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Student speech has and continues to be a contested issue in schools. While the Supreme Court ruled in Tinker that students do not shed their rights at the schoolhouse gate, in the Kuhlmeier and Fraser decisions the Court gave school officials greater latitude in regulating student speech, especially when it bears the imprimatur of the school. However, in its Frederick decision, the Court established school officials as the arbiters of the meaning of student speech. This chapter will explore the underlying values in schools that rejected the speech of Fraser while accepting the speech act of cheerleaders’ dance routines. It will examine how the interpretation of these speech acts by school officials contributes to gender reproduction, with all the inequalities imposed.

Searching public school students has been a Constitutional reality since the landmark decision New Jersey v. T.L.O. in 1985. The law in this area of students’ rights has expanded greatly, including everything from locker searches involving canines to random drug testing of students involved in sports and extracurricular activities to highly intrusive personal searches. As recent as April 2009, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that the strip search of a middle school student for ibuprofen was illegal, but because school authorities would not necessarily have known they were violating the student's Constitutional rights, the school was immune from paying money damages. Thousands of searches of all kinds are conducted every day in schools across the country. Many of those searches are legal but not all. Whether legal or not, are those searches ethical? Is an illegal search of a student per se unethical because it violates the Ethic of Care? If a search is legal can it nevertheless conform to any standard of Ethic? Does searching a student violate the Ethic of Care or the Ethic of Critique?