higher education). I suspect the latter is easier.

LaBrant ended her unpacking of the project method with a key element of how “scientific” can work in education. Science at its best requires that we define problems, generate evidence, and then conform the solutions to the problems.

The project method, LaBrant noted, was missing an obvious solution as educators lamented students either not reading or lacking reading ability:

That the making of concrete models will keep interested many pupils who would otherwise find much of the English course dull may be granted. The remedy would seem to be in changing the reading material rather than in turning the literature course into a class in handcraft. (p. 246)

Our rubrics and programs are the wrong goals, the wrong solutions, even as we occasionally recognize the problems of needing “good” teachers in order to increase student achievement.

Neither pedagogy nor expertise is itself the solution, but a complex understand of how both of these work together helps us seek the best possible pursuit of science and avoid the monster we currently embrace.