Fifty-seven years after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that students do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate,” the legacy of Tinker v. Des Moines is colliding with a new round of debates over what student expression looks like in 2026.

That tension has been front and center this week as schools mark Scholastic Journalism Week, themed “Press Under Pressure,” and Student Press Freedom Day, held Feb. 26. 

Last spring, Mary Beth Tinker brought the message behind the 1969 decision directly to Unit 5 students. Tinker, who was suspended as a 13-year-old for wearing a black armband to mourn the dead in Vietnam, spoke virtually to students from Community and West and Community in April, describing how a small act of protest became one of the most-cited student speech rulings in the country.

“To keep your rights, you have to use your rights,” Tinker said. “When you’re disrespected and your rights are disrespected, not only are you cheated but the whole society is cheated.”

Tinker told students the court’s protection is not unlimited. The Supreme Court’s standard, she said, allows student speech as long as it does not “substantially disrupt school” or “impinge on the rights of others,” language that continues to shape student expression disputes.

“It’s very important for you to speak up about issues that affect your lives,” Tinker said. “Young people have always been discriminated against in our society, and still are today.”

That question—what counts as disruption and who gets to decide—is exactly why social studies teacher Mrs. Meghan Hawkins said she keeps Tinker and Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier in the curriculum.

“We think it’s really important for students to know what their rights are at school,” Hawkins said.

But, Hawkins said, it goes beyond just knowing those rights: “We want those rights to be protected.”

 Students, Hawkins said, often underestimate their own power because authority can feel bigger than it is.

“Oftentimes people in positions of authority,” Hawkins said, “whether that’s a parent or a teacher or an administration, can often convey that they have more power than they actually do.” 

In her classroom, the social studies teacher’s goal is not just to teach legal rules but to help students practice civic discourse in a way that meets the Tinker standard.

“What we’re spending a lot of time doing in class,” Hawkins said, “is trying to make sure that students feel confident that they can express a position that is maybe different from the mainstream in a way that is not disruptive.”

Tinker echoed that idea by sharing how unprepared she felt as a teenager thrown into conflict with administrators.

“I was so nervous and scared, I was the shyest kid you could imagine,” Tinker said. “You can be nervous. You can be scared. And you can still find something to do to speak up.”

Student press rights in Illinois and what’s still missing

For student journalists, the line between protected speech and censored speech often comes down to whether a publication is considered school-sponsored—the key issue in Hazelwood, the 1988 Supreme Court decision that expanded administrators’ authority to control school-sponsored student media.

Illinois law is different. In 2016, the state passed the Speech Rights of Student Journalists Act, a New Voices law intended to limit censorship and protect student editors’ control over content when they meet journalism standards.

But advocates and educators point to a gap: adviser protections.

Student press advocates note that while Illinois provides protections for student journalists, advisers can still be vulnerable to retaliation for refusing to censor student work.

A proposal in the Illinois General Assembly, HB2932, would amend the Speech Rights of Student Journalists Act to strengthen enforcement and add protections for student media advisers, including language that would prohibit retaliation for refusing to infringe on protected student expression.

Hawkins said understanding rights matters most before a crisis hits.

“I think that most of the time you care the most when your rights are taken away from you,” Hawkins said. “I think that in a society where we don’t know the rights that we have, then it is more possible for those rights to be taken away.”

Why it feels current now

Tinker urged students to connect the case to current events—not as a history lesson, but as a reminder that rights depend on people willing to insist on them, even when the topic is controversial.

“I was reading an article today about how there’s another process you can invoke at the Supreme Court,” Tinker said, referring to emergency actions. She described how institutions beyond schools can face pressure to back away from difficult conversations, and she challenged students to keep learning what the First Amendment protects.

Hawkins said school can be one of the few places where adults can help students learn how to navigate disagreement without shutting it down.

“What we can do as adults in schools,” Hawkins said, “is something that people don’t have outside of school. We can help mediate what reasoned discourse looks like, and we can help kids know where to go, to sort out their opinions.”

At the same time, Hawkins said social change does not always arrive quietly.

“As a social studies teacher, I also realized that a lot of times social change happens because of disruption,” Hawkins said. “If everyone was OK with the way things are, then things stay the way they are.”

Tinker’s story—a protest that began with a strip of black cloth and ended with a Supreme Court ruling on Feb. 24, 1969—remains a reminder that students’ rights are real, but not self-enforcing.

And as student journalists mark a week focused on pressure, censorship and resilience, Hawkins said the underlying lesson of the Tinker anniversary is bigger than one case.

“Knowing what rights we have, and even if my rights personally are not violated, I’m invested in my community,” Hawkins said. “I want to make sure that other people’s rights are protected, too.”