Can teachers be fired for celebrating murder?

Teachers who celebrated the murder of Charlie Kirk online are losing their jobs, reports Sarah D. Sparks in Education Week. "Teachers in California, Florida, Iowa, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, North Carolina, South Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, and Texas have been fired or placed on leave ahead of investigations into alleged social media comments."

In a Sept. 11 letter to school districts, Florida Education Commissioner Anastasios Kamoutsas pledged to investigate every educator who posted “despicable comments” related to Kirk’s murder. “An educator’s personal views that are made public may undermine the trust of the students and families that they serve,” Kamoutsas wrote. State law allows the firing or suspension of an "educator who, ‘upon investigation, has been found guilty of personal conduct that seriously reduces that person’s effectiveness as an employee of the district school board.’”

Inside the classroom, teachers are supposed to teach the curriculum, writes Robert Pondiscio, who co-authored a paper on the subject last year. Their free speech rights are limited, courts have ruled, because they're engaging in "hired speech."

On their own time, teachers have a "right to speak as citizens on matters of public concern." However, school districts can take action if they prove the teacher's speech could disrupt the "order, safety, and the effective functioning of the school." That's the tack Florida is threatening to take.

Pondiscio thinks most of the firings will be overturned. But not all of them.

Consider the New York public school teacher who posted, “good riddance to bad garbage,” showed himself in a shirt that said, "IS HE DEAD YET?" and wrote that Kirk had become “a good Nazi,” that is, a dead one.

"Parents whose kids were fans of Charlie Kirk would not be wrong to ask: is my child safe in this person’s classroom?," writes Pondiscio. "Schools have a compelling interest in student safety and parental trust."

“If you don’t understand that celebrating an assassination is wrong, you have no business being around children," a teacher wrote on Facebook. "Our kids deserve role models who teach them how to handle conflict with words, not with violence. If an adult can’t grasp that celebrating death is unacceptable, they should never be trusted to shape the hearts and minds of the next generation.”

Courts, communities, and schools will have to "wrestle with hard questions both about the law and about judgment, competence, and the moral example set by the adults who shape our children," Pondiscio concludes.

Personally, I'd like to think that teachers are opposed to murder, regardless of the victim's identity, and understand the grave danger that political assassination poses to our democracy.

By the way, I've seen some interesting discussion here and here that suggests online nihilism -- not traditional left- or right-wing thinking -- encourages young men to fantasize about killing people they don't like. And, sometimes, act on those fantasies. Writing before Kirk's murder, Peter Savodnik thinks nihilism drove Robin Westman to murder Catholic schoolchildren in Minneapolis. This is a world I know absolutely nothing about.