Uniforms not a cure for schools' ills

National Catholic Reporter, March 29, 1996 by Colman McCarthy

School uniforms: Get 'em on, I've heard myself thinking, especially those mornings when many in my public high school class of 42 seniors are garbed in studied grunge -- baggy pants, T-shirts and baseball hats backward. Those are the well-dressed.

Then the fantasy behind the idea that kids in uniforms would be. Those teachable, more disciplined and less violent fades.

Why? Because my students' arguments against uniforms are more reasoned and persuasive than President Clinton's in favor. He believes that gun-play among kids will decline if uniforms are required. "Discipline and learning" will come back to schools.

Clinton was impressed by the uniformed boys and girls in a Long Beach, Calif., school he visited recently. He beheld look-alike kids and was told by think-alike administrators that since a dress code was imposed two years ago, suspensions, fights, robberies and the rest are down. The Department of Education has bought in by sending manuals to the nation's 16,000 school districts on how to suit up the kids.

I haven't noticed a rush to ask students for their views. Unless kids are seen as robots or inmates unworthy of consulting, their thinking might be revealing. It was for me.

Some in my class spoke experientially. They had been to private or schools where uniforms were required. "Everyone hated it," said a 17-year-old senior girl. "It completely killed any sense of individuality any one of us had. Everyone looked the same. It was sad to watch."

Another: "I have been in a private school with a uniform and a public school without. I didn't learn any better in a uniform than I do now."

One of the civil libertarians in the class saw school uniforms as a First Amendment free-speech issue' a view likely to be advanced eventually in the courts. "I am not saying," he wrote, "that every student's wardrobe contains some message, but some do. A very important and underrated part of high school and college is the development of a student's personality, Forcing a student to conform to a uniform mandated from high above would stunt this part of a student's growth."

Few in the class were persuaded that more uniforms equal less violence. Nearly every student saw the president's call as either a hokey solution or an example of political naivete about the true depths of violence in American culture.

"How can uniforms put an end to the violence that plagues our schools?" asked one. "Simply put, they cannot. Until drugs stop being dealt in schools, the violence will not end. Until students have constructive outlets to spend their free time, the violence will not end. Until students are taught from a young age alternate solutions to violence, the violence will not end."

Insufficient evidence has been gathered to document the case for uniforms. The two-year Long Beach experiment -- one school district out of 16,000 -- is not enough. Killings overjackets and sneakers have occurred. But the numbers are anecdotal, when at the same time those closest to the gore offer other explanations than clothing envy.

Officials at the New York University School of Social Work's Institute Against Violence wrote recently in The New York Times: 'Our research on New York City teenagers and the research of many other social scientists reveals that the primary cause of adolescent violence is "a history of victimization. Youths who are victims of violence eventually come around the cycle of violence as victimizers."

What the NYU social scientists know, so also do any students. "If a person is going to be violent," wrote one, "a uniform can't stop that. That's the kind of person they are and just because you make them dress like everyone else, the violent streak in their personality won't disappear."

Proven solutions are known: early childhood intervention, mentoring, literacy programs, teaching conflict resolution beginning in first grade, counseling for parents in abusive marriages, funding for drug treatment, discipline-minded teachers and principals.

These are comprehensive efforts based on moral codes, not dress codes.