Uniformity through Uniforms: One parent’s experience with school uniforms
Uniformity through Uniforms: One parent’s experience with school uniforms
Uniformity Through Uniforms
by
Dave Posner
My friends, we’ve got trouble. That’s trouble with a capital T which rhymes with P and E and stands for Public Education! When it came to flim flammery, Harold Hill had nothing over Bill Clinton. During the ’96 campaign Bill found the perfect solution to whatever’s wrong with our public schools: school uniforms! We put every Johnny and Sally in a school uniform and by magic discipline problems go away and test scores go up. And it doesn’t cost taxpayers a dime! As a campaign issue it was perfect. In addition to costing nothing, the only people who might object to it, the students, couldn’t vote. And it was just obvious that what kids needed was discipline and what better model of discipline than the army and soldiers wear uniforms as do prisoners and members of juvenile gangs. I don’t want to imply that Clinton didn’t believe in the idea – all good salesmen believe their own spiels. After helping him win the election, Clinton made school uniforms a central proposal in his state of the union address.
My own involvement with school uniforms actually predated Clinton’s epiphany. The school uniforms “movement” began in Long Beach California in 1994. With great fanfare the Long Beach school district rolled out its prime weapon in the war on truancy, delinquency, and poor academic achievement. Using statistics and computers the creators of the school uniform policy were able to demonstrate profound reductions in rates of truancy, violence, sexual harassment and strong anecdotal evidence that students were far more focused and content as a consequence of wearing uniforms. Not since the discovery of Cold Fusion had such powerful scientific evidence for a phenomenon been presented. No one was quite sure how it worked but surely the panacea for our educational ills had been found.
In the light of such powerful evidence, our school district in San Jose California could not act otherwise than to join the school uniform cause the very next year. Our slogan was Unity Through Uniforms! The new policy applied to the elementary (first through fifth grades) and middle (sixth through eighth grades) schools in the Alum Rock Unified School District. Alum Rock has for quite some time been one of the poorest achieving school districts in California. It is also one of the most impoverished districts – 80% our students are eligible for free lunch – with a large population of non-English speaking families and transient students. The district also has a long history of contentious boards – in just one incident one of the board members was charged with assault for trying to run over another board member – rapid turnover in policies and personnel – I don’t remember the last superintendent who completed his contract – and extreme mismanagement of resources including embezzlement and huge deficits caused by spending on unused technology and an absurd amount of administrative overhead. Given the magnitude of its problems it’s perhaps not surprising that the district is easy prey for whatever kind of snake oil salesman happens to come around. One year it was year-round schools, this year it’s “small schools” and open court, and in 1995 it was school uniforms.
In 1995 my third child, Rebecca, was a returning eighth grader in the district. During the summer we had received a letter informing us that our daughter would have to comply with a new school uniform policy. Now I must confess that all my children, and especially Rebecca, have a hard time conforming to ad hoc constraints. This is undoubtedly the fault of their parents. Rebecca couldn’t understand why she was being required to wear a uniform and therefore vowed to defy the order. I was personally ambivalent about the issue but was unable to come up with a convincing argument for why she should conform to the policy other than you’ll get in trouble if you don’t.
My second child, who was in high school at the time, had obtained an ACLU brochure explaining student rights in general and student rights with respect to school uniforms in particular. Among other things the brochure explained that the California law authorizing school uniforms in public schools specified that with parental consent students had the right to opt out of the uniform policy without any effect on their rights and privileges. The law further stated that the districts implementing a school uniform policy were required to inform parents and students of their right to opt-out. None of the literature we had received from the school had mentioned these rights – a fact in itself which raised our ire. This combined with our failure to see any valid rationale for the school uniform policy led us to send a letter to the school principal