In the modern era, the National Education Association (NEA) is committed to the rights of teachers and faculty members to teach, undertake research, and lead fully political lives without fear of retribution. This devotion can be seen in policy statements, legislative activities, and the pages of "Thought and Action," its journal devoted to higher…

This article explores common misbeliefs and misconceptions that many teachers have about the law of education, focusing on those that have the greatest potential to cause harm to schools, students, and teachers themselves. The myths fall into three categories: myths concerning the legal vulnerability of schools and teachers, myths concerning the…

This case study focuses on a teacher who discloses a learning disability to her Principal. Given the teacher's challenges in retention of her content material, the district is faced with how to handle the personnel situation of an employee with a disability. This case raises questions of how to balance the needs and interests of students with the…

Purpose--This study aims to present the opinions of public elementary school principals in Turkey about the current organisational justice practices among teachers from the distributive, procedural, interactional, and rectificatory dimensions. Design/methodology/approach--The opinions of 11 public elementary school principals in Ankara about…

School business officials and other education leaders worry now more than ever about facing legal battles. Maybe today's parents are more likely to run to the lawyer's office. Or maybe they simply expect everything to be a certain way--their way. Regardless, the result is the same: today's school leaders are likely to find themselves having to…

While both the author and Norman Finkelstein were reviled by American Zionists for their opinions regarding Israel's policies in the occupied Palestinian territories when they came up for tenure, the author ultimately gained tenure at an Israeli university, while Finkelstein was denied tenure at an American one. Drawing on this experience, the…

One may ask, "What is tenure today with its fuzzy parameters?" Is it a property right that a faculty member may earn and "hold" to retain employment? To understand the issue, educators must first understand what they are tenured to. Since the tenure process emanates from a department, are they tenured to a department or to a…

In this essay, the author explains how teaching assistant (TA) unions work to the benefit not only of the graduate students who are their members but also of the writing programs that employ them. While university administrations understand unions to be bothersome at best and forces of evil at their worst, unions are essential to the maintenance…

Most people have at least secondhand knowledge about Second Life, a virtual-reality world created by Linden Lab, in which avatars (digital characters) lease "islands" for real-life purposes--to sell products, conduct classes, do research, hold conferences, and even recruit for admissions. About nine million avatars reportedly interact on this…

Online education is particularly well suited to the needs of community college students. Although community colleges have lower per-unit fees than four-year colleges and universities, many community college students still experience economic hardship. Even with fee waivers, students may have problems finding the money for textbooks,…

Videos of teachers that students taped in secrecy are all over online sites like YouTube and MySpace. Angry teachers, enthusiastic teachers, teachers clowning around, singing, and even dancing are captured, usually with camera phones, for the whole world to see. Some students go so far as to create elaborately edited videos, shot over several…

In May 2006 administrators in the Austin, Texas, Independent School District learned that Tamara Hoover, an art teacher at Austin High School, was the subject of several explicit photographs that had been posted on Flickr, a public photograph-sharing website. Purportedly these photographs were posted on Flickr by the teacher's partner without her…

This plenary address from the AAUP's annual meeting says that it is time to clear away the obfuscating rhetoric and emphasize the urgency of this basic democratic principle. Michael Berube argues that not only is academic freedom under attack, but that what the society is now dealing with is a coordinated program of obfuscation about just what…

In this article, David Schimmel and Matthew Militello document the legal knowledge and training of teachers based on a survey of more than thirteen hundred K-12 respondents in seventeen states. The findings from this study suggest that most educators (1) are uninformed or misinformed about student and teacher rights; (2) have taken no course in…

Educators are generally aware that federal law protects persons with disabilities from unjustified discrimination, but they may not be familiar with the details of how these protections come into play when decisions are made about an individual's educational or employment opportunities. This article focuses on the protections that two federal…