Teachers Get Supreme Knowledge
by
Spencer S. Hsu
D.C. educators, in a quest to elevate the quality of classroom instruction, are enlisting high-profile help for a special semester-long teacher training session on the Supreme Court.
April 6, 2000
|
Washington, DC
Former independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr recently briefed an unusual audience at the U.S. Supreme Court. Instead of justices, jurors or the occasional U.S. senator, he talked to 20 District social studies and history teachers.
D.C. educators, in a quest to elevate the quality of classroom instruction, are enlisting high-profile help for a special semester-long teacher training session on the Supreme Court. Just as a trip to Washington crowns the academic year for thousands of students across the country, local school officials hope to capitalize on the stock of experts in one of the world's great civics laboratories.
"Teachers love the pursuit of knowledge," said Roceal M. Duke, a social studies content specialist for D.C. public schools, who recruited instructors for the program. "The city is their classroom. When they go out on field trips, they're constantly applying what they see to what they teach."
Funded with a $ 40,000 grant by the private Supreme Court Historical Society, which is seeking additional support, the new education program poses no cost to D.C. taxpayers. About 60 of the city's 300 social studies instructors have applied for the course, which is taught by Street Law Inc., a nonprofit legal education group. Teachers receive a small stipend, credit for in-service recertification or graduate degree credit at Trinity College.
The 12-week syllabus borrows liberally from court decisions likely to stir interest, including disputes over search and seizure of youths, sexual harassment, freedom of expression and religion in the schools, privacy issues and discrimination. It also offers sessions on voting rights and District history and a guide to Internet tools.
The course this spring features a presentation by American University law professor Jamin B. Raskin, architect of the suit seeking District voting rights in Congress. There will also be an evening reception at the Supreme Court hosted by a justice, with each teacher enrolled in the program permitted to bring a student.
Starr declined an interview request to talk about his class lecture, but those who attended said the former U.S. solicitor general addressed a number of courtroom controversies--though not his famous investigation of President Clinton. Supreme Court policy excludes reporters from events not sponsored by justices, so Starr's March 27 talk at the court was closed to the media.
David T. Pride, executive director of the nonprofit historical society, said part of the program's funding came from friends of Starr as a gift in his honor.
"We've learned that only 12 percent of colleges and universities in this country offer constitutional history as a course," Pride said, calling that "pretty shocking" to members of the historical society, which was created to broaden understanding of the least-known branch of government. "Familiarity doesn't exactly breed contempt, but ignorance I think can breed disdain."
Teachers praised the rigor and sophistication of the class. They said instructors supply cases, Internet sources and other materials that teachers can use in their classrooms. And students, they added, have a natural interest in the law, albeit sometimes an adversarial one.
"My students are very concerned about their rights," said Carlton Funn, who teaches eighth-grade American history at Hine Junior High School in Southeast Washington. Each year when lessons turn to the nation's judicial system, Funn said, their hands go up.
"When they go to a store, they don't want to be followed," Funn said. "It's the first thing they talk about."
On a recent rainy afternoon, after teaching their own classes, 15 D.C. teachers in the course filed in to Room 111 at the aging Logan Middle School behind Union Station. They shook out their coats and munched on slices of deli meat, chocolate chip cookies and lemonade in small plastic cups. The instructor's voice carried over a roaring window fan.
Seated in a U-shaped arrangement of desks, the teachers began a three-hour discussion about freedom of expression in the public schools--sort of a cross between a PBS round-table and the 1973 law school film "The Paper Chase." Instructor Judith A. Zimmer played John Houseman's professor role.
This day's lesson focused on the influential 1988 case involving a St. Louis high school, Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier, in which the court affirmed the right of the principal and school administrators to censor articles on teen pregnancy and divorce in the school-supported paper.
"What were the facts in the Tinker case?" Zimmer asked, interrogating her charges. "What's being weighed here? What was going on in the Hazelwood case?"
Paul Grady was game. "The school class had a newspaper and they wanted to print some information, and some of that information was about someone's pregnancy and someone's father," said Grady, a history and government teacher at Oak Hill Academy, the school for D.C. students confined to the juvenile detention facility in Laurel. "The principal said no. . . . The question was whether the students' freedom of speech was violated by not letting information in the newspaper be published."
That answer displeased many of the teachers in the class, one of whom objected aloud. "If I were the teacher who published the paper, I would want the students to have more control of the newspaper," said Simeon Stolzberg, 29, a first-year U.S. history teacher at Roosevelt High School in Northwest Washington. "They learn from that how to publish without having someone tell them what they ought to write and say and think."
Should a seventh-grade student be allowed to write a junior high school newspaper review of the R-rated 1988 film "Mississippi Burning"?
Nope, that's a school-funded activity under the discretion of the principal, and it might promote underage moviegoing, said Tom Graham, a 20-year education veteran who teaches American history at Cardozo High School in Northwest Washington.
Can a school board cancel a high school production of "Hair"--with its partial nudity--even after students have rehearsed, advertised and sold tickets?
You bet. A drama class's work is part of the school's curriculum, said Patricia West, chairwoman of social studies at Johnson Junior High School in Southeast Washington.
And what about the student who slipped some sexual innuendo into a speech nominating a friend for a student council seat? He's suspended, said Sylvia Isaac, a 13-year teaching veteran at the School Without Walls high school in Northwest Washington, whose answer won agreement from the strict crowd.
"Students have to be monitored, and some of their actions are inappropriate," said Isaac, an Advanced Placement government teacher. "This is a school function, it operates under the school's curriculum and it's inappropriate. Teachers are setting the tone."
Quipped Zimmer: "In law school, there's a lot of law review articles about prisons and schools. Those two are used in the same sentence, and not by accident."
Source:
Washington Post
(Reproduced with permission)
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Supreme Court Seminar for St. Louis Area Teachers
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Topic: US Supreme Court