Joel Klein
Chancellor, New York City Department of Education
52 Chambers Street
New York, NY 10007
Dear Chancellor Klein:
As you may recall, we wrote you last January about a censorship incident at Brooklyn Tech High School involving the Russell Banks novel, Continental Drift. More recently, we sent you a copy of our letter to Dr. Lee McCaskill, Principal of Brooklyn Tech, about our on-going concerns about censorship at the school, which are shared by many others in the First Amendment and education community. Copies of both letters are enclosed for your convenience. To date, we have not received a reply to either letter.
We are interested primarily in seeing a resolution to this situation that respects First Amendment and academic freedom interests of students and teachers, and high quality education at Brooklyn Tech. To that end, we join our colleagues, Deborah Karpatkin and Arthur Eisenberg from the New York Civil Liberties Union, in requesting a meeting to discuss how this might be accomplished.
Sincerely,
Joan Bertin
Executive Director
National Coalition Against Censorship
Chris Finan
President
American Booksellers Association for Free Expression
Larry Siems
Director, Freedom to Write and International Programs
PEN American Center
***
May 22, 2003
Dr. Lee D. McCaskill
Principal
Brooklyn Technical High School
29 Fort Greene Place
Brooklyn, NY 11217
Re: Todd Friedman
Dear Dr. McCaskill:
As you undoubtedly are aware, my organization and a number of other First Amendment groups have been concerned about the fact that a teacher at your school, Todd Friedman, was disciplined last year after a parent complained about sexual content in Russell Banks’ novel Continental Drift.
It is gratifying that the discipline letter has been removed from Mr. Friedman’s file. However, we are still concerned about the status of Continental Drift, and how the decision to approve or exclude this novel and other materials will be made at Brooklyn Tech.
In your May 12 letter to Mr. Friedman, you indicate that you have “developed a method for selecting and approving reading materials for all classes at Brooklyn Tech,” which I assume refers to your May 12 memo to staff on “Supplemental Reading Materials Classroom Libraries.” That memo states that “[f]aculty may not use literature to promote political, religious or other personal beliefs. In the selection of non approved material, sexually explicit material may not be distributed to students.”
Unfortunately, this policy only heightens our concerns. First, the policy bars books with specific types of content. This contravenes the basic First Amendment rule prohibiting discrimination on the basis of content or viewpoint and chills protected expression. Moreover, it is vague, subjective, and over-inclusive. Virtually all literature promotes personal beliefs. For example, students recently read the poem “Somebody Blew Up America,” a poem that can only be fully understood in a political context. Sexual content is also not a permissible ground to bar books at the high school level; otherwise, students would be unable to read Romeo and Juliet and Secrets, which was assigned recently apparently without complaint.
It is standard to appoint a committee to review complaints about books, but it is highly unusual to require teachers, especially at the high school level, to obtain prior approval to assign a respected novel as supplemental reading. Such a requirement is time-consuming and plainly chills the selection process. It also provides an opportunity for harassment, which in this situation is a serious concern, given the number and nature of the grievances still pending at Brooklyn Tech.
In sum, even though Mr. Friedman’s grievance has technically been resolved, the censorship issue which was at the heart of the situation has not been solved, and actually seems to have gotten worse. The current policy institutionalizes the problem and invites continued dissension and controversy.
The vast majority of high schools in New York City educate their students without violating students’ and teachers’ First Amendment right to read and speak freely and to explore a wide range of materials and ideas. There is no reason why Brooklyn Tech should not do likewise.
Sincerely,
Joan E. Bertin
Executive Director
National Coalition Against Censorship
Chris Finan
President
American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression
Larry Siems
Director, Freedom to Write and International Programs
PEN American Center
cc:
Joel Klein, Chancellor, NYC Department of Education
Randi Weingarten, President, UFT
Reyes Irizarry, Superintendent, Brooklyn and Staten Island High Schools
Judy E. Nathan, First Deputy Council, NYC Dept. of Education
Russell Banks
Deborah Karpatkin, Esq.
Judith Krug, Director, ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom
Charles Suhor, National Council of Teachers of English
***
January 27, 2003
Joel Klein
Chancellor, New York City Department of Education
52 Chambers Street
New York, NY 10007
Dear Chancellor Klein:
We understand that Russell Banks’ novel Continental Drift has become the center of a dispute at Brooklyn Technical High School, and that a veteran teacher at the school, Todd Friedman, has been disciplined for assigning the novel to an eleventh grade student as supplemental reading. The principal, Dr. Lee McCaskill, acted in response to a parent’s complaint about sexually explicit language in a few isolated passages.
In our view, Dr. McCaskill’s actions in this situation are both constitutionally suspect and educationally unsound. Not only is the principal’s action unjustifiable on the merits, the review process he employed was defective. He acted arbitrarily, without reference to any standards for judging what kind of material will be deemed unacceptable, and even without a meaningful review of the facts, including the fact that the student was offered and declined an alternative assignment. The action was undertaken without any apparent consideration of the pedagogical value of the book, or the relevance of the “objectionable” passages to the book as a whole. Indeed, since it appears that Dr. McCaskill had not even read the book, it seems that he relied on nothing other than a parent’s complaint. This arbitrary and capricious conduct threatens and chills the rights of all teachers at Brooklyn Tech, who may justifiably fear similar disciplinary action merely on the word of a disgruntled parent.
Procedural defects are only part of the problem. Of equal concern is the pedagogical judgment displayed by the principal’s decision. Continental Drift was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1986 and is widely recognized as a work of significant literary and artistic merit. Its author, Russell Banks, is currently the President of the International Parliament of Writers. Mr. Banks has won many of the literary field’s most prestigious awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships, the Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Ingram Merrill Award, the St. Lawrence Award for Short Fiction, the John Dos Passos Award, and the O. Henry and Best American Short Story Awards. Mr. Banks’ work has also been short listed for the PEN/Faulkner Fiction Prize and the Irish International Prize. Two of Mr. Banks’ works (Continental Drift and Cloudsplitter) have been finalists for the Pulitzer Prize.
The sexual content in Continental Drift represents a small but essential part of the novel, and is consistent with the kind of material that high school students frequently read. Indeed, if students were precluded from reading literature with sexual content, they would be deprived of exposure to vast amounts of important material, including Shakespeare, major religious texts such as the Bible, the works of Tolstoy, Flaubert, Joyce, Faulkner, D.H. Lawrence, and Nabokov, and contemporary books such as The Bluest Eye, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, and many of the texts regularly assigned in high schools throughout New York City and State. Focusing on the sexual content, however, is misleading; Continental Drift addresses crucial themes such as social class, race, and political and social disillusionment. It is especially appropriate to the high school classroom.
Mr. Banks, who is aware of the controversy, put the matter this way: “The central themes and characters of Continental Drift and the overall arc of its two interlocking stories deal directly with the social, racial, and cultural realities that contemporary teenagers must deal with every single day. This is especially true for teenagers living in Brooklyn, NY, who must confront in a personal way the very issues of immigration and class and cultural collision that my novel dramatizes and explores.” He further notes that Continental Drift is widely taught “in communities where there are large immigrant populations.”
Principal McCaskill’s decision to ban the book, based on a few isolated pages rather than a reading of the book as a whole, is fundamentally at odds with an educationally-based assessment of a literary work. As the National Council of English Teachers’ Statement on Censorship and Professional Guidelines cautions, censorship may occur when parts of a book are looked at in isolation rather than as part of a larger literary whole. Dr. McCaskill’s reliance on the New York State Textbook Law is misplaced: NYSTL provides no justification for censorship of literature; it is merely a state funding mechanism for required textbooks, and in no way restricts the use of supplementary materials which are routinely used by teachers throughout New York State, and which the State Education Department encourages teachers to rely on to enrich the curriculum.
Our public educational system is based on the premise that a free and unfettered exchange of ideas is essential to both democracy and education. As the Supreme Court held in Keyishian v. Board of Education, the “classroom is peculiarly the ‘marketplace of ideas.’ The Nation’s future depends upon leaders trained through wide exposure to that robust exchange of ideas which discovers ‘truth out of a multitude of tongues, (rather) than through any kind of authoritative selection.’” Academic freedom operates as an important safeguard for these principles, and the ability of teachers to choose supplementary materials is integral to the creation of a vibrant and healthy learning environment. School officials are under a constitutional obligation to resist pressure to suppress controversial and/or unpopular ideas. Nor may they codify their own preferences or a parent’s restrictive view of what is “appropriate” in literature.
We appeal to you to intercede in this situation and insure that Principal McCaskill’s actions are nullified. The Department of Education can hardly afford to alienate and lose skilled teachers like Todd Friedman. More than doing justice to one dedicated teacher is at stake, however: the ability of other teachers at the school to bring into the classroom important and stimulating materials that enrich the curriculum and classroom experience, and the right of students to an educational environment that allows free and full exploration of ideas. An action like this stifles creativity and alienates the most talented teachers and impedes their recruitment; if the Department allows it to go unchecked, New Yorkers will have reason to doubt its commitment to high quality education.
Sincerely,
Joan Bertin
Executive Director
National Coalition Against Censorship
Chris Finan
President
American Booksellers Association for Free Expression
Larry Siems
Director, Freedom to Write and International Programs
PEN American Center
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