The Schoolhouse Gate: Public Schooling, the Supreme Court docket, and the Battle for the American Thoughts

An award-winning constitutional regulation scholar on the College of Chicago (who clerked for Choose Merrick B. Garland, Justice Stephen Breyer, and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor) provides us a fascinating and alarming e-book that goals to vindicate the rights of public faculty stu­dents, which have so usually been undermined by the Supreme Court docket in latest a long time.

 

Judicial selections assessing the constitutional rights of scholars within the nation’s public colleges have constantly generated bitter controversy. From racial segregation to un­licensed immigration, from antiwar protests to compul­sory flag salutes, from financial inequality to teacher-led prayer—these are however a number of of the cultural anxieties dividing American society that the Supreme Court docket has addressed in elementary and secondary colleges.
The Schoolhouse Gate provides a contemporary, lucid, and provocative account of the historic authorized battles waged over training and illuminates modern disputes that proceed to fracture the nation.

 

Justin Driver maintains that because the Nineteen Seventies the Supreme Court docket has usually abdicated its accountability for safeguarding college students’ constitutional rights and risked trans­forming public colleges into Structure-free zones. College students deriving classes about citizenship from the Court docket’s selections in latest a long time would conclude that the next actions taken by educators cross constitutional muster: inflicting extreme corporal punishment on college students with none proce­dural protections, looking college students and their possessions with out possible trigger in bids to uncover violations of college guidelines, random drug testing of scholars who usually are not suspected of wrongdoing, and suppressing pupil speech for the view­level it espouses. Taking their cue from such selections, decrease courts have upheld a wide selection of doubtful faculty actions, together with degrading strip searches, repressive gown codes, draconian “zero tolerance” disciplinary insurance policies, and extreme restrictions on off-campus speech.

 

Driver surveys this authorized panorama with eloquence, highlights the gripping private narratives behind landmark clashes, and warns that the repeated failure to honor college students’ rights threatens our primary constitutional order. This magiste­rial e-book will make it unattainable to view American colleges—or America itself—in the identical means once more.