Center for Scholastic Journalism Blog

On this date in 1988, Massachusetts became the first state to enact a statute specifically in response to the Supreme Court’s decision earlier that year in Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier, which limited the First Amendment rights of high school students confronting censorship by school officials. (Actually, the legislation took an existing statute that had been on the books in Massachusetts since 1974 as a voluntary guideline for school districts and made it mandatory.)

Chapter 71, section 82, of the Annotated Laws of Massachusetts, says that “The right of students to freedom of expression in the public schools of the commonwealth shall not be abridged, provided that such right shall not cause any disruption or disorder within the school.” These protections include the right for students “to write, publish and disseminate their views.” As applied by the Massachusetts Supreme Court, the law gives students in Massachusetts the “broadest free speech rights in the country” according to the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts.

The sponsor of the bill back in 1988 said he was prompted by his memories of being a censored high school editor. Former state Rep. Nicholas Paleologos, who is now the executive director of the Massachusetts Film Office, received an award of special recognition from the New England Scholastic Press Association in May for the impact his efforts have had on Massachusetts student for two decades.

Massachusetts was the first post-Hazelwood statute, but was soon joined by Iowa and then Colorado, Kansas, Arkansas and in 2007, Oregon. California has had a state law protecting student free expression since the 1970s and provided part of the inspiration for Massachusetts and the other states. And the California legislature is nearing passage of a bill that would expand their laws protections by explicitly protect student media advisers for punishment based on what their students publish.

As an explanation for his support for the Massachusetts effort in 1988, Paleologos said, “[w]hen I read the newspaper articles about the Hazelwood case I just got angry, because it seemed we had spent the last three or four years trying to reform education and produce kids that were more creative and independent and capable of thinking critically — it seemed that all this effort to make students more thoughtful and independent would now be swept under the rug by a Supreme Court that wanted to muzzle everybody.”

Thank goodness for legislators who understand why scholastic journalism is important. To all those in Massachusetts who have benefited from the protections of this statute over the last 20 years, happy anniversary.

Two colleagues here at Kent State have put together an excellent site (both great design and insightful content) about job hunting for those in the television and Web worlds. (Increasingly those worlds are becoming one, with print media often part of the same operation.) Using clips of interviews with hiring professionals around the country, the Media Job Pod (www.mediajobpod.org) site is a great way to help students, even when they’re still in high school, think about the skills and tactics they need to get their foot in the door with an electronic media employer.

As reported here on June 20, the University of California system says it won’t follow the proposed bill protecting advisers if it is signed into law. Thanks to the excellent reporting of the online publication Inside Higher Ed, we now have another piece of the puzzle. Apparently, California’s Donahoe Higher Education Act, which the proposed adviser protection bill would amend, includes a provision that explicitly says the the sections of the law only apply to the University of California if the University regents, by resolution, agree to it.

The question that remains: have the regents ever adopted a resolution endorsing the limitations on their ability to censor student expression first enacted into law in 1992 and amended in 2006, commonly known as the Leonard Law or Education Code section 66301? They claim to support it, even if they object to the adviser protection provisions now being proposed. If they haven’t adopted a resolution, that would seem to be a priority for free expression advocates on the university’s 10 campuses (ironically, where the campus Free Speech Movement of the 1960s got its start). Given how weak their arguments, perhaps they could be persuaded to support the adviser protection proposal as well.

The good news if the adviser protections in SB 1370 become law, other California universities and high schools should be, without question, limited by the law in their ability to punish advisers as a means of censoring student expression.

Even though the bill pending in the California legislature to protect media advisers from punishment based on what their students publish has not yet become law, the University of California announced this week that it won’t comply with the law’s requirements if it is enacted.

In a letter dated June 16 sent to Sen. Leland Yee, SB 1370’s primary sponsor, the University Office of the President announced that the University of California Board of Regents would be “unlikely to adopt” the provisions of the bill for enforcement on the university system’s 10 campuses.

Senior Legislative Director Happy Chastain explained in the letter the University’s tortured reasoning for rejecting the bill’s provisions. According to Chastain, the University has to protect its ability to take appropriate measures if a faculty member fails to observe instruction standards. The letter cites as a hypothetical example a math instructor who allowed a student to promote opinions unrelated to the subject during class time, suggesting that under the law, the university would be prohibited from punishing the teacher for tolerating the disruptive student speech. Of course, the letter never explains why the University believes that off-topic student speech in the classroom would be protected by the law in the first place, a requirement for the university employee protections of the bill to come into play.

Because the University of California Board of Regents is established by the state constitution, the courts have held that it has protection from some laws enacted by the state legislature. But this letter appears to be the first indication that the University believes the provisions of this bill (and, by implication, the underlying law protecting student free expression and free press rights enacted in 1992 which SB 1370 seeks to amend) cannot be enforced against it. The university’s suggestion that it can ignore Education Code section 66301 (also known as the “Leonard Law” based on its sponsor) 16 years after its enactment will likely be news to free speech advocates in the state and around the nation.

Although the letter states that the University “feels strongly about academic and speech freedoms,” the position taken suggests “not really.” I would expect that it is only a matter of time before censored University of California students or advisers, with assistance of the Student Press Law Center, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education or the American Civil Liberties Union, take the university to court to prove that Education Code section 66301 does protect their rights.

And despite this disturbing twist, SB 1370 appears close to passage. The bill, which would protect school employees at public and private high schools and colleges, was approved by the state Assembly on the same day the University sent its letter, June 16. A slightly different version of the bill passed the state Senate 35-2 in April. If the Senate approves the amendments included by the Assembly, the bill will be on its way to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger for his signature. (No indication from “the Governator” whether he supports the bill, but one would hope being married to a former journalist is an indication of likely support.)

While a stringer at my hometown paper in the mid-’70s, I was paid 25 cents per inch for features and stories on public meetings of rural school boards, township trustees and village councils. This was the rate paid to all correspondents, as we were glamorously called.

It wasn’t long before I noticed that the longest stories in the newspaper carried the bylines of people like me. Staff reporters wrote much shorter articles, better focused. Stories written by stringers dwelled overly on every ordinance, resolution, argument, chuckle and sneeze; the people’s right to know, I’m sure we rationalized.

My goodness, how we went on and on in 1975 about every village’s plan to paint all the fire hydrants red, white and blue to honor the American Bicentennial the next year.

Of course, complete, detailed reporting wasn’t really the goal; reader needs had far less to do with those tomes than the need to fill the gas tanks of our rust-bucket cars and justify the long haul to the newspaper’s hinterlands. To earn a trifling $10, a stringer had to turn out 40 inches.

Two problematic products of the newspaper’s correspondent pay practice:

1. Endless stories that few would read, and

2. Bad writing habits among the writers trying to find their way into the business.

I’m pleased to report that when I became city editor years later, I junked that pay procedure and paid stringers per piece, each story shaped around the most important question the writer could answer for his or her audience at that particular moment.

This is more than an anecdote. It’s a warning about what can happen when we take our eye off the true goal of journalism: Serving the community.

Behaviors learned young are hard to break. And just as the community was secondary to our lust for those quarters, so can it be when we seek peer recognition for our work, yet another type of compensation.

I think about this every time I help high school advisers select contest entries and when I’m asked to judge scholastic news competitions.

I wonder how much different the work might be if the students — and as important, their advisers — would keep their focus on the audience rather than on year-end praise and prizes.

How many different kinds of stories, told in ways more appealing to readers, would materialize if student reporters and editors weren’t worried about pleasing a panel of judges who cling to antique commandments having more to do with uniformity than engaging an audience?

Sure, this can be dicey, as it would require a new kind of trust in our student journalists, a different kind of advising and administrations more concerned about education and communication than control. But it would be worth the effort. As it stands, the lesson implicitly imparted by contests puts the audience second and compromises the best goals of journalism. I’ve yet to encounter a single judging panel that can guarantee correct conclusions about the most important goals of journalism: accuracy and community service.

We need to rethink this business. That’s my 25-cents’ worth, anyway. Read the rest of this entry »

We need to pay attention to how the student press is portrayed in the media.

The California Report, which is heard on many PBS stations here in The Golden State, broadcast a story on May 30 about the Adviser Protection Act that is currently awaiting a vote from the state Senate (SB 1370) before going onto the governor’s desk. The piece starts out at session at the JEA/NSPA Spring National High School Journalism Convention in Anaheim in April, goes to an interview with Jan Ewell about her ouster as adviser (and her principal’s admission is was partly over the staff’s editorials) and then explains the proposed act.

The piece is good, but I was dismayed with a teaser promoting the program that said the proposed act protected advisers “when student journalists go too far.” The promo implied the students were being irresponsible in their reporting when just the opposite is true. In the eight cases documented by Sen. Leland Lee (D-San Francisco/San Mateo) for this act, the students did nothing wrong and were responsibly reporting events or wrote opinion pieces based on fact that resulted in retaliation against the adviser by an unhappy principal or administrator. In no case did the disapproval have to do with students abusing their rights as journalists.

Listeners who turned off their radios after hearing the promo and without hearing the piece could easily have been misled to believe advisers are being punished when their students publish irresponsible stories — and few are likely to disagree with that idea.

It may have been “just” a promo, but words have consequences. We need to vigilant in correcting the erroneous perception high school students are engaged in “student journalism” rather than high-quality “journalism by students.”