Offering frequent news and analysis from the majestic Evergreen State and beyond, The Cascadia Advocate is the Northwest Progressive Institute's unconventional perspective on world, national, and local politics.

Sunday, August 15, 2010

Letters, we get letters...

We get our share of unusual or strange letters here at NPI. Every so often, I like to publish particular missives that are quirky or amusing, just for fun. Here's such a message that we received only a few days ago:
I would like to have the voters approve that kids in school will wear uniforms.

All of the kids will feel equal. I am not usally a proponent of things like this, but the more kids worry about what they are wearing, the less that they are likely to work for an education. This should not be about who can wear the coolest clothes. I don't care if the stores make any money on school clothes. This should be about education!

Let's let them worry more about things that count, like their grades, and graduating from High School, and moving on to college.

I am tired of seeing kids that have to worry about how 'hip their clothes should be. Clothes should not be an issue, so when they wear things like each other, they will be more equal.

If they wear much the same clothing, the less they worry, and then, they can use their potential towards better grades, and a better life for themselves, and those around them.

Thank you for listening.
The person who sent this message was evidently under the impression that we're a conservative organization, rather than a progressive one.

(Oddly enough, this happens more often than you might think. It's amazing how illiterate many people are, especially right wingers who think having a university education makes a person stuck-up and elitist.)

There is no credible evidence that forcing students to wear uniforms increases academic performance, brings about desired changes in behavior, or makes "all of the kids [...] feel equal", as the author of this letter stridently asserted.

Research has simply yielded a different conclusion.

In a paper on the subject, written for the University of Notre Dame more than a decade ago, David L. Brunsma and Kerry A. Rockquemore found that mandatory uniforms have only a cosmetic effect:
Instituting a mandatory uniform policy is a change which is immediate, highly visible, and shifts the environmental landscape of any particular school. This change is one that is superficial, but attracts attention because of its visible nature. Instituting a uniform policy can be viewed as analogous to cleaning and brightly painting a deteriorating building in that on the one hand, it grabs our immediate attention but on the other, is, after all, really only a coat of paint.
The biggest problem we have with the idea of requiring students to wear uniforms, however, has nothing to do with effectiveness and everything to do with freedom of expression. Freedom of expression is part of our freedom to speak freely, which is guaranteed by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. As proponents of youth empowerment, we strongly oppose policies that prevent students from exercising their First Amendment rights.

Furthermore, as advocates of unconventional thinking, we reject what school uniforms represent: rigidity and conformity. As longtime readers know, we have our own "Washington Progressive Blogroll" summer t-shirt tradition, essentially a wearable guide to the blogs that comprise our local netroots community.

Part of the reason we've kept this tradition alive is so that we can give ourselves and other netroots activists something to wear that wasn't designed and marketed by Madison Street. It's a way we can exercise our right to free speech.

Nobody should dictate to students what they can wear when they go to school. That's not to say schools can't have a reasonable dress code, but administrators should not have the power to insist that students wear a particular outfit each and every day. The only "voters" who should have the option of adopting such a policy are the students themselves. Put the question to a vote before any public school's student body... our guess is that the vast majority would be against, every time.

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