Trash-talking your high school teacher on Facebook is constitutionally protected speech

A federal magistrate today ruled that a former Florida high school student suspended after creating a Facebook page to diss her teacher should receive constitutional protection under the First Amendment. The name of the page? "Ms. Sarah Phelps is the worst teacher I've ever met."

Boing Boing editor/partner and tech culture journalist Xeni Jardin hosts and produces Boing Boing's in-flight TV channel on Virgin America airlines (#10 on the dial), and writes about living with breast cancer. Diagnosed in 2011. @xeni on Twitter. email: xeni@boingboing.net.

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Anonymous

“Teachers are control freaks…” Well it appears that in this case, it’s the principal that’s the control freak.
zio_donnie

i am with MDH. the kids are (mostly) alright. it is the teachers more often than not that suck. especially the totalitarian i-am-the-law types that are fairly abundant since forever.

schools are not prisons. schools have no authority whatsoever on students after school. and if you suck at your job be prepared to take criticism. being a student is not a job. being a teacher is.

back in my day we did not have facebook but we protested all the same. and stupid teachers had to watch their backs after the bell ringed. i bet that bad teachers are better off today. a facebook rant is always better than an egg in the face or seeing your description as an asshole spray painted on every street around school.
Anonymous

Seriously? Some teacher is complaining about a negative facebook page about them? They should just join the group. It would be hilarious to the students, so they’d accept the invite. Then it would be condoned, so they’d stop or it’d become ironic.
Anonymous

something like this happened at my high school about 10 years ago. a kid was angry with a teacher for something-or-other so he created a website called schoolvent.com where people could post gripes about teachers without specifying names. it folded after a month or two. it was fun while it lasted.
CastanhasDoPara

Teaching inherently requires a thick skin. Back when I was in school this sort of thing would have appeared on a bathroom wall and would have been appropriately tuned in content and intelligence to its location. Furthermore, it would have been near impossible to track down the source and therefore nobody would have been punished. And overall the teacher would still have had to go about business as usual and in some egregious circumstances all of the students would have been punished. It all boils down to the fact that now people post their rants on the internet’s shit house walls and sign them because they can. Nothing has changed for the teacher save for the fact that they now know who is saying what. Students should be smarter about this thing because no matter how much we want teachers to be super heroes; teachers are still just human and prone to revenge seeking and that can take the form of just about anything in an academic situation. I base this on the few times I pointed out the inconsistencies or just plain wrong things I was being taught and punished for “undermining the authority of the teacher.” And that is just a nice way of saying, “sit down, shut up, and take notes.” Needless to say, that only steeled my resolve as an anti-authoritarian and generally contrarian sort of person. A lesson that has surely served me well in the world of today.
Disclaimer, I am not saying that all teachers or administrators are power-mad, ass hats but a few bad ones sure make it hard not to think that from time to time.
Anonymous

I hope students all over print this story out and stealthily place it on their worst teacher’s desks.
Xopher

Doesn’t seem worse than “yours is a very bad hotel” to me. It’s an opinion. Protected.
- mdh
  
  agreed. good precedent.
- Tdawwg
  
  Agreed, but I hope the school’s mature enough to not let this affect their assessment of Phelps as a teacher. To the degree that this might hurt Phelps’s career unaccountably and without recourse (she can’t reasonably respond publicly, or make her own “Student Complainants with Nebulous Projections and Undefined Personal Issues Can Bite Me” Facebook page), this is a troublesome precedent for those of us who teach: by all means its defensible speech, but here’s another slight tipping of the balance from educated faculty calling the shots to a technologically-empowered mob of howling student-clients with axes to grind.
  - mdh
    
    I am surprised to hear an educator not know that this is how it has always been. The kids are alright.
    - Tdawwg
      
      I’m unsure as to what you mean. I’m “cool” with kids being kids, if that’s what you mean: even the most noxiously resistant behavior, like this student’s, is groovy and beautiful when considered as mere human behavior. I’m less cool with technological and institutional pressures allowing nonprofessionals a disproportionate say in what I do, how I do it, and the appropriate criteria by which my performance can be judged. There are no reasonable arguments by which students can be seen to have this kind of expertise, reason, judgment, etc. Feedback is important, but I just hope the school can find a way to support the teacher while appropriately dealing with the student’s complaints (which they emphatically failed to do by expelling her, etc.). Add to this the distressing reinforcement of the emerging (dominant?) “student-as-client” model, and I think you have some fair reasons to find this disturbing.
      - mdh
        
        I’m saying your argument here is tired Tdawwg, I cannot validate your primary point.
        
        I’m less cool with technological and institutional pressures allowing nonprofessionals a disproportionate say in what I do, how I do it, and the appropriate criteria by which my performance can be judged.
        
        and that, exactly that, is the same as it ever was.
        
        teachers, yourself included, same as they always have, do not like being picked on. Kids got suspended (or beaten) for doing this same thing on the outhouse walls 100 years ago, and probably for doing this same thing 1000 years ago. The method of delivery of a childs puerile message about an authority figure does not make that message more dangerous.
        
        and the kids, as they always have been, despite their modern conveyances which make you cringe, are entirely alright.
      - Tdawwg
        
        Eh. That seems kind of nihilistic to me. You’re arguing to a teacher that the kids can’t be reached, that they’re locked into the teenage wasteland and that’s all good, etc.: if teachers like myself acted that way, we couldn’t intervene in their lives at all, as educators, mentors, etc. I’m comfortable with my authority as a teacher, even if others’ aren’t. And as I have to remind myself every day teaching, the students’ perception of my job =/= my job. Same with nonteachers’ perceptions of what I should or shouldn’t do, what kids are “really” like, etc. Saying students are essentially unchanging is a nonstarter for a humanistic professional whose entire job is to change students.
        
        And I really disagree with this:
        
        The method of delivery of a childs puerile message about an authority figure does not make that message more dangerous.
        
        The medium is the message, no? What if they delivered it via a shower of flaming arrows? AMIRITE?
        
        Antinous, I’d respond as knappa did just above me:
        
        Even if it wasn’t, it’s ridiculously unprofessional to publicly bash individual students.
        
        I mean, I think you’ve mentioned a few times that you’re a yoga teacher, right? Certainly you’d never discuss your students or clients in public, especially after being dissed on a blog or elsewhere in public? I think proportionality is the key here, as well as the professionalism that knappa mentions.
      - Anonymous
        
        The method of delivery of a childs puerile message about an authority figure does not make that message more dangerous.
        
        The medium is the message, no? What if they delivered it via a shower of flaming arrows? AMIRITE?
        
        No, U R RONG. Danger is dangerous, kids’ opinions are discounted by everyone, deadly force is changing the subject, you are not exactly impressing anybody. I suppose if teaching got paid better we’d have smarter teachers.
      - mdh
        
        Saying students are essentially unchanging is a nonstarter for a humanistic professional whose entire job is to change students.
        
        Where did I say that? No, really. Where? I think you might be projecting, because I meant that educators, essentially, are unchanging. They have always overreacted to criticism and read WAY more into it than was said.
        
        case in point:
        
        You’re arguing to a teacher that the kids can’t be reached, that they’re locked into the teenage wasteland and that’s all good, etc.
        
        No, I am not. You consistently choose to misread me. Few others here have that issue. I appreciate your choice to jump to ad absurdium (flaming arrows!!!) tactics rather than seeking some clarification of what I might have meant. It speaks volumes of your respect for your audience and conversational parter.
        
        You apparently have no idea how many kids you will turn off if your default reaction to challenging ideas is to mock the speaker.
        
        and no, I was never making an explicit ‘The Who’ reference. You read that into it too.
      - Tdawwg
        
        To be fair, you do say “teachers … same as they always have” above: but you started with the response
        
        I am surprised to hear an educator not know that this is how it has always been. The kids are alright.
        
        I don’t think anything I’ve said to you is an unfair reading of this opening line: if I’ve been inaccurate, accept that you might not have been perfectly clear; accept too that folks are often misread on the ‘Nets (same as you’re misreading me by taking my words as mocking or challenging of you as a person).
        
        Again, I don’t think it’s so much of an overreaction on teachers’ part (less still some kind of transhistorical constant of teachers overreacting), as a legitimate concern that many teachers have over the proper boundaries of technology, the “classroom,” authority, etc. It’s also about the future viability of our profession.
        
        As for projecting:
        
        It speaks volumes of your respect for your audience and conversational parter.
        
        Indeed, projection happens: QED. Let me explicitly say I have respect for you, and even for your argument here, even though I disagree strongly. I guess you feel challenged and mocked, so let me disavow any responsibility for that: nosce te ipsum as they say
        
        You apparently have no idea how many kids you will turn off if your default reaction to challenging ideas is to mock the speaker.
        
        Mockery is a two-way street, as much a problem of perception as something that’s *really* there. Students are predisposed to feel mocked by intelligent adults, who knew? Just like how intelligent bloggers are predisposed to feel mocked by other intelligent bloggers with whom they blog! I think this is called psychodynamics. Anyhoo, students’ misperceptions, projections, etc., while factors teachers deal with, are emphatically not our primary responsibility: we certainly don’t cause this behavior, although we can indeed deal with it effectively.
        
        Oh, and I’d argue that phrases like “the kids are alright,” especially when invoked as a nostrum or panacea, is legitimately a Who reference. Maybe pick your nostrums more carefully next time. (Joke: pick your nostrums, eh, eh?) Really, I have no quarrel with you.
  - Anonymous
    
    @Tdawwg, why can’t she make her own “Student Complainants with Nebulous Projections and Undefined Personal Issues Can Bite Me” Facebook page?
    
    That’s what any teacher at my kids’ school would do… and I’d support it, if it was well done. If the teacher came off like a moron or mispelled words on the page, that’d show something, neh?
  - Anonymous
    
    “this is a troublesome precedent for those of us who teach: by all means its defensible speech, but here’s another slight tipping of the balance from educated faculty calling the shots to a technologically-empowered mob of howling student-clients with axes to grind.”
    
    All sympathy for teachers putting up with low pay, uninterested but angry parents, and shithead kids. That said, it’s legal to be an angry shithead, and that’s not going to change anytime soon. The internet “unbalanced” a lot of things, certainly politically, and the less we interfere the better for all of us.
Anonymous

I wonder if everyone applauding the pro-free speechiness of the verdict would be so sanguine if the profile had been called “Mrs. Teacher X likes to diddle kids?”
Anonymous

“I doubt public Internet ranting is the way to go.”

Funny how this Music teacher thinks that the internet would not be a good way to deal with bad instructors when this is the STANDARD in College education

http://ratemyprofessors.com/

Funny how ignorant teachers in grade k-12 are about things that happen only a year after their students leave.

This AP student did what every AP student should do. They acted like a dedicated college student.
- knappa
  
  This AP student did what every AP student should do. They acted like a dedicated college student.
  
  I’m definitely going to have to take issue with the “dedicated” bit there. I’ve got a listing on ratemyprofessors.com from my grad student years – and probably one now too. Not too much there in total, but what there is isn’t complimentary. (Business Calc only seems to arouse passion in those who hate it.) I also have a reasonably good idea which students posted the reviews. They are those who cheated on exams, tried to bribe me, and several who just didn’t like my fashion sense.
  My point is that unsolicited student reviews are, often as not, ad hominem attacks which have more to do with the student’s failures and prejudices than anything else. If you doubt me, just take a look at the reviews of transgendered profs – it ain’t pretty.
  Anyway, I think the ruling was right, but we should make no mistake: this particular kind of speech is mostly worthless and too often veers into territory that would, in other situations, be called workplace harassment or schoolyard bullying.
Jawbone Minding

This school is a charter, which I reckon means it receives public funding and public school system support. To me, that means it’s essentially a government building, and subject to government-building laws.

It would be like a government office worker attending a protest against their department’s governmental policies. Would the department they work for be able to put them on unpaid leave for expressing political opinion? Legally, I would think not.

If this was a totally private school, then I’d say they could suspend the student for anything they were contractually able to. If they had a rule that students agreed to follow as condition for attending the school (ie, “no publicly criticizing teachers”); then suspend away.

That’s not the same for a public school. Students are clients, as US citizens, and are entitled to do anything they want to outside the walls of the school. Hence, I think this was a great ruling. If it had been a private school, like I said, it would have been a bad ruling.
Tdawwg

That said, I cannot believe they suspended the student and removed her from AP classes over this! Bad judgment all around at that school….
Lobster

It may be legal and protected but that doesn’t make it smart.
- RHK
  
  True dat. She’ll get a lesson in “What goes on the Net stays on the Net – forever” when she applies for a job.
- mdh
  
  fortunately for you and I, the content of the opinion is irrelevant to its protected status.
xwizbt

Can you hide slander or libel behind opinion? Or is it just the UK that has the most oppressive libel laws possible, and that’s slanted my opinion.

What if your neighbours started making posters that were just opinion, and began posting ‘YOURNAMEHERE is the worst neighbour I’ve lived near’. And then their friends joined in. And complete strangers. And then it appeared on Boing Boing.
Waltb555

I find my self torn on this issue. While I am certainly a supporter of free speech I worry about the damage this type of free speech can do. It’s one thing to vent about a teacher you don’t like. She’s an adult and should be able to deal with it. But I worry about the student who, for some reason, becomes a target for abuse from his or her classmates and finds himself the subject of hurtful and unkind comments on social networking sites. I know what I’m talking about because my own daughter went through this kind of abuse in middle school for no apparent reason. It was amazingly frustrating and hard to deal with and we didn’t have Facebook and MySpace back then. Just the abuse she endured during school was bad enough. I can’t imagine dealing with this type of problem with the technology kids today have at their fingertips. I don’t really have the answer but we are walking a fine line here.
Anonymous

I’m a music teacher. I do my best at what I’m doing, and I like to think that a vast majority of kids like my class. But I know some of them don’t.

If I googled my own name and found that some kid made a Web page that dissed me or my teaching, I would feel sad and frustrated. Hey c’mon Xopher, education is not commerce. Not where I live at least.

If you want to criticize/ discuss your teacher competence, I doubt public Internet ranting is the way to go.

…

How did that matter reached a federal magistrate, though?
ozneicsa

It may be legal and protected for society at large, but does the school not have the right to impose discipline against its students for this type of activity?
If the same student stood up in the middle of a class and voiced the same opinion, wouldn’t there be some sort of reprimand?
- Anonymous
  
  Yes, but that would be in the middle of class and disruptive. She did it at home on her own time. Students have constitutional rights just the same as the rest of us. As an agent of the state, schools have to respect those rights.
- Avram / Moderator
  
  If the same student stood up in the middle of a class and voiced the same opinion, wouldn’t there be some sort of reprimand?
  
  Probably, but standing up in the middle of the class can be disruptive, regardless of the content of what you’re saying. A student who stood up in the middle of math class and shouted “Paris is the capital of France!” would also be reprimanded.
  - Machineintheghost
    
    Right. In a nutshell, the government can regulate the time, place, and manner of speech (i.e., no sound trucks at 2:00 a.m. in residential areas) but mostly not the content. So if a student wants to talk about her teachers on her own time, that should be OK. Nice to hear good news about appellate decisions about the first amendment issues for a change, even if the student got screwed for a long time as the case wound its way through the process.
- Mllerustad
  
  If the same student stood up in the middle of a class and voiced the same opinion, wouldn’t there be some sort of reprimand?
  
  Yes, because that is 1.) within the confines of the school and 2.) disrupting class. Making a Facebook page outside of school qualifies as neither.
  
  There was once a Supreme Court decision that ruled that students’ constitutional rights did not cease “at the schoolhouse gate.” Now it seems there is a temptation to consider students as within those gates at all times.
Anonymous

Why should the school be able to follow the student 24 hrs a day? If the student jumped up and started yelling in class, he could be reprimanded. But what if the student went to something like a pro basketball game and jumped up and yelled for the team, should the school be able to reprimand for that?
- ozneicsa
  
  I’m not suggesting the school be able to “follow the student 24 hours a day”, but when the student decides to take his/her complaint to the public arena knowing full well that there is no recourse for the teacher to defend herself against that same student it seems unfair.
  Yes, I know, life is unfair, but if I started a website saying my boss was an idiot I would probably end up fired. Why should students be treated as a ‘protected class’ by allowing them to say anything they want as long as they phrase it as an opinion without fear of retribution?
  - SKR
    
    The difference with your example is that your boss employs you and the teacher does not employ the student. As for retribution, if the teacher could prove harm, she could sue for libel. Of course the truth is a great libel defense and it would be hard to prove that she isn’t the worst teacher that that particular person has ever met. It seems the student was smart enough to make an unfalsifiable claim.
Anonymous

Its a just decision considering that young people in school should be taught good manners and right conduct. There is nothing undemocratic about that. What are these critics talking about? Better that these people be kept off school if that would be the case. Simple as that. If you want to be taught, you must also be prepared to sacrifice some of your wants.
dculberson

I was curious as to how Morse v. Frederick might impact this case. Obviously it opens the doors a bit for schools controlling student’s speech even outside of school grounds. I suppose Facebook isn’t a “school event.” But we’ll see – free speech has suffered some serious blows from this court.
hadlock

The correct (current) meme to follow is to create the facebook group “Do One Million people think Ms. Phelps is a worse teacher than this Pickle?”
funkyderek

She posted her teacher’s name and picture, wrote that she was insane and incapable of doing her job. She was lucky to get away with being suspended.
Anonymous

xwizbt, yes, the UK’s slander and libel laws are particularly noxious. Generally speaking pure opinion is protected. The student wasn’t making any factual allegations about the teacher at all. It couldn’t be libel.
Inventorjack

This brings good old Pink Floyd to mind: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_bvT-DGcWw
Anonymous

Compare and contrast :

http://www.news-record.com/content/2010/02/15/article/teacher_may_lose_job_after_derogatory_comments_about_her_students_on_face

[[ anon, your link was screwy so I unbundled it.. - arkizzle ]]
ElkAintMoose

This bit is worthy note, perhaps? “After receiving three comments from people who criticized her and supported the teacher, Evans removed the page from Facebook.” Sounds like the brouhaha took care of itself rather quickly…
Anonymous

wonder how this works the other way, for teachers?
a NC teacher was suspended for comments made on her FB page (by others)….
http://www.newsobserver.com/news/wake_county/story/341361.html
Science_Boy

The student and the teacher will both get over this. Just wait till the student gets to college. In my state, the K through 12 teachers all had to have “teaching certificates” and have gone through training that meant that from the worst to the best they still fell within a pretty narrow range. In college the range of teaching ability widens dramatically. You find both incredibly good teachers and teachers that are worse than anything you could have imagined in high school.
Anonymous

Couldn’t the teacher then put up a page saying this kid is the worst student ever or the most disruptive student ever or whatever and be protected as well.
teufelsdroch

Meh. The World’s Greatest Teacher hears this many times a day. Feynman, during his famous physics lectures, got killed by the students in the class. Anyone who puts their opinion out to the public has an internal ear for what is good or bad.

If you stand up in front of 200 reasonable adults, at least 5 are going to think you’re a jerk. Stand in front of 200 teenagers and–I mean, bottom line, why would a teacher care about the opinions of a single child?

And it’s free speech, clear cut. Teachers are control freaks but if I saw this I’d push this kid to publish a blog or a wiki article. My most talented students are always the ones who first figure out how to graffiti the class wiki. Monitor and adjust.

And–Hooooly christ did I give my own teachers a harder time than this.
Shane

Please please please read the whole thing before reverting to e-chest thumping!

If you did you’d see that the teacher in question never even read the “attacks” and that the whole thing was removed after a handful of replies, some of them defending the teacher.

Seems like the student posted it, got some shit, realized it wasn’t the best move and deleted it. One of the posters must have took some screen shots (hypothesizing here) and turned those in and then the school over-reacted.
- Chrs
  
  I mean, clearly, if the student realized it was bad enough to take down, it was bad enough to get them punished. Heh. Thanks, courts.
Anonymous

Hi all

Have I missed mention of this in the comments?
http://www.ratemyteachers.com/

No need for facebook!
Ceronomus

The very fact that it is speech that is legal but perhaps unpopular is the reason it SHOULD be protected. It is the potentially difficult burdern that we bear in a free(-ish) nation. Heck, if we cannot string up the Rev. Phelps than we really have to stand up for everyone else too.
Antinous / Moderator

she can’t reasonably respond publicly

Why not? If the student’s speech is protected, the teacher’s speech deserves to be protected as well.
- knappa
  
  Well, if this was college anyway she wouldn’t be able to respond publicly because of a number of federal laws which protect student privacy. Even if it wasn’t, it’s ridiculously unprofessional to publicly bash individual students.
Adam’s Navel

It’s like nobody ever heard of ratemyprofessor.com
LILemming

Wow, back in the 70s and 80s I had plenty of teachers who wore our scorn as a badge of honor.

Ms. Guanerie would’ve slapped Ms. Phelps and told her to suck it up.
phltration

Student’s rights? Why weren’t my students around to buy beer at happy hour? Could be something to do with being a minor. Article doesn’t say whether the kid or parent might signed away some rights in a code of conduct. Teacher’s right to free speech is limited by the concept of professionalism. If you’ve never been a teacher you have know idea. (Like the poster above who called teachers control freaks while admitting to being a theft of teachers time for actual pedagogy.)
- Chas44
  
  @phltration said: “If you’ve never been a teacher you have know idea.”
  
  You’re right. Most people have *know* idea what it’s like to be a teacher. Do tell us. It might be enlightening.
  - phltration
    
    OOps Chas44 a typo. A teacher can make a mistake. Like when I let two guys go to the bathroom at the same time. One was a lookout, the other stole about $600 worth of stuff from students backpacks. The lookout fenced it. They confessed. 3 days suspension. In my state the felony threshold is $400. I knough hough to spell, I just get worked up about the treatment of teachers.
robcat2075

In almost all school settings there are legally enforceable *privacy policies* preventing a teacher from speaking publicly about students without their parents’ permission. The teacher doesn’t have the freedom to defend herself against the immaturity of the student.

And hasn’t the SC already held that student speech, as in student publications, is not fully protected? I suspect that should apply here.
mdh

tdawwg. I am arguing NO SUCH THING.

I am saying it has always been this way. It always will. You play your role well.