Pubdate: Mon, 01 Jul 2002
Source: Newsday (NY)
Copyright: 2002 Newsday Inc.
Contact:  http://www.newsday.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/308
Author: Sheryl McCarthy
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/testing.htm (Drug Testing)

COURT SCORES ONE HIT, ONE MISS FOR STUDENTS

The Supreme Court scored a hit and a miss last week, giving the green light 
to use public money to pay some students' tuition at private religious 
schools, and allowing schools to administer drug tests to students who want 
to participate in extracurricular activities.

The decision on school vouchers was a hit. The court said that by giving 
vouchers to low-income public school students, who then chose to attend 
religious schools, the city of Cleveland wasn't using public money to 
support religion. It just happens that most private schools - certainly the 
less expensive ones that working-class families can afford - are religious 
schools.

Cleveland students were trapped in a miserable school system where fewer 
than one-third graduated from high school. And when the voucher program 
offered them up to $2,250 a year in private school tuition, they took the 
money and ran.

Joyce Otemah of the Bronx understands. Her son, Alfred, 15, spent his first 
seven years of school at PS 127, where he was bullied by other boys and 
where his teachers constantly called her to complain that he challenged 
what they said in class and that he was a chatterbox. Her other son, 
Samson, 7, was in a public school kindergarten without serious problems.

When both boys won scholarships from the Children's Scholarship Fund, a 
national, privately funded program to help parents move their children to 
private schools, Otemah jumped at the chance. She enrolled her sons at St. 
Raymond's, a Catholic school, where Alfred is entering the 10th grade and 
Samson is going to the third grade.

There are no bullies, she said, and "I don't get no calls from no teachers."

Urban school systems have been struggling for all the 27 years that I've 
been in this business to raise student achievement levels and graduation 
rates. All school systems have some high-functioning schools and good 
programs, but steady gains for a majority of students have eluded them. 
Fortunate students escape to private schools or to elite public schools, 
while many poor and minority kids get trapped in underachieving schools 
with no way out.

Until the public schools can get it together, these students deserve a way 
out, and if vouchers are their only ticket, I'm for them.

The court's decision on drug testing of public school students was totally 
wrongheaded, however. As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in her dissent, 
not only was the drug-testing program in Tecumseh, Okla., "not reasonable, 
it is capricious, even perverse."

Tecumseh required every middle- and high school student who wanted to take 
part in extracurricular activities - from football to the academic team - 
to submit to random urine tests. The district had no rampant drug problem, 
just the occasional kid who appeared to be high, some marijuana found near 
the parking lot and some drugs found in a student's car.

Writing for the majority, Justice Clarence Thomas justified the school 
district's need to deal with the "national epidemic of drug use." But there 
is no national epidemic of drug use among high school kids. A national 
Centers for Disease Control study released just last week found that 23 
percent of high school students had used marijuana - whose effects are less 
destructive than alcohol's - in the month before the study was done and 
that a tiny minority of high school students had ever used harder drugs.

Research has shown that students who take part in extracurricular 
activities are the least likely to use drugs. Subjecting them to drug tests 
is irrational, not to say ridiculous. It's more an effort to make a 
symbolic statement about drugs than to address an actual problem. And, 
since students are at the mercy of school officials, the officials did it 
because they could, not because it was necessary or made sense.

A drug-testing program for high school athletes in Dublin, Ohio, found that 
out of more than 1,000 drug tests conducted in 2000, only two students 
turned up positive. Dublin could have spent the thousands of dollars it 
wasted on drug tests to hire a guidance counselor or send the kids on some 
field trips. What a waste of time for a problem that barely existed.
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MAP posted-by: Beth