Life After Ending Segregation in Public Schools

A decade and a half after the Supreme Court’s famous case in 1954 ending segregation in public schools, the Warren Court provided another landmark decision for public schools in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District to close its era of liberal ideals and civil liberties. While Tinker lacked the historic controversy and impact of Brown v. Board, the decision established significant precedents by “safeguarding public school students’ free speech rights” (Rowe 31). For the first time, the Warren Court explicitly expanded the scope of the First Amendment to include public school students, forming the framework and issue of school speech for future litigation.
Throughout the 1900s, the Supreme Court debated the extent that the First Amendment’s right to freedom of speech protects political speech. In the early twentieth century, the Supreme Court formulated principles to test the limits and restrictions of the freedom of speech by the government. The first doctrine, the bad tendency principle, broadly allowed the government to restrict any speech that only served to cause illegal activity. However, applications of the doctrine let the government to stifle any dissenting political views of the government because they created a ‘bad tendency’ to harm or disrupt the actions of the government, such as in Whitney v. California (1927).
In 1919, Schenck v. United States marked a turning point where the Justice Holmes introduced the doctrine that expressions that only allowed the government to restrict speech that presents a “clear and present danger” and not merely just a predisposition toward an illegal action (Eastland 5). While the Supreme Courts upheld and used both doctrines, the clear and present danger analogy f...

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... of laws called school speech. Although the subsequent jurisdictions further provided rules that clarified the public school’s right to regulate speech, the original rule of Tinker has not been compromised (Eastland). The Court upheld the punishment of lewd speech that goes against community values in Bethel School District v. Frasier (1986) (Hall). In Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier (1989), the courts decided that any part of school curriculum or function, such as high school newspapers, is not considered public forum and can be regulated by the school to prohibit inappropriate and controversial issues (The Oyez Project). Most recently, in Morse v. Frederick, the Supreme Court declared that public schools can prohibit and regulate school speech encouraging illegal drug use, especially at a school-sponsored event as mentioned in Hazelwood (The Oyez Project).