A recent case from Pennsylvania, Munroe v. Central Bucks School District (2014), raises fresh questions about the free speech and expression rights of public school teachers as they use the Internet. In Munroe, when a board terminated a high school teacher’s employment for making controversial postings about her students and colleagues on her personal blog—postings that proved disruptive—a federal trial court rejected the educator’s claim that she was dismissed in retaliation for exercising her right to free speech.
Before reviewing the facts and judicial opinion in Munroe, it is worth noting that blogs (a term coined in the late 1990s by joining the words “Web” and “log”) are collections of online postings created by individuals that are read and sometimes commented on by others. The growth of that phenomenon is nothing short of amazing; the popular blog site Tumblr (2014) reports that as of early September 2014, some 201.9 million blogs were on the Internet, totaling 90.5 billion posts.
- Educational Administration and Supervision,
- Educational Leadership,
- Education Law,
- Elementary and Middle and Secondary Education Administration,
- Elementary Education and Teaching,
- First Amendment,
- Junior High, Intermediate, Middle School Education and Teaching,
- Pre-Elementary, Early Childhood, Kindergarten Teacher Education,
- Secondary Education and Teaching and
- Teacher Education and Professional Development
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