Introducing educators to the law

Three steps to access and interpret legal documents and concepts without a law degree or a legal research background.

“Like a double helix of DNA, the law is closely intertwined with the lives of educators,” observes Lily Eskelsen García, the former president of the National Education Association, in her foreword to my book Elevating Equity and Justice. Whether responding to playground bullying, crafting an IEP, or overseeing the student disciplinary process, educators constantly act in ways that have been shaped by past legal decisions and/or have legal implications for the future. Even much of the curriculum is determined by law, whether through legislatively enacted content standards or court decisions that both empower and limit the ability of the state, teachers, and parents to control what children are taught in public schools.

Given the law’s pervasive influence on K-12 pedagogy and practice, a familiarity with legal sources of information can help teachers in many ways. For instance, it can help them better understand their rights as school employees, such as their right to speak out on matters of public concern or in ways that are critical of their employer (see Pickering v. Bd. of Educ., 1968), the power of their unions to collect dues from them (see Janus v. AFSCME, 2017), or the right not to be discriminated against by their school on the basis of sex, sexual orientation, or gender identity (see Bostock v. Clayton Cty., 2020). It can also help them protect their students’ rights to equal protection, due process, privacy, and freedom of speech and religion — which are frequently tested in schools — and spell out the educational requirements for particular student populations, such as students with disabilities or English learners. Further, a basic grasp of education law gives teachers and administrators a stronger foundation on which to make decisions about everything from student assessment and school accountability to resource allocation, data collection, discipline and safety measures, and even parental engagement.

But despite these benefits, a working knowledge of the law is missing from most educators’ professional tool kit. Why is this? What should they know about education law and its relevance to their everyday lives? And how can they find and make sense of legal sources?

Overcoming negative perceptions

For a busy teacher or principal, poring over a Supreme Court opinion probably doesn’t seem all that helpful in managing a classroom or school. This feeling of disconnect is likely magnified by the fact that most “law” educators encounter has been reduced to a series of bullet points buried in a compliance-oriented training manual. Whatever intellectual, emotional, or civic value the law might contain has been stripped away, leaving only a series of intractable do’s and dont’s. Not very appealing.

On top of that, the most visible recent evidence of lawmaking in K-12 education has seemed out of touch with the realities of teaching and learning. (Think of the now defunct No Child Left Behind Act and its heavy-handed insistence on “100% student proficiency” and standardized testing requirements.) Nor has the law appeared to do much, at least not since the 1970s, to confront racial and socioeconomic segregation in public schools, or to close resource and opportunity gaps. If the law isn’t helping to ameliorate these most fundamental problems, then what incentive do educators have to plumb its depths? It’s hard to fault educators for perceiving the law not as a path toward a solution, but as part of the problem.

All of us have a stake in protecting our mature, yet fragile, democracy.

To get another perspective on educators’ disaffection for law, I reached out to Cody Miller, a former English teacher who is now an assistant professor of English education at SUNY Brockport, and who both follows the law and regularly incorporates legal issues into his classes. “The law, like the learning process, is messy and complicated,” he said. “It’s easier for teachers to feel cynical and even defeatist about the law and the legal process, rather than to engage with it.” (Miller also happens to believe that the law affects educators whether they engage with it or not — “so they ought to engage.”)

Similarly, Liz Kleinrock, a D.C.-based elementary educator and antibias curriculum expert, told me that few teachers see the law as relevant to their lives, or as something they can influence. “It’s important that we humanize the law, whether for students or for adults,” she said. “From an early age, we’re conditioned to think of ‘law’ passively, almost like a law of nature that must be accepted ‘as is.’ But that’s not the case. If a law was created by real people, it can be undone or changed by real people. Once we realize we have the power to influence the rules that apply to us and to our students, our motivation grows to explore the law further.”

Finding and using legal materials

Beyond these perceptual barriers lies a more technical one: Can educators access and interpret legal documents and concepts without a law degree or a legal research background? The answer is yes. And it’s not as hard as you might think. Kleinrock and I have written for Heinemann’s Professional Development Catalog-Journal about how educators can engage students in discussions about the law; the same steps apply for adults looking to understand the law.

The first step is to identify K-12 policy or practice goals that might benefit from legal sources or materials. Consider a hypothetical scenario: Let’s say you teach in a South Carolina public school, and like many educators around the country in recent years, your school is grappling with how to discipline students in a way that is fair, effective, and non-discriminatory, and that doesn’t rely on school police to make disciplinary decisions. You remember a violent and disturbing video that went viral several years ago showing a school resource officer (SRO) at a South Carolina school who forcibly seized and handcuffed a Black female student in the classroom. And when you search online for this incident, you find a New York Times article, which mentions a lawsuit. Bingo. You’ve now identified a legal source that could help you review and reform your school’s disciplinary practices.

Step two involves finding the relevant legal materials. But this is easier said than done. Without a precise title or citation in hand, identifying a statute or judicial opinion matching your area of interest can be a bit of a wild (online) goose chase, and Google and Wikipedia will get you only so far. The most meticulously curated legal search engines are expensive and out of reach to nearly all but practicing attorneys. But there are free online databases as well, including www.oyez.org and other websites that can help educators identify and interpret notable U.S. Supreme Court cases; www.justia.com for looking up state and federal laws and court decisions; federal and state court websites, and university portals, such as www.law.cornell.edu. So, by using details in the Times article and a free online database, you can locate a case stemming from the SRO incident: Kenny v. Wilson (4th Cir. 2018). Knowing the name of the case then helps you to find the entire litigation history, including prior and subsequent court rulings and the original federal court complaint.

The third step is to make sense of these legal materials, so you can use them to inform the decisions you make in your school. This is the tricky part. As every first-year law student knows, to read a judicial opinion for the first time is to be confronted with pages of incomprehensible terms, procedural jargon, and references to other cases you’ve never heard of. (A word of encouragement here: Reading legal texts gets easier with practice. And you can always call that lawyer cousin of yours, or a local law librarian, to make sure you’re on the right track.)

Back to our scenario: From the legal materials you’ve reviewed, you pick up key pieces of information, such as who the lead plaintiff is (a student who was arrested and criminally charged after protesting the violent treatment of her classmate in the video); the scope of the litigation (including a broad constitutional challenge to specific South Carolina laws used to prosecute thousands of K-12 students each year); relevant discipline data (showing that students of color have been prosecuted under South Carolina laws at four times the rate of white students), and the outcome of the litigation (including the successful amendment of the state’s “Disturbing Schools” statute to stop the prosecution of students for vague offenses such as “obnoxious” behavior or “disturb[ing a school] in any way”).

Now you can present this information to your colleagues, summarizing the legal texts and supplementing them with data on the suspensions, expulsions, school-based arrests, and referrals to law enforcement of students at your school, as well as links to related research on the disproportionate discipline of students of color.

Connecting educators to law — and lawmakers

The steps I’ve described are neither difficult nor time-consuming — they’ll likely take no more than an evening or two. But that doesn’t mean educators couldn’t use a bit of help. I’d love to see one of the big professional associations, unions, or education advocacy or policy organizations take on the tasks of identifying, curating, and synthesizing legal materials relevant to a host of school-related topics, from student discipline to school dress codes, students’ free speech rights, guns on campus, special education laws, funding equity, and so on. And while they’re at it, they could also do more to connect K-12 educators to state and federal legislators — not just while bills are being debated but also much earlier, as policies are being formulated — and even to judges and courts.

With the right support, more teachers and administrators may come to discover that a basic understanding of education law can be a powerful addition to their professional tool kit, informing their everyday decision making about K-12 policy and practice. Further, educators — like everybody else — have a civic responsibility to learn about the legal principles and traditions that are so pivotal to this nation’s health. Such knowledge must not be reserved for lawmakers, scholars, and advocates. All of us have a stake in protecting our mature, yet fragile, democracy.