The state of Arkansas can prohibit the teaching of Critical Race Theory in the classroom, a federal appeals court has held, rejecting two students’ claims that the State’s ban violated their free speech rights.
We covered the students’ lawsuit last year here, where they joined with two teachers challenging the anti-indoctrination provision of Arkansas’s LEARNS Act (“Section 16”). In a preliminary ruling, the federal district court then blocked the State from taking action against the teachers for teaching Critical Race Theory (CRT) while the litigation played out.
Section 16 prohibits the promotion of “teaching that would indoctrinate students with ideologies such as Critical Race Theory … that conflict with the principle of equal protection under the law.”
The two teachers said they were self-censoring what and how they teach to avoid punishment under Section 16.
Based on that self-censorship, the students asserted their constitutional claim. The First Amendment protects their right to receive information, they argued, including information their teachers would otherwise be providing them.
In a unanimous ruling, the three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit disagreed. Judge L. Steven Grasz, a Trump appointee, wrote the court’s decision vacating the district court’s preliminary injunction, concluding the students were unlikely to succeed on their free speech claim.
The classroom instruction the students claimed a “right to receive” constituted the government’s own speech, Judge Grasz wrote.
“That right cannot be used to require the government to provide a message it no longer is willing to say”:
Students do not possess a supercharged right to receive information in public schools. … Just as ordinary citizens cannot require the government to express a certain viewpoint or maintain a prior message, students cannot oblige the government to maintain a particular curriculum or offer certain materials in that curriculum based on the Free Speech Clause.
These principles hold true even where the teaching materials were removed for political reasons, the court continued. “Since the speech belongs to the government, it gets to control what it says.”
Put simply, the Constitution does not give the students the right to tell the school what to teach.
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