School free speech fight [Stockton Record, 5/5/11]: A Bear Creek High teacher is fighting for her students' freedom of speech after the school's principal requested to preview the monthly Bruin Voice newspaper prior to publication.

California weighs shorter school year as budgets wane [Sacramento Bee, 5/4/11]: Children in frigid areas have "snow day" school closures. Could students across sunny California face "budget days" in bad fiscal times?

Fensterwald: Most of 13 parcel taxes passed [Thoughts on Public Education, 5/4/11]: If the threshold for passing a parcel tax were 55 percent, as Sen. Joe Simitian and fellow Democrats in the Legislature favor, a baker’s dozen parcel taxes would have passed on Tuesday. Instead, four fell short of the two-thirds majority needed for passage, including two that came within 1 percent of winning.

Court of Appeal overturns Commission on Professional Competence: Soliciting Sex on CraigsList evidences unfitness to teach [School Law Blog, 5/5/11].
San Diego Unif. School Dist. v. Com. on Prof. Competence (4th District, 5/3/11): Frank Lampedusa was terminated by San Diego Unified School District which alleged that he showed evident unfitness for service and immoral conduct. Specifically, the charges were based upon Lampedusa's posting on Craigslist of an ad soliciting sex that contained graphic photos of his genitalia and anus, as well as obscene written text, that was discovered by a parent and reported to the District. The Commission on Professional Competence reinstated Lamedusa, determining that cause for the dismissal did not exist and reinstating Lampedusa's employment. The Court of Appeal overturned the Commission finding there is no substantial evidence to support the Commission's decision as the evidence shows both evident unfitness to serve as a teacher and that Lampedusa engaged in immoral conduct, either of which constituted grounds for termination.

Educating students in remote areas can be costly [California Watch, 5/3/11]: In some very small schools in remote parts of California, the state is paying about $200,000 per student to educate them.

School Districts Call in Cavalry of Consultants to Push Parcel Taxes [Bay Citizen, 4/29/11]: Bay Area school districts, facing increasingly severe budget problems, are turning en masse to one of the few revenue-raising tools at their disposal: the parcel tax.

Walnut Creek man says school ignored son's bullying [Contra Costa Times, 4/26/11]: A Walnut Creek man says bullies on a school football field injured his son -- and that the school has done little about it. Walter Yuhre's formal complaint against the Acalanes Union High School District says administrators did nothing to prevent or stop the bullying and became indifferent after it occurred.

Teach For America seeks critical mass [Thoughts On Public Education, 4/26/11]: There was a point last week during Wendy Kopp’s appearance at the Commonwealth Club of California in Silicon Valley that smacked of the sort of smugness that, I suspect, makes some veteran teachers cringe when Teach For America (TFA) is mentioned.

Districts Consider Even Shorter School Year [California Watch, 4/26/11]: The likelihood is growing that many school districts will have to cut the number of days students spend in class in response to the state's deepening budget crisis, according to state education leaders and experts.

Court Backs Discipline of Student Over Internet Speech [School Law Blog, 4/25/11]: In a case raising novel issues about student speech rights in the Internet era, a federal appeals court has upheld the discipline of a Connecticut student who had harshly criticized school officials in her Web journal.
Ken Paulson of the First Amendment Center comments. The case is Doninger v. Niehoff.

Book Review

Before Brown: Heman Marion Sweatt, Thurgood Marshall, and the Long Road to Justice
By Gary M. Lavergne
University of Texas Press, 354 pages

Reviewed by Stuart Stern
South Texas College of Law
Office of Development & Alumni Relations

The Postman Cometh: The Integration of UT School of Law

South Texas students are undoubtedly familiar with Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954) and Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the two most well-known legal cases affecting the racial composition of public schools in the United States. But few, I’d venture, have heard of Sweatt v. Painter (1950). Yet this Texas case was called “the big one” by none other than Thurgood Marshall, who argued both Sweatt and Brown before the U.S. Supreme Court—and won each of them. For Sweatt, which was heard by the Court in 1950, resulted in the desegregation of the University of Texas School of Law and paved the way for Brown four years later.

In his engrossing book Before Brown: Heman Marion Sweatt, Thurgood Marshall, and the Long Road to Justice, Gary M. Lavergne presents the stories of plaintiff Sweatt, a black Houstonian, and his attorney Marshall, the star counsel of the NAACP, and depicts the painstaking groundwork that was laid by Marshall and his legal team to achieve victory in the landmark case. (The Painter they opposed was acting UT president Theophilus S. Painter.)

Heman Marion Sweatt was what we would today term a second-career student, which adds to the impressiveness of his accomplishment and makes him an intriguing figure. Sweatt was a thirty-seven-year-old mailman with a wife, an undergraduate degree in biology earned sixteen years previously, and a house on Delano Street in the Third Ward. In one of the ironies of the case, Sweatt, who said he wanted to be a lawyer when he applied, in 1946, for admission to UT, had originally wanted to be a doctor. But it was Sweatt who had stood up, when no one else did, at an NAACP meeting in a neighborhood church the previous fall to volunteer to be the plaintiff in a law school–desegregation suit the association was planning to file. He would later describe this turning point in civil rights history as a “brash moment.”

Lavergne, a UT Austin administrator and the author of four previous books, leads us up to this moment with his meticulous descriptions of a variety of interrelated historical threads: the history of public higher education in Texas, including the funding of both UT and Texas A&M through the profits of a very bountiful oil field; the history of the NAACP, including that of its outspoken Texas branches; the cases the NAACP took on in Texas prior to Sweatt to desegregate the state’s Democratic-primary elections (the only primaries held at the time); and the nature of life in both Houston and Austin during the first half of the twentieth century, a period in which the black and white citizens in each of these cities were rigidly divided by the racial caste system of the times.

Despite the segregation that characterized Austin, the UT campus itself during the 1940s and ’50s showed the first glimmers of open-mindedness that would later come to symbolize the capital city. The student newspaper, The Daily Texan, “exhibited a surprising liberalism,” according to one black educator. Following the denial by President Painter of Sweatt’s application to UT, a group of students formed an all-white campus branch of the NAACP. And two years later, in 1948, according to Lavergne, “UT polls indicated that nearly six in ten students approved of the desegregation of their campus, especially the graduate and professional schools.”

That wouldn’t happen, however, for another two years. Sweatt v. Painter went from the 126th District Court, in Austin, in 1946 to the Third Court of Civil Appeals, also in Austin, in 1947. The following year, the Texas Supreme Court refused to hear the case, and in November of 1949 it went to the U.S. Supreme Court. The following April, the Court heard oral arguments in Sweatt, and two months later, in June of 1950, issued a unanimous verdict in favor of the plaintiff.

In the meantime, the state of Texas had attempted to conform to the “separate but equal” doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson by providing more funds for Prairie View A&M University and, in 1947, establishing the Prairie View Law School, in downtown Houston (which generated no applicants); the Texas State University for Negroes (now Texas Southern University), in Houston (which generated 2,300 applicants and immediately became the largest African-American university in the South); and the School of Law of the Texas State University for Negroes, in Austin (which enrolled three students).

Although TSU became known as “the House that Sweatt Built,” Sweatt refused to attend either its makeshift law school, which consisted of four rooms in an Austin office building, or the Prairie View Law School, which comprised three rooms in a Houston office building. He was determined to go to UT, and the Supreme Court agreed that he should. In its ruling, the Court stated:

Whether the University of Texas Law School is compared with the original or the new law school for Negroes, we cannot find substantial equality in the educational opportunities offered white and Negro law students by the State. In terms of the number of faculty, variety of courses and opportunity for specialization, size of the student body, scope of the library, availability of law review and similar activities, the University of Texas Law School is superior. . . .

What is more important, the University of Texas Law School possesses to a far greater degree those qualities which are incapable of objective measurement but which make for greatness in a law school . . . [including the] reputation of the faculty, experience of the administration, position and influence of the alumni, standing in the community, traditions and prestige. It is difficult to believe that one who had a free choice between these law schools would consider the question close.

Heman Sweatt began classes at UT School of Law in September of 1950, and I will leave it to the reader to explore the bittersweet denouement of his complex story. Of significant note is that the portion of the UT campus known as the Little Campus, located at 19th and Red River streets, was renamed the Heman Sweatt Campus in 1988, and that the courthouse where his case was originally heard was renamed the Heman Marion Sweatt Travis County Courthouse in 2005.