Students' free-speech rights extend to the Internet
A Missouri school district violated a student's free speech
rights when it suspended him for criticizing his high school and
its faculty on his personal web page, a federal court has ruled.
The case is among the first to reach the courts concerning students'
rights to free speech on the Internet.
Brandon Beussink, 17, was a junior last year at Woodland High
School, about 100 miles south of St. Louis, when he set up a home
page with his sister on their parents' home computer. Using occasionally
vulgar language, the page criticized the school's official web
site. It also urged visitors to send e-mail to the principal and
inform a teacher that the web site was bad.
Beussink removed his home page from the Internet after school
officials complained. They also suspended him for 10 days and
then failed him for the semester as a result of his absences,
according to a suit filed on Beussink's behalf by the American
Civil Liberties Union.
Last December, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction
against the Woodland School District, prohibiting it from using
the suspension against Beussink in grade and attendance calculations.
The injunction also bars the district from punishing Beussink
or restricting his ability to post his web page.
"Dislike or being upset by the content of a student's speech
is not an acceptable justification for limiting student speech,"
wrote U. S. District Court Judge Rodney Sippel.
Asked what she would like school board members to learn from
the case, Denise Field, president of the ACLU of Eastern Missouri,
said: "We'd ask school board members to take the First Amendment
seriously. The judge has made a point that it is important that
students see that the First Amendment works."
The growth of the Internet adds a complex new dimension to issues
of students and free speech, said Edwin Darden, a staff attorney
for the National School Boards Association. "These really are
untested waters," he said.
As in cases involving nonelectronic media, courts have performed
"a balancing act" in weighing students' free speech rights against
the schools' need to maintain order and discipline, Darden said.
The scale tipped toward students in a pivotal 1969 Supreme Court
case, Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District.
In that case, the high court ruled that school officials could
not use their fears of a disturbance to justify restricting students
from wearing black armbands to school to protest the Vietnam War.
In 1986, the Supreme Court sided with school officials, ruling
in Bethel School District No. 403 v. Fraser that a student
could be suspended for using graphic sexual metaphors in a speech
nominating his friend for school office. Such vulgar speech was
inconsistent with the "fundamental values of public school education,"
according to Chief Justice Warren Burger.
A case similar to the recent Missouri case arose in Ohio last
year and was also decided in the student's favor. In a March decision,
a federal judge reinstated a student who had been suspended from
Westlake High School in suburban Cleveland for creating a web
site to complain about his band teacher.
Darden said there may be instances in the future in which courts
would uphold restrictions on students' personal web sites. These
cases could involve sites seen as threatening to staff or disruptive
of school activities, he said.
Paco the asteroid?
What's that up in the sky? It's a bird. It's a plane. It's 1998
FS144?
With the help of an astronomy computer program, three high school
students in Northfield, Mass., have discovered a 100-mile-wide
asteroid that might be a remnant of the creation of the solar
system 4.5 billion years ago.
 Heather
McCurdy, Miriam Gustafson, and George Peterson -- all students
in Northfield Mount Hermon preparatory school's asteroid
search program -- spotted a huge chunk of ice in the Kuiper
Belt, near Neptune, in October. The object, believed to have been
created at the same time as the solar system, is now being tracked
by astronomers from California to Massachusetts. It's a find that
might help astronomers map the distant reaches of space.
The discovery came as the students studied space photographs
taken at the Cerro-Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile.
Using computer software and mathematical techniques, they compared
photos taken at different times of day, and distinguished moving
objects from the stationary ones.
By tracking the object's course over several days, the students
determined its size, speed, and location.
The high school stargazers are part of the multi-school Hands-On
Universe program based at the University of California at
Berkeley and funded by the National Science Foundation.
"This is a fantastic piece of science, of education, of discovery,"
said astrophysicist and Hands-On Universe founder Carl Pennypacker
of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and The Lawrence Hall of Science.
"The Northfield students' discovery has shown that all students
from a broad range of backgrounds can make solid, exciting, and
inspiring scientific contributions."
McCurdy, a senior who hopes to attend Colgate next year and
major in astronomy, said the possibility of making such finds
is what attracts her to the science. "On the Earth everything's
mostly been found, and everyone has an explanation for it," she
said. "In space there's an unlimited amount of things to find
and learn about. You just have the feeling of, 'What's beyond
that? And what's beyond that?'"
McCurdy originally named the object "Paco," in honor of her
brother's nickname. But astronomers in Cambridge, Mass. renamed
it "1998 FS144." The object is one of 75 discovered in nascent
studies of the coldest, furthest reaches of the solar system.
The area remains largely unexplored, but studies have been boosted
recently by technological advances that allow scientists a more
penetrating view of space.
It only hurts when you LOL
 Good
news: Having your students bang out rapid-fire e-mails does not
lead to reduced sentence complexity, poor grammar, or an abundance
of typos. "This should reassure parents who think their children's
grammar will suffer because of the Internet," said Susan C. Herring
of the University of Texas, Arlington.
How computers and the Internet are affecting word usage was
much on the minds of Modern Language
Association members as they met at their annual conference
in December. Herring revealed the results of a study that looked
at the evolution of an early discussion list on the Arpanet, the
predecessor of the Internet. She found that computer correspondence
did not appear to lead to a homogenous style among users. Instead,
writers tended to cultivate their own style. Also, computer correspondence
tended to become less formal and less polite than other forms
of communication.
The Internet provides an interesting laboratory for examining
language changes, Herring said, noting how computer talk is crawling
into general use. LOL (laughing out loud) is one example. And
then there's the "smiley," the combination of colon and closing
parenthesis that in Net-speak indicates a happy face. "Smiley
faces have been around a long time, [but] they were always right
side up," said Herring. "The Internet turned them sideways. Now
I see more and more people putting them in letters and notes that
way."
Another researcher, Lisa Gerrard of the University of California
at Los Angeles, studied more subtle ways the Internet is changing
language. Gerrard looked at 200 web sites created by women for
a female audience. Some of the sites challenged stereotypes of
women by using pejorative terms like "bimbo" and "chick" in an
empowering way.
Schools of education fail to meet new teachers' technology
needs
Much lip service has been paid to the importance of training
teachers to use new technologies, but the rhetoric has not turned
into reality: Only a handful of schools of education are teaching
future teachers how to use technology intelligently in the classroom.
That inability to hone the technology skills of future teachers
can no longer be tolerated, say members of the CEO
Forum on Education and Technology, a group of business and
education leaders who are studying the quality of technology,
and how it is used, in public schools. Schools of education need
to do a much better job training teachers, the forum says -- especially
since more than two million new teachers are projected to be hired
over the next 10 years.
"Only a handful of schools of education require their students
to be able to design and deliver instruction using interactive
technology," according to Focus on Professional Development,
a CEO Forum report. "Although new teachers are increasingly able
to use basic technologies, they are rarely prepared to successfully
teach with technology."
The new report updates the forum's StaR chart, which provides
indicators by which school districts can gauge their level of
technology implementation. This spring, the CEO Forum will release
another report, Focus on Digital Content, examining the
quality of digital education content. The report will include
additional recommendations on how professional development should
be improved.
Other groups are pushing for change, too. The National Council
for the Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) is one. After
nearly a year of studying the issue, it released its own prescription
for change in a report titled Technology
and the New Professional Teacher: Preparing for the 21st Century.
"State and national policymakers want to see an improvement
in student and teacher candidate ability to use computer technology,"
said Arthur E. Wise, president of NCATE. "We must all work together
to help ensure that tomorrow's teachers are prepared for the challenges
of teaching in the 21st century."
Eight-year-old Fred Hanger succumbed to diphtheria in the fall
of 1884, and his classmate Jessie Garrett died the next spring.
These are among the sorrowful statistics preserved on the class
rosters of a 19th-century Little Rock teacher named Mrs. M. Hoover.
The rosters
are preserved on an Internet site developed by bookseller Kathy
Karcher Floyd, who came across the tattered lists in a box of
trash. Going through the box was like going on an archaeological
dig: "There were bits and pieces from a couple of generations,"
said Floyd, including high school graduation programs and handbooks
describing the city's school system in the 1880s.
E-Wire is prepared with Associated Press (AP) reports.
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