Courts Say No Politics In The Classroom

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So math teachers need not worry about how to attack Judge Brett Kavanaugh in the middle of a class.

That’s not a hypothetical. “At the height of the battle to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court a few weeks ago, a California math teacher took to Twitter, as many of us are wont to do, to vent,” Robert Pondisco of the Thomas Fordham Institute writes. “I’m a teacher, and I don’t know what I’m going to say to my students if Kavanaugh gets confirmed,” Nicholas Ponticello tweeted. “Do I tell them that this country doesn’t take sexual assault seriously?”

“Do I tell them that truth and integrity don’t matter? What do I say?” Pondisco notes that “The Tweet was ‘liked’ 27,000 times and re-tweeted 8,000 more.” Meanwhile, Ponticello might want to contemplate if such a group therapy session is legal.

“In Mayer v. Monroe County, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago ruled unanimously against an Indiana elementary school teacher who alleged she was fired in 2003 for comments made in her classroom criticizing the U.S. war on Iraq,” Pondisco writes. “She sued the school district on First Amendment grounds and lost.”