In recent years, higher education administrators and professors have come under intense pressure to ban certain disfavored initiatives on their campuses (e.g., DEI) and censor their speech inside and outside of the classroom to avoid certain subjects related to race, gender, anti-LGBTQ+, and other controversial subjects. The enactment of laws and other measures in more 30 states seeks to reduce alleged liberal bias on college and university campuses and promote more "alternative" viewpoints by contracting free speech rather than expanding it. These efforts to censor and punish those in the academy for their teaching, scholarship or speech on so-called "divisive issues" have caused many administrators and professors to resign or retreat into silence. Moreover, the movement has triggered a wave of investigations and lawsuits over free speech on a scale unparalleled since the era of McCarthyism during the 1950s. This article explores the legal implications of the recent political crackdown in higher education and its meaning for academic freedom under the law. By tracing the legal history of how U.S. courts have treated the concept of academic freedom from the McCarthy era to the present, this article seeks to shed light on the current state of the law, the ambiguities created by a split in federal circuits overtime, and how the courts are treating this new wave of discriminatory, censorship restrictions thus far. For example, an important federal appellate court case, Pernell v. Lamb, examining the constitutionality of Florida's law banning "divisive concepts" in the classroom, is expected to impact the political and legal landscape of similar laws nationwide. This article delves into this case and others to provide a glimpse of where the courts may be headed concerning the limits of government intrusion in higher education.
Most of public school operational budgets are dedicated to compensating staff, and school staff are important for schools and students. Yet discussions about teacher shortages and teacher quality have tended to ignore many important aspects of school staff compensation beyond broad generalizations about average teacher salary levels. Consequently, these discussions are often muddled. In this essay, I highlight five important choices about school staff compensation faced by school district boards and other policymakers that are commonly neglected: (1) to hire more staff rather than to pay staff more (2) to replace salary with benefits (3) to backload rather than frontload compensation (4) to make compensation contingent on education (5) to compensate staff uniformly rather than to strategically differentiate compensation How school systems navigate these choices, and their trade-offs, has implications for their ability to recruit and retain high quality staff. Rather than taking for granted the decisions of stakeholders in the past-which has tended to obscure potential solutions to staff recruitment and retention problems-school leaders and policymakers should make these choices actively and explicitly on an ongoing basis. Additionally, researchers should do more to inform their decisions.
This reflective essay recounts a period of time when school finance and law research emphasized the central core of statewide funding for common schools. Abrief survey of articles appearing in the flagship Journal of Education Finance demonstrates that less than seven percent of research capacitybrings to light the status and need for centralized government common school funding. This observation is a source of concern for the sustainability of common schools for the common good. For if there is no scholarly press for statewide school funding, what will fuel economic, political, and legal thrusts to fund common schools? The observation and question are particularly important in this era of defunding traditional public school systems. Collateral damage caused by school choice options is noted as well as the extension of micro market theory to local schooling communities. A conceptualization of the commodification of residential real estate is also introduced. Understanding micro markets and the commodification of residential real estate are important because when pullbacks in central government funding occur, financial burdens increase locally where residential property valuation and ownership are proxies for common school economic and political support.
