Clark vs. the Fort Worth School District is an important case, and not just for its obvious free speech implications. It’s about how we should educate our children and what kind of republic we want to live in.
I am surprised that Georgia Clark’s dismissal occurred in the Fort Worth, Texas school district. Despite a large Latinx population, Fort Worth is controlled by conservative Whites, and an influx of people with Brown skin is perceived as a threat to White dominance, as Trump’s supporters endlessly tell us. The superintendent, and perhaps a few members of the school board, may lose their jobs over this ham-handed episode, because I’m willing to wager a new silver dollar that many people in the community support the teacher. Of course, I’m not especially surprised that the commission ruled in the teacher’s favor. If you follow Texas politics at all, you can’t help but notice the large number of conservatives/racists in positions of public trust. The committee, in effect, was protecting one of their own.
What is the source of White anxiety? In Fort Worth, population statistics tell part of the story. In 1940, Whites comprised 85.7 percent of the population; by 2010, Whites were 61.6 percent, and non-Hispanic Whites only 41.7 percent, of the population. I suspect Latinx people were lumped in with Whites in 1940, since Blacks were recorded, but no Latinx people. That’s historically unlikely, because we know Texas was part of the native lands of Latinx people.
The number of Black or African Americans in Fort Worth have grown modestly: from 14.2 percent in 1940 to 18.9 percent in 2010. The earliest data on the Hispanic or Latinx population begins in 1970, at 7.9 percent of Fort Worth’s population. By 2010, it was 34.1 percent. The percentages, of course, don’t validate Clark’s belief that the city has been overrun by violent drug dealers; that’s the other part of the story: People of European descent have carried a low-grade infection of racist nativism since they first set foot on Turtle Island, and the infection occasionally spikes a destructive fever, as it’s doing now.
Despite that, I believe the commission’s ruling was correct, because fringe or not, Clark’s right to express her beliefs is a fundamental freedom.
If Georgia Clark had verbally attacked students, then her behavior would be inappropriate and worthy of her removal from the classroom. The commission, however, ruled that she did not attack her students.
Her tweets were clearly protected by the First Amendment, which guarantees freedom of speech and the freedom to petition the government to seek redress for grievances. Sadly, her assertion that Latinx people are illegal drug dealers who are taking over “her” city and school are not even fringe beliefs, since a great number of U.S. citizens, including the president, passionately agree with her. It’s unconscionable for the school district to censor her (nonviolent) speech.
If she can be fired for expressing anti-immigrant beliefs on a private Twitter account, then another teacher can be fired for privately expressing opposition to Trump’s actions on the border. Once some speech is arbitrarily deemed inappropriate, it’s easy to extend the ban to other forms of speech (or merely to people who are considered troublemakers). The school board’s termination of the teacher was a violation of the Constitution.
I am surprised that The New York Times published such a neutral article on free speech. I know most people claim to want “just the facts” from news organizations, but if that were true, Fox News and MSNBC wouldn’t exist. When I watch the news or read a newspaper, I’m aware of the bias of the source. The New York Times is reliably liberal (including on matters of war), just as Fox News is reliably . . . insane. (The New York Times, and a great many liberals, are war boosters, regardless of who is president; only the Left thinks this is an anomaly.) If any case calls for The New York Times to demonstrate bias, it’s one that directly bears on the First Amendment, since newspapers rely on it for their survival. So does our republic.
But this incident, to me, raises another troubling question. What does the school board believe the function of education to be? Is it imposed discipline and conformity? Is it passing a seemingly endless array of soul-destroying tests? Or is it the challenge of learning and free inquiry? School districts routinely attempt to throttle back exercises of free speech, especially that of students. Do we want a republic in which young people are early and often told to shut up? Where even adults are afraid to speak their minds, because they fear they’ll lose their livelihood?
Students and teachers don’t lose their free speech rights when they cross the threshold of a public school’s door – if anything, they should be prodded to engage in freewheeling discussions of ideas, even obnoxious ideas. That’s what education is 𝘧𝘰𝘳, even if it also serves other purposes (providing tools for citizenship, providing job skills, providing memories of Friday night football games, etc.) 
Academic freedom is tied to a method of inquiry and learning that requires free speech; arbitrary limitations on academic freedom constricts knowledge – and knowledge is the soil in which wisdom takes root. Academic freedom – free speech – is messy, challenging, and irritating. It is also exhilarating and vital to our survival. Under restrictive conditions, what students learn is but a pale shadow of what our very human civilization means: we are a restless, freedom-loving people possessed of curious minds that love challenges.
“I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue,” John Milton wrote in Areopagitica, “unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.” Are we losing the race because we don’t allow our teachers and students to run?
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