480 in the collection
State must pay fees in testing critic's case: Urged he be barred at school conference
The Good News! section doesn't work at the moment and so this has to be entered under ordinary news. Note that the State admits it has an agenda. . . and will take extreme measures to protect it.
The wheels of justice do indeed grind slowly. The ACLU filed suit on Alfie's behalf in '01 against the Mass. Dept. of Education.
By Tracy Jan
The state Department of Education must pay more than $155,000 in legal fees for violating the civil rights of a noted standardized testing critic by preventing him from speaking at a conference, a superior court judge has ordered.
The order by Middlesex Superior Court Judge Hiller B. Zobel was made public yesterday. It follows the court's ruling last August that the department violated the First Amendment when it threatened to withdraw funding for the conference if Belmont author Alfie Kohn delivered the keynote address.
The American Civil Liberties Union sued on behalf of Kohn and a school principal, a counselor, and a parent who wanted to hear the speech.
"It's very important that the highest education officials in the state respect the Constitution and be willing to engage in debate about the policies they've adopted," said Sarah Wunsch, staff lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts. "They shut down disagreement and dissent, and that's a very sad lesson for educators to be teaching."
Kohn, author of "The Case Against Standardized Testing: Raising the Scores, Ruining the Schools," published by Heinemann in 2000, said in a written statement that there is an urgent need for discussion on the downsides of testing at a time when the federal No Child Left Behind law is up for reauthorization.
"It's too bad that the Department of Education was so committed to its agenda of high-stakes testing that it would violate the Constitution to silence those who disagree," Kohn said in the statement.
Heidi Guarino, spokeswoman for the Department of Education, stood by the department's decision not to allow Kohn to speak because state officials thought the subject of his talk was inappropriate for the conference.
"We still believe we did not infringe on his First Amendment rights, but clearly the judge didn't agree," Guarino said.
The state has required that, to graduate, high school students, starting with the Class of 2003, must pass the math and English exams of the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System.
Kohn was invited to speak at a 2001 conference in Northampton cosponsored by Western Massachusetts educators, including charter schools, universities, and community groups focused on improv ing high school education in the state.
Testing was a major topic of the conference, organized to spur dialogue between charter schools, regular public schools, and higher education.
But two months before the conference, a state Education Department official sent e-mail to conference organizers threatening to withdraw federal funds administered by the department unless Kohn was barred from speaking, even though the money was not slated to be used to pay speakers. Kohn, who subsequently was disinvited as a speaker, received a $5,000 fee, which was paid for privately.
The state official's e-mail said "it was stupid" to use the state funds to support a speaker who is "diametrically opposed" to the state's agenda, according to court documents.
In addition to awarding the fees in his final judgment, the judge also issued an injunction prohibiting the Department of Education from denying grant money for any conference unless the speech topic is clearly unrelated to the conference's subject.
— Tracy Jan
Boston Globe
2007-05-04
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