If you really want to know what’s wrong with Pittsburgh Public Schools (PPS) in a nutshell, one need look no further than to the unanimous action of the district’s school board last month.
In a 7-0 vote on Jan. 25, the Post-Gazette reports the board of education voted to retain not one but two outside law firms to sue the likes of Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok to recover what it claims are the additional costs the district incurs for the social media platforms’ alleged effects on PPS students – from “therapies” to “learning loss” and from “counseling” to “other mental health services.”
“The Pittsburgh school district follows the lead of the Seattle school district, which earlier [in January] filed a complaint against social media companies,” the P-G reports.
“The [Seattle] lawsuit blames social media websites for worsening students’ mental health and behavioral disorders,” the story continues. “The 91-page complaint says from 2009 to 2019, there was on average a 30 percent increase in the number of Seattle Public Schools students feeling ‘so sad or hopeless almost every day for two weeks or more in a row that [they] stopped doing some usual activities.’”
In the PPS case, the outside law firms, from Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, respectively, reportedly will cover all upfront costs. That, we can only suppose, in advance of some hoped-for big settlement and/or court-imposed judgment. PPS board Solicitor Ira Weiss says he’s on board with the lawsuit.
More’s the pity. For not all legal experts are, as Julian Shen-Berro reported last month on the Seattle lawsuit and another filed in Washington State for the “essential education reporting” webzine Chalkbeat.
Fordham University education law professor Aaron Saiger told him “It is not a winning lawsuit and it shouldn’t be.”
It’s a point of order joined by Eric Goldman, a technology and marketing law professor at Santa Clara University, who told Chalkboard that what social media sites do is a common marketing strategy that doesn’t make a compelling case for legal liability.
“A lot of product marketers would love to addict their customers and do everything in their power to do so — that’s called product marketing,” Goldman told the news outlet. “We don’t hold many services or products liable for addicting customers.”
It’s akin to holding casinos liable for gambling addictions, he told Chalkboard.
Back to Fordham’s Saiger, who questions whether school districts even have standing in such matters.
“It’s a very long causation chain, and I don’t think the courts will be inclined to let the school district pursue it,” he told Chalkboard.
“To say, ‘We’re service providers to children whose mental health is affected by thousands of things, and we picked you,’ strikes me as a very attenuated way to understand liability under the nuisance law. …
“I would assume the [Seattle School District] case is going to fail,” he said.
The assumption should be no different for the Pittsburgh lawsuit and, we can only imagine, countless others coming down the pike.
Grabbing at straws as dollars signs roll across your eyeballs is poor public policy.
Instead of worrying about a lawsuit that it likely can’t win, Pittsburgh Public Schools should be more worried about some astute parent, or a group of parents, securing a lawyer, or lawyers, to file suit against PPS for failing, for years, to educate a large swath of students after being forced to pay an incredibly high per student taxing premium to do so.
Quite frankly, we’re surprised that hasn’t happened yet.
As Jake Haulk, president-emeritus of the Allegheny Institute (and who has chronicled the utter and repeated failures of Pittsburgh Public Schools for years), sees the PPS lawsuit:
“They have to blame someone. Looking in the mirror is too horrifying to even contemplate.”
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
