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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 informing him that Rebecca had our permission to “opt out.”

 

This of course provoked a phone call from the principal who wanted to know why and by what right we were opting out.  When we informed him that as to right it was guaranteed by law he tried to argue that, even though all of the literature referred to the new policy as a school uniform policy it was in fact just a more restrictive dress code and thus not covered by the law.  After we rejected that argument out of hand the principal tried to argue the rationale for the policy.  Now I was all in favor of a reasoned discussion about the policy and at one point during the year had my daughter write up her case for not wearing uniforms and suggested to her and the principal that they get together and discuss her reasons.  That meeting turned out to be a disaster, as the principal couldn’t actually bring himself to try and understand the view of a thirteen year old. 

 

1. Finally, whatever the reason, the statistical evidence from Long Beach showed that uniforms work so a theory of causality was unnecessary.

 

Before I start countering these arguments let me say that I’ve never felt very passionate about the school uniform issue itself.  My main interest is in understanding what  policies like the school uniform policy say about the values and objectives of their creators and the reasons behind the uncritical acceptance of these policies by the public at large.  My concern is not with this particular policy which I view as mostly benign, if silly, but that the point of view it represents and the inability of many to see the potential problems with this point of view will and in fact has lead to the creation of policies which are genuinely harmful to students and therefore to the future of our society.

 

Let’s start with the notion that uniforms foster unity.  My interpretation of unity is a belief among those that are unified in a common set of goals and a particular set of actions for achieving those goals.  Now unity in itself is not necessarily a good thing.  Sometimes, as in the creation of the American democracy it is clearly good, and other times as in the unity to subjugate and annihilate other cultures and races it is clearly a bad thing.  After all, the members of a lynch mob are united in their goal.  So what kind of unity will requiring students to wear uniforms foster?  One kind of unity I could imagine arising is the unity of the oppressed.  One could imagine students saying, “No matter our ethnic, cultural, social or class differences we can agree that we hate being made to wear these uniforms and we hate those who make us wear them!”  That would certainly represent a unity of values that might lead to a unity of actions but that probably isn’t the kind of unity the author’s of this policy intended to foster. 

 

So let’s work backwards and imagine what form of unity the authors wanted to achieve.  One assumes that since the authors are educators the unity they desire in the students is a common belief in the value of education and a commitment to becoming educated by working hard in their classes.  I have no argument with such a goal but by what logic or even superstition do you connect being required to wear a uniform to a belief in the value of education?  No matter how I approach the question I am unable to see how uniforms could promote any positive form of unity at all.

 

I conclude that what’s actually meant by the slogan is not that uniforms promote unity but rather a lack of uniforms promotes disunity.  The theory would be that differences in attire emphasize our ethnic, cultural, social, and class differences and therefore make it hard for students to be unified.  But again, by what logic or superstition does one connect the existence or non-existence of differences, superficial or otherwise, with others with my belief in the value of education and commitment to working hard in my classes?  Worse, what message are we sending students by implying that there is some connection?  Are we telling them that people with differences can’t all become educated? 

 

Let’s move on to the value of eliminating superficial distinctions.  What value could this have?  Perhaps we are trying to convince students that clothes do not make the man by placing the students in an environment where everyone is clothed the same.  We can view this as a kind of experiment that will allow the students to observe first hand that clothes don’t matter.  But what is the connection between an experiment in which all students dress the same and the hypothesis that clothes don’t matter?  All the experiment could possibly demonstrate is the tautology that clothes don’t matter in an environment in which clothes are constrained to be constant.  It seems to me that if we want to get the clothes don’t matter message across students should be placed in an environment where they can observe for themselves that arbitrarily well-dressed individuals can be arbitrarily ignorant and stupid.  I was certainly able to observe that in my public school education.

 

Perhaps the uniform proponents believe that clothes actually do matter but want to provide a nurturing environment in which they don’t.  We might be concerned with the impoverished student whose self-image and hence his ability to function equally in class is negatively effected by his lack of nice clothes.  Wouldn’t uniforms level the playing field for him?  To this question I will apply a little “economic theory” along with observational data from a teacher I know.  The little bit of economic theory (stated imprecisely) is that decreasing the options available to a consumer can only increase his costs.  Where the impoverished student before the uniform policy could choose from a variety clothing sources including hand-me-downs, thrift stores, discount stores, and a variety of styles for achieving respectability at a lower cost, he is now restricted to the available supply of uniforms.  These cost more than the clothes he would buy or receive otherwise so he’s forced to buy fewer of them.  The result is that his uniforms (of which he may have only one) are worn more frequently and replaced far less frequently if at all than the clothes he would have worn had there not been a uniform policy.  The result is, as borne out by teacher observation, that the uniforms of genuinely poor kids are generally far dirtier and in far worse overall condition than uniforms of other children.  In schools with a uniform policy there is absolutely no difficulty distinguishing haves with their fresh clean new uniforms from have-nots with their old dirty damaged uniforms.  True, some school districts have organized donations or provided public monies to subsidize uniform purchases for poor students.  (I don’t remember but this may even be a requirement under the uniform law.)  But by the same economic argument, clothing supplements for poor children could be used more effectively to buy clothes in an environment where they are not so restricted with respect to products and sources.  Uniforms can only make matters worse for poor children.

 

What about the stories of kids being murdered for their jackets or sneakers?  Won’t uniforms prevent these tragedies?  The flaw in this theory is that if students want to wear or carry expensive objects in an environment where children will kill for expensive objects they will always be able to find ways of doing so that are consistent with any uniform law.  Rolex watches, expensive jewelry, computers etc. and in fact sneakers and jackets are consistent with the uniform policies in our district.  It seems to me that we can assume that students are not anxious to be killed and so the real solution here is to educate students and their parents about the risk of wearing expensive objects in an environment in which people will kill for such objects.  There’s little else you can do except when you observe students at risk because they carry such items, send them home on the basis that you cannot guarantee their safety as long as they are carrying those items.  You don’t need a uniform policy to do that. 

 

The last point applies as well to the wearing of gang colors.  Everyone knows what the gang colors look like.  If you see gang colors on some kid you send him home on the basis that his attire is likely to provoke violence and so puts him and others at risk.  Again you don’t need a uniform policy for this.  (It would be quite a pleasant surprise for everyone I think if a gang member contacted the ACLU and tried to make an argument for his constitutional right to fly his colors.  Unfortunately it won’t happen.)  Now of course keeping gang colors out of school doesn’t actually address the problem of gangs.  I find it hard to imagine a kid deciding not to join a gang on the basis that wearing colors would violate school policy.  (“Dear Gang Leader:  I want to express my sincere appreciation for the opportunity to join your excellent gang.  However I must decline because the uniforms of my school are inconsistent with gang colors.”) 

 

 I would think that one of the strongest reasons for not joining a gang is a natural desire not to be bossed around.  As I understand it, gangs are strictly hierarchical.  The gang leader tells members what to do and how to do it and also what to wear.  So it would seem likely that encouraging individuality would strengthen a young person’s resistance to joining a gang.  (“Who the blank is this moron to tell me what to do?”)  In establishing a uniform policy the school seems to be discouraging individuality.  In this sense, other than the types of activities in which the groups engage, there doesn’t seem to be much difference between the policy of the gang and the policy of the school.

 

1. Choices that come to mind include chatting with friends, hair styling, putting on makeup and jewelry, downloading and listening to music, video games, the Internet, drugs and sex.

 

The theory that uniforms make students indistinguishable preventing teachers from discriminating against students was articulated by my daughter’s principal.  I confess that this argument leaves me almost speechless.  Is it really the case that discrimination by teachers against students is a wide spread problem?  Are uniforms such an effective camouflage and/or are teachers so blind that even after a few weeks of seeing students almost every day they are unable to find ways of distinguishing them?  Isn’t it sometimes useful for teachers to be able to distinguish one student from another?  Should we extend the uniform policy to require students to wear masks and speak through speech distorters?

 

The final argument in support of uniforms given earlier is that empirical data from Long Beach shows they work.  I have two basic concerns with this argument.  My first concern is about the ethics of a pure trial and error approach to improving schools.  This implies an approach in which we set up experiments without theoretical foundation and apply them to living human beings without their consent.  Having decided that uniforms are good should we now start a series of experiments varying attire to see if we can do better?  Perhaps we put all students in Bermuda shorts.  What would be the effects of making students cross-dress?  Should we try an all-nude school? 

 

My second concern is scientific.  In being the first to go out on a limb and require school uniforms Long Beach clearly had a vested interest in finding success in their statistics in the same way that the Cold Fusion folks wanted to find free neutrons in their experiments.  This is a well-known phenomenon in science and accounted for by peer review and the requirement of repeatability by unbiased observers.  Any kind of science is difficult and science based on analysis of statistical data is particularly prone to error.  Are we confident in the Long Beach data?

Apparently not.  A search on the Internet turned up The Effects of Student Uniforms on Attendance, Behavior Problems, Substance Use, and Academic Achievement by David L. Brunsma and Kerry A. Rockquemore from the Department of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame.   (See http://www.cprlafayette.com/study.htm.)  I ask forgiveness for my prejudice, but when I saw this link I assumed that a study of school uniforms done at a Catholic university would be biased in favor of uniforms.  This was not at all the case. 

The paper begins with the following, to my mind, strange declaration.

 

1. This is a true and high-level research study based on accepted scientific research methods.  It has been done in a manner so as to minimize bias on the part of the researchers thereby providing an objective finding.
2. We have not been able to find an opposing study to match this level of study.
3. Many studies, including the infamous Long Beach (a school district WITHOUT UNIFORMS for high school and an OPT-OUT for all others) study, have been referenced concerning the benefits of school uniforms, however they are based more on conjecture than scientific research – we can find none which follow even the most rudimentary elements of a scientific research study.
4. We are open to anyone who can find one and send it to us.

 

“A valid research design tests what it is supposed to test and is concerned with whether the concepts being investigated are actually the ones being measured or tested.”  (Research Methods – A process of Inquiry 3rd Edition Graziano/Raulin)

I’ve never before seen a scientific study that felt compelled to state explicitly that it had used scientific methods rather than something else (superstition?).  Apparently the field is so cluttered with garbage that the authors felt that this statement was necessary.

As to their conclusions, the abstract says:

Recent discourse on public school reform has focused on mandatory uniform policies. Proponents of such reform measures emphasize the benefits of student uniforms on specific behavioral and academic outcomes. This research empirically tests the claims made by uniform advocates using 10th grade data from The National Educational Longitudinal Study of 1988. Our findings indicate that student uniforms have no direct effect on substance use, behavioral problems or attendance.  A negative effect of uniforms on student academic achievement was found.  These findings are contrary to current discourse on school uniforms.  We conclude that uniform policies may indirectly affect school environment and student outcomes by providing a visible and public symbol of commitment to school improvement and reform.

1. So the cost-benefit analysis winds up at least slightly positive and so let’s give them a try.

If this last statement seems correct to you, please think about it again.  In particular is there some piece missing from our cost-benefit analysis?  In management lingo, is there some stakeholder whose interests haven’t been accounted for?  How about the students?  Do they have any rights?  Do their interests and feelings on the matter count for anything?  Does anyone believe that if given complete freedom of choice the students would have opted for a school uniform requirement?  I think this failure to accord students any significant rights or status with regard to their own lives and education is the most harmful feature of this kind of policy.  We’re basically telling students: We’ll tell you what to do, when to do it, and even what to wear while you’re doing it.  You just sit down, shut up, and get educated! 

I’m not arguing against structured education.  Obviously young children are not capable of taking control of their own lives and education.  But as they mature we should steadily relax that structure and encourage the point of view that education is ultimately the responsibility of the student.  The more control we give students over the process the more likely they are to become an active participant in seeking an education.  The more control we take away from a student, the more we push him into becoming a passive or even unwilling participant.  Any constraints we have to impose should be viewed as necessary evils.  We mustn’t impose constraints arbitrarily believing that “well they can’t hurt.”

If logic and science don’t support a policy like school uniforms why is it so popular and what was the motivation behind creating it?   I believe that the motivation for the school uniform policy as well as many others lies in a form of superstition called sympathetic magic.  The idea of sympathetic magic is that in order to create phenomenon A you create a phenomenon B which is similar to A in some respect with the expectation that A will come into existence through some kind of resonance with B, like sympathetic vibrations in strings and other vibrating objects.  Primitive peoples for example try to induce rain by sprinkling water or some other liquid on the ground or by making the sky appear cloudy with smoke or dust.  This is surely the idea behind the theory that uniforms create unity of purpose – that wearing the same clothes will somehow cause people to be alike in other respects. 

One of the forms of sympathetic magic postulates reverse causality: If the occurrence of A causes B then by creating B I will through reverse causality bring A into being.  Conditions for rain cause the sky to be cloudy so making the sky “cloudy” will bring about rain; Rain causes the ground to become wet so making the ground wet will create rain.  I believe that at heart uniform advocates are attempting to create a set of attitudes and values in our children, which would cause them to want to wear uniforms through reverse causality by making them wear uniforms.

So what kind of mental state are uniform advocates trying to create in our children?  Whatever it is one can assume that it’s uniform across all children.  It’s a state that revels in conformity.  It is uncomfortable with individuality and differences of any sort.  It is accepting of conventional views and group decisions without critical analysis, as critical analysis would imply at least the possibility of disagreement and therefore non-uniform behavior.  These ideal students are a school administrator’s dream.  They are without will and without spine.  This is not a new ideal.  In The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man, Marshall McLuhan described the educational ideal circa 1950 as follows:

“Our educational process is necessarily geared to eliminate all bone.  The supple, well-adjusted man is the one who has learned to hop into the meat grinder while humming a hit-parade tune.  Individual resistance to that process is labeled as destructive and uncooperative.”

McLuhan’s 1950 comparison of education to meat grinding strikes me as particularly apt today.  In recent years executives, mostly retired, from the business community have become quite actively involved in education reform.  These executives almost invariably see the value in applying modern industrial processes and operations research to improving the efficiency and quality of education.  In order to scale to high volumes these processes depend on uniformity, predictability, and measurability.  Quality is the result of applying uniform processing methods to uniform materials along with constant monitoring according to strictly defined metrics.  In an education setting this implies a need for uniformity in the student populations and for strict control and measurement of teaching methods.  This point of view is inconsistent with the notion of an autonomous material taking responsibility for its own manufacture.  Such a material might choose unprescribed methods with goals, which might not fit within the domain of the metrics used to measure progress.

My own feeling is that the business executives promoting this point of view are considerably behind the times.  Human material is ridiculously inefficient as a basis for the kinds of components these programs seem to be trying to create.  We already have much better materials based on silicon for example.  The reliability of silicon and silicon controlled devices in conforming to predicted behavior is many orders of magnitude greater than that of human beings.  These devices can be cheaply constructed and operated in whatever quantities are desired.  Further, the complexity of behaviors of which these devices are capable include all of the kinds of problems involving restricted domains and little or no creative analysis that fall within the domain of the metrics which are driving process improvement in education.  In short, the products of this kind of educational process are more than likely to be obsolete before they’re even completed.

Human beings who are going to be useful in the present and future need to be just the opposite of uniform and predictable.  Where human beings excel is in the creative and unpredictable.  A system that encourages uniformity and blind acceptance of arbitrary policies de-emphasizes exactly the kinds of mental faculties our children and our society will need to survive.

My daughter ultimately survived her year of rebellion though I don’t believe she was unscathed.  She certainly suffered various forms of harassment from teachers, administrators, and students alike.  Her non-conformity seemed to be a point of obsession at the school.  Strangely enough the harassment only increased as the year went on and climaxed at the very end of the year.  After whatever harm or good my daughter’s nonconformity could have caused was over the principal decided on one final attack.  He would not let her appear in her class graduation picture without a uniform – a policy clearly in violation of the California school uniform law.  I will not go into the gory details of what followed, as they do not speak well of my intelligence.  Suffice it to say that my daughter did appear in her class picture though her father was arrested for disturbing the peace at a school!  Recently the principal was removed from the school as a consequence of his students failing to progress sufficiently relative to another piece of idiocy called the California Academic Performance Index.  I almost felt sorry for him.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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