1y ago

High school teacher and students sue over Arkansas' ban on critical race theory

A high school teacher and two students sued Arkansas on Monday over the state’s ban on critical race theory and “indoctrination” in public schools, asking a federal judge to strike down the restrictions as unconstitutional.

The lawsuit by the teacher and students from Little Rock Central High School, site of the historic 1957 racial desegregation crisis, stems from the state’s decision last year that an Advanced Placement course on African American Studies would not count toward state credit.

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“It absolutely chills free speech”
I don't think that this angle is going to be successful.
States do have the right to set the content of their curriculum.
They can't stop the teacher from saying what he wants outside the school, but in the context of the education system, they do get to decide what goes.
The Scopes trial dealt with this point:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scopes_trial
The Scopes trial, formally The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes, and commonly referred to as the Scopes Monkey Trial, was an American legal case from July 10 to July 21, 1925, in which a high school teacher, John T. Scopes, was accused of violating Tennessee's Butler Act, which had made it illegal for teachers to teach human evolution in any state-funded school.
Second, the lawyers argued that the statute violated Scopes' constitutional right to free speech because it prohibited him from teaching evolution. The court rejected this argument, holding that the state was permitted to regulate his speech as an employee of the state:
He was an employee of the state of Tennessee or of a municipal agency of the state. He was under contract with the state to work in an institution of the state. He had no right or privilege to serve the state except upon such terms as the state prescribed. His liberty, his privilege, his immunity to teach and proclaim the theory of evolution, elsewhere than in the service of the state, was in no wise touched by this law.
- Yeah, because a famously anti-science trial against a teacher accused of teaching science in science class is a GREAT jurisprudence to look to! 🙄
  
  It's not about the material in question, it's about if a state employed teacher has the right to override the curriculum. They do not.
  
  You don’t have to like it for it to be the reality of the situation, and the fact is that the precedent is extremely relevant. Your little fantasy world where teachers choose the material ignores the other side of the equation too, as I’m sure you wouldn’t want some evangelical deciding on his own to override the curriculum to suit his beliefs.
The recent trend of transferring individual rights to the state en masse is alarming. Even worse, the states are working in direct contradiction to experts in the fields they are regulating. Skimming over some of these recent laws, we see legislatures working against medical associations (reproductive health care and gender affirming care), sports rules authorities (trans athlete participation), and education accreditation bodies (this article).
The result is a gigantic state power that sees fit to decide what health care you receive, what the rules of your sports should be, and what constitutes a good education. We have set up institutions to tackle these problems due to the (now less) common assumption that these decisions should be made by experts and/or local stakeholders, and that politics should have no place in our doctors' offices, football fields, and classrooms.
But let's assume that politics and state power should reach into these spaces. Why would the laws work in direct opposition to the most trusted authorities in these fields? What legitimate purpose could that serve?

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