Judge temporarily halts parts of LEARNS Act
Order temporarily bars teaching restrictions for history, theory
A federal judge on Tuesday issued a partial ruling in a constitutional challenge to the Arkansas LEARNS Act, which the students and teachers challenging the suit say chills speech in public school classrooms.
Judge Lee Rudofsky, in his order for a partial preliminary injunction against the state, said that, until there’s a final decision in the case, the state can’t prevent or punish the plaintiffs’ teaching of history or theory unless it’s explicitly discriminatory and the students are forced to agree with it.
The lawsuit was filed in March by two students, their parents and two teachers at Little Rock Central High School, as well as the Arkansas State Conference of the NAACP.
The lawsuit targets Section 16 of the LEARNS Act, which dictates how certain topics can be taught in public schools.
Section 16 requires the education secretary to “amend, annul, or alter the rules, policies, materials, or communications that are considered prohibited indoctrination” or that would “promote teaching that would indoctrinate students with ideologies, such as Critical Race Theory.”
The teachers claim that the law leaves what counts as “prohibited indoctrination” open to interpretation and so caused them to self-censor what they taught out of fear of punishment. The students claim the law violates their right to receive information.
The first plaintiff, Ruthie Walls, teaches an AP African American History course which, under the LEARNS Act, was removed from the state’s course code listings before the start of the 2023-24 school year.
The order temporarily bars the state from implementing Section 16 in a way that would prevent the two teachers from continuing to teach their class
curricula.
Rudofsky wrote that a broader injunction wasn’t necessary since his opinion confirmed, and the state already conceded, that “Section 16 only prohibits a teacher from compelling … a student to accept the validity of a theory, idea, or ideology that violates Title IV/VI [of the Civil Rights Act of 1964] and conflicts with the principle of equal protection under the law.”
What to know about the LEARNS Act
The LEARNS Act is an omnibus bill passed in March 2023 that changed many rules and policies for public schools in the state.
In a statement after its passage, Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders called the act “the boldest, most farreaching, most conservative education reforms in the country.”
According to the lawsuit, Sanders explained the LEARNS Act was also intended, in part, to “prevent a ‘left-wing political agenda’ from ‘brainwashing our children’ with ‘political indoctrination.’”
The suit calls the LEARNS Act “an unconstitutional law that violates plaintiffs’ First Amendment and Fourteenth Amendment rights.”
What does this decision mean?
April Reisma, president of the Arkansas Education Association, said the injunction gives teachers a “temporary respite.”
“Teachers should never have to worry that they can be punished or be in fear of losing their job for facilitating student learning to honestly engage with the curriculum used to understand the facts as we know them,” Reisma said in a statement.
David Hinojosa, an attorney for the plaintiffs, said in a statement Tuesday that the “ruling makes it clear that students’ right to receive information and ideas was violated.”
“Judge Rudofsky further narrows the scope of the LEARNS Act so that students won’t be forced to learn a false version of this country’s history of discrimination or continuing struggles with racial justice. Governor Sanders and Secretary of Education Jacob Oliva had already walked back the law in their response briefing, stating that Critical Race Theory could be taught in Arkansas’ classrooms.”
Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin said in a written statement Tuesday that Rudofsky’s “decision confirms what I’ve said all along. Arkansas law doesn’t prohibit teaching the history of segregation, the civil rights movement, or slavery.”
“The very limited injunction merely prohibits doing what Arkansas was never doing in the first place,” he said.
Maya Brodziak, another attorney from the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, who’s involved in the case, pushed back against that idea on Wednesday.
Sanders and those in her administration, “in defending this law have proposed a much narrower interpretation and that’s really what the courts seized upon and adopted.”
“But I’m not sure that, without our litigation, whether [the state] would have been would have been likely to take such a narrow interpretation,” she said. “Some state officials saw the laws as much broader and were working under that assumption.”
Rudofsky’s order cites an August 2023 statement from Education Secretary Jacob Oliva in which he said that AP African American History “could potentially run afoul of [the Governor’s] executive order on teaching implicit bias as well as the LEARNS [Act] and other Arkansas laws.”
The Department of Education’s communications director also said that “Arkansas law contains provisions regarding prohibited topics.”
Sanders issued an executive order in January 2023 which uses much of the same language as the LEARNS Act. It’s not at issue in the lawsuit but “the state could potentially use it sort of as a replacement for the statute,” Brodziak said.
“In terms of actual effect, there’s been some action done under the executive order, and we’re considering what other options we may have,” she said.