The Schoolhouse Gate

Public Education, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for the American Mind

By: Justin Driver

Narrated by: Robertson Dean

A Washington Post Notable Book of the Year
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice

An award-winning constitutional law scholar at the University of Chicago (who clerked for Judge Merrick B. Garland, Justice Stephen Breyer, and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor) gives us an engaging and alarming book that aims to vindicate the rights of public school stu­dents, which have so often been undermined by the Supreme Court in recent decades.

Judicial decisions assessing the constitutional rights of students in the nation’s public schools have consistently generated bitter controversy. From racial segregation to un­authorized immigration, from antiwar protests to compul­sory flag salutes, from economic inequality to teacher-led prayer - these are but a few of the cultural anxieties dividing American society that the Supreme Court has addressed in elementary and secondary schools. The Schoolhouse Gate gives a fresh, lucid, and provocative account of the historic legal battles waged over education and illuminates contemporary disputes that continue to fracture the nation.

Justin Driver maintains that since the 1970s the Supreme Court has regularly abdicated its responsibility for protecting students’ constitutional rights and risked trans­forming public schools into Constitution-free zones. Students deriving lessons about citizenship from the Court’s decisions in recent decades would conclude that the following actions taken by educators pass constitutional muster: inflicting severe corporal punishment on students without any proce­dural protections, searching students and their possessions without probable cause in bids to uncover violations of school rules, random drug testing of students who are not suspected of wrongdoing, and suppressing student speech for the view­point it espouses. Taking their cue from such decisions, lower courts have upheld a wide array of dubious school actions, including degrading strip searches, repressive dress codes, draconian “zero tolerance” disciplinary policies, and severe restrictions on off-campus speech.

Driver surveys this legal landscape with eloquence, highlights the gripping personal narratives behind landmark clashes, and warns that the repeated failure to honor students’ rights threatens our basic constitutional order. This magiste­rial book will make it impossible to view American schools - or America itself - in the same way again.

©2018 Justin Driver (P)2018 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

“The Schoolhouse Gate is the first book-length history of Supreme Court cases involving the constitutional rights of schoolchildren, a set of cases that, though often written about, have never before been written about all together, as if they constituted a distinct body of law.” (Jill Lepore, The New Yorker)

“Indispensable... bold and ultimately persuasive...astute... exquisitely well timed, given President Trump’s nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to replace Justice Kennedy.... Driver has performed a service in assembling the stories of so many important education cases in one encyclopedic, fair and elegantly written volume. It will remain on my desk for years to come.” (Dana Goldstein, The New York Times Book Review)

"This meticulous history examines rulings on free speech, integration and corporal punishment to argue that schools are our most significant arenas of constitutional conflict." (New York Times Book Review, Editors' Choice)

• A Washington Post Notable Book of the Year
• A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice

Balanced, researched, insightful and very timely

Prof. Driver, though he has his own perspective, presents the history to date of the intersection between the Court and education in a most informed, organized and impartial study. I wished I had such a book available when studying ConLay in the early 60s.

Fascinating, engaging, and well composed

This book endeavors to examine the influence of it highest court on our youngest citizens.

Outstanding!

Perhaps one of the most conclusive and well-written book regarding public education. Legal minds and curious listeners alike will learn more than imagined through this magical piece of scholarship.