Comment by Christina Hoff Sommers
[The Safe and Drug-Free Schools Program]
Lawrence W. Sherman's "evidence-based" approach to school drug and safety problems is admirable and reasonable, but the difficulties of implementing his proposals should not be minimized. Many in the education establishment react with hostility and indignation to the very idea of an evidence-based policy, with the implied accountability that it entails. My more serious reservations pertain to his general approach of solving problems that vex U.S. schools by calling for yet more studies, more experts, more funding. Are more studies needed about how to improve the moral climate of schools? Schools would be much improved simply by applying what is already well known.
Sherman is on target when he shows how and why the current Safe and Drug-Free Schools program is failing. He notes that since 1986 the program has received more than $6 billion, yet "there is no evidence that this half-billion-dollar-per-year program has made schools safer or more drug-free." He cites several painful examples of how program monies have been spent wastefully. Some schools used funds for excursions to Disneyland, others for fishing trips and baseball games. Tens of thousands of dollars were spent on visiting magicians and other "edutainers." Drug Abuse Resistance Education (D.A.R.E.) is immensely popular with schools and parents. Uniformed policemen visit schools and warn students about the hazards of drugs. The trouble is it does not work. Neither does the ever-popular peer counseling; this program may actually encourage drug usage by bringing high-risk and low-risk teenagers together. [End Page 156]
One questionable expenditure not mentioned by Sherman is a 1998 K-12 anti-harassment and anti-violence curriculum entitled Quit It! (It was developed jointly by the Wellesley Center for Research on Women and Educational Equity Concepts and distributed by the National Education Association (NEA).) Among its many unusual classroom exercises, Quit It! instructs teachers on how to introduce a new version of the game tag:
Before going outside to play, talk about how students feel when playing a game of tag. Do they like to be chased? Do they like to do the chasing? How does it feel to be tagged out? Get their ideas about other ways the game might be played.
After students share their fears and apprehensions about tag, the teacher is advised to announce a new, nonthreatening version of the game called Circle of Friends--"Where nobody is ever 'out.'"
Somehow, the authors of Quit It! were able to convince officials in the Department of Education that this was a good use of federal funds targeted for reducing school violence. No one seems to have asked anyone to show that Quit It! is an effective program. No talk was heard of control groups or randomized field testing. It was funded, rushed into print, and distributed by the NEA to teachers--bearing the imprimatur of the Department of Education and the Safe and Drug-Free Schools and Communities Act. Somewhere today children are playing Circle of Friends.
Quit It! is just one of many examples of empirically baseless and socially useless government subsidized programs promoted by well-intended but misguided educators and government officials. Unfortunately, its approach is not atypical, and it shows how badly Sherman's reforms are needed. But it also reveals the irrational forces that any Sherman-inspired reformer will be up against.
Sherman's proposals depend critically on the availability of good data and solid research for grass-roots education groups to use when deciding on which programs to fund. He wants education experts to determine the "best practices" in pedagogy and programs, just as medical doctors routinely do, and to make this knowledge available to local schools. But Sherman may be overly optimistic about the prospects for getting responsible information from professional educators about best practices. Doctors are accustomed to changing their practices when negative evidence indicates the need for new practices. Educators are less sensitive and more [End Page 157] resistant to empirical checks on their ideas, policies, and practices. Sherman is facing an uphill struggle.
Sherman says that his idea of having an evidence-based approach is inspired by the medical model for adopting new cures or disease-preventing measures. The Life Skills Training program, which Sherman cites as the best program for reducing drug abuse in the schools, was not developed by educators but by Gilbert Botvin at the Cornell Medical School. Sherman notes that Botvin's program, though relatively effective, is not much used when compared with other programs that have advocacy organizations behind them. In the world of contemporary education, having logic, reason, and evidence on your side is no guarantee of success.
Despite the difficulties in implementing it, Sherman's evidence-based approach is clearly the right way to go. He is well aware of popular antagonisms to intrusive central controls. So he resists all suggestions of sending out knowledge elites from Washington telling local communities how to run their schools. He proposes instead to bring good science to local citizens groups, or as he puts it, "marrying grass roots with evidence." In this respect, Sherman's approach is especially attractive.
At the same time, Sherman's persistent emphasis on data and new research appears excessive. In the area of teen drug abuse, a relatively new phenomenon, the argument is plausible that more research on how to control it is needed. The case is different for the more general problem of student behavior and school safety. Schools are much less safe than they were earlier in the twentieth century. Schools were doing something right that they are no longer doing. Sherman pays little attention to the body of historical experience on how to civilize children.
He casually dismisses the observation sociologist James Q. Wilson made in the wake of the Littleton, Colorado, school murders. Wilson points out that schools have abandoned their traditional mission of character education, suggesting that this is in part responsible for an amoral climate that made the violence possible. If schools took ethics education more seriously, Wilson believes, they could diminish violence. Sherman reacts to Wilson's suggestion with skepticism. He wants evidence. He says that Wilson's hypotheses remain "unevaluated."
I believe that Sherman's dismissal of Wilson's point is unwarranted. Prestigious educators in the 1970s deliberately turned their backs on the schools' traditional mission of moral education. Some, such as Harvard University's former dean of education, Theodore Sizer, talked dismissively [End Page 158] of the "old morality." In a 1990 ethics anthology, he and his coauthor point to a consensus among leading thinkers on moral education: "The old morality can and should be scrapped."59 At the same time, influential Harvard University moral psychologists derided the "the old bags of virtue" that schools had traditionally promoted. For the last three decades, educators have been participating in a moral deregulation that has radically changed society, by allowing the children in their care to "find their own values."
Setting children ethically adrift in this way was irresponsible and socially harmful. Children need clear, unequivocal rules. They need structure. They thrive on firm tutelage from the adults in their lives. Aristotle laid down what children need some twenty-five hundred years ago: clear guidance on how to be moral human beings. The kind of direct moral education that Aristotle recommended has had a long and successful history in Western culture. Sherman wrongly suggests that this is something whose usefulness still needs to be evaluated.
To be sure, the usefulness of direct moral education can be confirmed anew. Some of the old approaches are now being rediscovered by objective researchers. Sherman admires the careful and rigorous work of criminologists Gary and Denise Gottfredson. But much of what they recommend is common sense dressed up in sociological jargon. Here is one of the ways they say schools can reduce crime and delinquency: "Clarifying and communicating norms about behavior through rules, reinforcement of positive behavior, and school wide initiatives (such as anti-bullying programs)." Translated into everyday prose, this comes down to saying that schools should be focusing on moral norms and insisting on good behavior. It calls on the schools to once again take up their responsibilities to foster moral development, discipline, and accountability. At the risk of sounding like one of those antinomians that Sherman criticizes, are new studies and research needed to confirm that schools should be "communicating norms about behavior through rules"?
I agree with Sherman that far too much "symbolic pork" exists in current programs aimed at enhancing the safety of children in schools. Efforts should be made to find ways to marry the grass roots with evidence of what works. But much about what works is already known, particularly that schoolchildren are much safer when their teachers feel strongly responsible for their moral development. Much or most of the money annually given for programs to make schools safer should be used [End Page 159] to promote the revival of the schools' mission of moral education. That kind of constructive diversion of funds, now largely wasted in fatuous ways, would also have a great deal of popular and political support. Sherman warns "There's no such thing as free evidence." But there is. It is the distilled product of centuries of experience and it is called common sense.