Course Description:
This course is intended to provide prospective administrators an introduction
to the legal environment in which schools operate. This includes the
statutory, constitutional, and regulatory constraints that apply to
schools as well as the educational policies and administrative guidelines
that school districts adopt. In order to understand this environment,
and be able to influence it, teachers and administrators need to have
rudimentary legal skills in reading cases and statutes and making arguments
about how certain fundamental ideas apply to the public education of
children. Consequently, this course will introduce you to a range of
legal topics and focus on the development of a variety of individual
skills of legal analysis. These legal skills include the ability to
research and locate a range of pertinent legal sources, to make judgments
about the relative quality of these legal resources, to analyze primary
legal materials, to make legal arguments based on statutory and case
authority, to recite points of law, and to analyze and propose educational
policy recommendations.
This course will focus on school and district
policies on a variety of topics. We will explore the relationship between
the legal standards that exist for these topics and the extent to which
educational objectives can be achieved by the policies.
Instructor: Paul Thurston
