1. Sex, drugs, hip hop, and school prayer
(a.k.a. School Law, Education Ethics)
From TS&S, Chapter 8

2. Teachers’ Rights and Responsibilities
In a job interview, can teachers be asked about their plans to have children?
What rights do school citizens have when feeling sexually harassed?
Can teachers smoke pot?
“Personal lifestyle… significantly disrupt the educational process or erode credibility with students, colleagues, or the community.”

3. Teachers’ Rights and Responsibilities
What to do with teachers (and students):
smoking marijuana?
engaging in private homosexual behavior?
adultery?
vulgar language?
living with HIV/AIDS?
disability?
“Balancing personal liberty and community standards:
homosexual advances to non-students, sex with students, encouraging students to attend certain religious meetings, allowing students to drink alcohol, not living within the district.”

4. Teachers’ Rights and Responsibilities
To what extent can teachers lawfully teach about sex, drugs, hip hop, and prayer?
Academic freedom: present and limited
Legal liabilities and educators:
Misfeasance…failure to conduct in an appropriate manner
Nonfeasance…failure to perform
Malfeasance…not lawful regardless, to do
Educational malpractice…academic damage

5. Teachers’ Rights and Responsibilities
Can we teach from:
Napoleon Dynamite?
Rolling Stone, Cosmo, The Onion?
A People’s History of the United States? (Zinn)
YouTube?
Copyright Act (fair use worksheet)
fair use
brevity
spontaneity
cumulative effect
Can we strike?
Figuratively: labor rights: the right to organize?
Literally: corporal punishment? (read to understand)

6. Teachers’ Rights and Responsibilities
Can students see their school records?
Buckley Amendment, parents and guardians
Can one’s sex be used as criterion for award?
Can’t be used as a criterion
Can teachers suspend and discipline as they see fit?
Due process
Zero tolerance policies
Corporal punishment
Can students express whatever they want to?
Freedom of speech

7. Teachers’ Rights and Responsibilities
Can public schools support prayer?
student led at public events forbidden
Can schools search students?
Search and seizure…fewer restrictions than the police
in loco parentis
Can schools censor school newspapers?
Can HIV-infected students be discriminated against?
How much sexual harassment is happening?
gap between intentions and student perceptions
gap between actual and reported

8. Teachers’ Rights and Responsibilities
Can teachers keep secrets?
Mandatory Reporting:
physical abuse,
sexual molestation,
neglect (medical, educational or physical)
emotional abuse
Can I make you more like me?
moral education…
inculcation,
values clarification,
character education,
moral stages of development