Dressed to Shill

In his 1996 State of the Union address, Bill Clinton challenged “all our schools to teach character education, to teach good values and good citizenship. And if it means that teenagers will stop killing each other over designer jackets, then our public schools should be able to require their students to wear school uniforms.” His remark lit a fire under an incipient movement promoting required uniforms for students in public schools, and a decade later, Nashville’s public school system is thinking seriously about jumping on board.

In two weeks, the Metro school board will get a final report and recommendation from a committee created to explore a “standard school attire” policy. “Standard school attire” (SSA) is a euphemism for requiring kids to go to school dressed like stockbrokers having a weekend lunch at the club (khaki pants or skirts, collared polo shirts, that sort of thing).

This is the second time in less than a year that Metro schools director Pedro Garcia has put a proposal for cosmetic reform in front of the school board by enlisting a friendly study committee to generate a proposal. Last fall it was an overhaul of the school calendar—a loopy idea that the school board rejected after it became apparent that there was dubious community backing for it and virtually no research support for its benefits. The research evidence on SSA is no more convincing.

Advocates of school uniforms point to a number of potential benefits: achievement gains, less violence, reduced behavior problems, heightened school pride, increased attendance, decreased substance abuse, more student preparedness, less gang activity, increased student self-esteem and maybe even a halt to global warming. They see uniforms as a way to reassume control of learning environments that currently put kids at risk, both academically and as a matter of safety.

At least that’s the theory. And it’s a nice theory, but unlike other nice theories—such as, say, evolution, gravity and global warming—there’s almost no hard evidence for this one. Arguments for the virtues of school uniforms turn out to be mostly anecdotal and speculative. A school system somewhere mandates uniforms, some people involved in the system make animated pronouncements about how well it all seems to be going, and voila!—anecdotal evidence that uniforms work.

One such piece of “evidence” that gets a lot of airtime is the case of Long Beach, Calif., which in 1994 became the first large urban public school system in the U.S. to require uniforms in kindergarten through eighth grade. Uniform enthusiasts regularly mention Long Beach as a success story: within a few years after requiring school uniforms in grades K through 8, school violence was markedly down and attendance was way up.

School uniform opponents say that the improvements there weren’t necessarily a result of the new attire policy. Other significant school reforms were introduced in Long Beach at the same time, including a major grant devoted to alternative teaching strategies and a broad reassessment of academic content standards. It is unlikely, skeptics say, that uniforms were the sole factor, or even the main factor, for the improvements.

With the Long Beach experiment getting a lot of buzz, Bill Clinton’s 1996 comment prompted a mini-movement around public school dress codes. Some experts started to wonder if there were any actual evidence to justify the enthusiasm. David Brunsma, a sociologist now working at the University of Missouri, decided to study the issue after reading about Clinton’s remark.

In 1998, Brunsma and his colleague Kerry Ann Rockquemore published in the Journal of Educational Research a widely cited study of school uniforms using a nationally representative dataset and focusing on 10th graders. They looked at possible links between uniforms and several outcomes that uniform boosters point to: attendance, behavior problems, substance abuse and academic achievement.

The connections they found? None. Zilch. But there was one notable finding: students who were required to wear uniforms showed an almost 3-point decline (yes, decline) in standardized test scores. Subsequent analyses piled on the (lack of) evidence: no significant effects whatsoever for school uniforms on school climate, student achievement or attendance outcomes in grades 10, 8 and kindergarten.

Brunsma’s interest in the subject culminated in a 2004 book, The School Uniform Movement and What it Tells Us About American Education, in which he observes that the number of schools with mandatory uniform policies is 15 times what it was in the 1980s, with the drive to put kids in uniforms focused on disadvantaged and minority schools and districts. Brunsma insists that the push for uniforms is “rooted in pure speculation, without any scientific evidence to support anecdotal arguments for its effectiveness.”

Opponents of uniforms aren’t against it just because there’s no evidence for it; they also worry about issues of rights, class and money. How does enforced conformity in student attire, they wonder, cultivate the kind of individualism and creativity that are the hallmarks of an educated person? There are also concerns about student rights to free expression. While there is little doubt that reasonable public school dress codes can pass constitutional muster, such policies risk legal challenges if they don’t offer parents the opportunity to seek exemptions on religious grounds. Some school districts (including Long Beach) let kids opt out of the uniform requirements with parental consent regardless of the reason.