He keeps repeating it, because he wants you to go look it up for yourself. But here, I've done a very nice copy and paste for you detailing exactly confirming what UB has stated....
“Duct-tape bills” pending in Kansas and Arizona would prohibit teachers from speaking out about politics—particularly issues related to school funding.
The Arizona bill,
SB 1172, passed the state Senate Feb. 23, won a preliminary vote in the House March 26, and is expected to come up for a final vote in the House this week. Under it, school employees would not be allowed to “distribute written or electronic materials to influence the outcome of an election or to advocate support for or opposition to pending or proposed legislation.”
“The bill clarifies that we are talking about advocacy for proposed legislation,” Sen. Kimberly Yee (R-Phoenix), its main sponsor,
told the Associated Press. And under an amendment sponsored by Rep. Anthony Kern (R-Glendale), any school employee who did speak out could be fined up to $5,000. “If they are going to act as a teacher, which is paid for by the taxpayers, they should not be doing any political activity,” Kern told the AP.
It’s primarily intended to prevent teachers and school officials from campaigning for more funding or speaking out against budget cuts, which have been a major issue in Arizona. In February,
233 school-district superintendents signed a letter to the state legislature urging it to reject Gov. Doug Ducey’s budget proposal, which would cut school funding by $120 per pupil and “further erode the instructional time and direct services available to our classroom.”
“This bill is basically putting a gag order on school officials when it comes to providing any kind of information that is factual to stakeholders,” Heidi Vega, a spokeswoman for the Arizona School Boards Association, told the AP. “We wouldn’t be able to provide information on what programs would be cut.”
“If the bill passes I’d guess the legislature (which hasn’t funded our schools) wouldn’t foot the bill for the mouth-closing material necessary to silence the state’s many hard-working school officials,”
columnist E.J. Montini wrote in the Arizona Republic. “They’d have to buy their own duct tape.”
In Kansas,
House Bill 2234 would make it illegal for employees of state colleges or universities from writing opinion pieces or letters to the editor in newspapers while identifying themselves with their official titles. The law applies if they are writing about anything that “concerns a person who currently holds any elected public office in this state, a person who is a candidate for any elected public office in this state, or any matter pending before any legislative or public body in this state.”
As Dr. Mark Peterson, chair of the political science department at Washburn University in Topeka, put it on
Kansas Public Radio, “if I wrote a newspaper column expressing how ridiculous this proposal is, I would be prohibited from using my title.” He believes the bill is intended to “muzzle”
Insight Kansas, a weekly blog in which he and several other political-science professors produce newspaper commentaries on state politics—such as an
October 2014 column accusing Secretary of State Kris Kobach, “a noted voter-fraud alarmist,” of perpetrating fraud himself by “trumped-up claims of fraud, used to justify policies suppressing legitimate votes.”
State Representatives Joe Seiwert and Virgil Peck, the bill’s main advocates, “report that they are tired of our columns criticizing the Legislature’s and governor’s actions,”
Insight Kansas columnist Michael A. Smith wrote in a February column in which he also spoke of appearing “on Wichita television stating that I ‘may or may not be’ a faculty member at a state university, while the host suggested I wear a paper bag over my head.” But “What is happening to Kansas is not funny,” Smith added.
The bill wouldn’t prohibit professors from writing such articles without mentioning where they work. But it would prohibit them from using the common citizen-journalist practice of mentioning one’s work or status to show that you have direct knowledge of or expertise in the area you’re talking about.
So it would outlaw—quite conceivably intentionally—letters and articles in the vein of “As a professor at Pratt Community College in Wichita, I have seen firsthand the devastating effect of Gov. Sam Brownback’s drastic cuts to higher-education funding” or “As a professor of paleobiology at the University of Kansas, I can only see the efforts of the
Citizens for Objective Public Education to stop the teaching of evolution in our public schools as evidence that some human beings are both ignorant of trilobites and as ignorant as trilobites.”
(The usual journalistic practice in such cases is to include a disclaimer saying that the views expressed are those of the author and not necessarily those of the institution.)
HB 2234 may not go very far, however. The House Education Committee held a hearing on it Feb. 13, but has not voted on it yet. Rep. Peck, who introduced it, is now saying that while he supports it, he’s not the sponsor.
In any case, it is likely unconstitutional, Penn State education professor Neal H. Hutchens argues in the
Chronicle of Higher Education:
In
Pickering v. Board of Education, decided in 1968, the U.S. Supreme Court held that a public-school teacher’s speech in the form of a letter to the editor qualified for First Amendment protection. In that case, the teacher wrote to criticize budgetary decisions of the school district in which he taught.
In sum, when speaking in their private capacity, public employees possess significant First Amendment rights to share their views on matters of public concern. Such safeguards also encompass instances, as in
Pickering, when the public employee speaks out about his or her employer. While a public employer can proffer a justification to restrict that type of private employee speech under limited circumstances, the speech presumptively receives First Amendment protection.
For First Amendment purposes, a public employee speaking as a private citizen differs markedly from an individual speaking in the course of performing job duties…. the Kansas bill has nothing to do with employee speech arising from the performance of job duties. Instead, it seeks to restrict individuals employed at public colleges and universities in Kansas from sharing a certain kind of information — their official title — when speaking as private citizens.
