Is it illegal for a teacher to force her students to change their facebook statuses?

[derka]

My son's middle school teacher forced all of her students, including my son, to log into their facebooks profiles and correct their status updates to be grammatically correct. She followed this by posting on her on page "My grammar lesson with my students this week was to correct some atrocious Facebook statuses. I am brilliant, I know. They HATED it so much. I am instilling in them a deep animosity for poor grammar in hopes that they'll realize how stupid it looks and stop doing it." While I wholeheartedly agree with teaching our children good grammar, I feel this is a violation of my son's privacy and was wondering if what the teacher did was legal?

[mark s.]

It was not legal

[krissa]

I don't know exactly If its illegal as much as it is psychotic! I think you should just go to your sons school and talk to his principal about it. Im sure they'll either have an explanation or they'll have a nice chat with her (:

[Jessica]

Idk if it's legal or not, but a teacher recently got in trouble for a situation where she posted pictures of her student's grades on a test on Facebook and was talking about how stupid they were and all this and all that. That's somewhat similar to your situation. I'd take it to the principal. If it's not illegal by law, it should certainly be punishable by the school.

[Mike]

No. There was no breach of privacy. There was no violation of rights.
It sounds to me, the Teacher said to students "open up your facebooks" and then had them look at posts to find grammar errors and then correct them. Nothing wrong with going on facebook, and finding grammer errors then posting grammatically correct.
The teacher's post was nothing too bad, just saying how much she likes grammar, and how she hates it, being ignored on social media sites.
She was teaching them a lesson, that even though there online to still use grammar, and proper writing techniques.
Also she did not "force" students to open up their facebook page, any student could have said "I don't have one" Or "I'm not comfortable logging in at school".
You can however make a complaint to the school, that the teacher allowed students to access social media website during class. More than likely that is against school policy.

[Jennifer]

It is a violation to their privacy, you should probably address this issue to the school administrators. Or probably have your son unfriend his teacher

[Tyler]

Idk if its illegal but I'm pretty sure she can get in trouble with her boss. I'd say something to the other parents and all go to the superintendent. If it were my kid id be pretty upset. She can't force someone to change their Facebook status as a school assignment

[gregory]

The best alternative is to have your son create a second Facebook account specifically for that class.

Your son legally cannot be required to use Facebook for any purpose within public school because he is required to agree to Facebook's Terms of Service in order to use Facebook and his participation in that school is required by law; therefore, if he is forced to agree to the Facebooks ToS as part of mandatory schooling or punished in any way for failing to do so, it is illegal.

[Scott]

you DO have a point, but I think it(what she is alleged to do /be doing for "her lesson" ) would be a really controversial debate which in turn would raise awareness, (possibly terminating her job by the Tactics shes trying to impose), but Her point (maybe she had to take drastic steps to make her Student's realize just how dumb some of her students " stats were spelled/done to raise their awareness of their PUBLIC profiles on FB) tho the "tactics" employed to make her "lesson" clear, another question for another great debate( and possibly getting notice to a termination and loosing a job and a School a teacher) ... if That is WHAT she posted on HER facebook page , I feel sorry for her cause she sounds like shes egotistical and a literary COP... stating shes Brillant QUOTE she knows unquote, that maybe after School, looks at her students PUBLIC profiles on Face book, but who KNOWS maybe shes just concerned and teaching her Kids Thur a social media and everyone now a days has a FB page, but I also would think... isn't THAT strange? and also the point you brought up ,,, a privacy concern, but the privacy concern, its in FB policy, what you post , it the accounts owner responsible for its content that's displayed publicly (or not) facebook does have that little hide button, I'd definitely bring my concerns to the Principal(s) office

[Who Is John Galt?]

Most school districts have a policy similar to "Synchronous and Asynchronous Online Communication and Social Networking Applications: Student users shall not access or use online synchronous or asynchronous communication applications such as e-mail, chat, blogs, wikis or social networking Web site functions (i.e., discussion threads, document posting, RSS feeds, etc.) while at school." So while it was probably not illegal or really a violation of privacy (per Facebook's TOS) it was definitely not ethical and was most likely in violation of the policies in place for your school district.