Pubdate: Mon, 01 Jul 2002
Source: Reason Magazine (US)
Copyright: 2002 The Reason Foundation
Contact:  http://www.reason.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/359
Author: Nick Gillespie
Note: Nick Gillespie is Reason's editor-in-chief.
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/testing.htm (Drug Testing)

PISS TAKE

The Supreme Court's ruling on school drug testing will hurt public schools 
more than the one on vouchers.

In more ways than one, the U.S. Supreme Court has emphatically helped to 
pave the way for America's kids to vacate the nation's public schools.

The decision that has gotten most of the attention, of course, deals with 
Cleveland's controversial--and now constitutionally sound-- voucher 
program, which helped low-income parents exercise the sort of school choice 
that middle- and upper-income families can often take for granted. By 
clarifying the legal status of the Cleveland program, which allows parents 
to use tax dollars to send their children to private religious schools, the 
high court has removed doubts surrounding a half-dozen similar programs. As 
important, "a Supreme Court sanction [means] states will enact more 
programs," according to Jeanne Allen, president of the pro-voucher group, 
the Center for Education Reform.

So poor parents can anticipate more options, including private schools, in 
educating their kids. That's great news. Here's some really rotten news: On 
the same day the Supremes filed that decision, they also upheld an asinine 
school drug-testing policy that effectively punishes students for 
participating in extracurricular activities. Add one more major argument 
for vouchers that would let students choose where they go to school.

In Board of Education of Independent School District No. 92 of Pottawatomie 
County v. Earls, the court ruled that Oklahoma's Tecumseh High School was 
justified in subjecting students who joined after- school clubs to 
mandatory random drug tests. The case stems from the experience of Lindsay 
Earl, who participated in Tecumseh's academic quiz team and choir--two 
activities long associated with rampant drug use, right?

After providing the requisite urine sample, Earl tested negative--as did 
all but three of the 505 students tested under the policy, which was in 
effect for two years until the honor student sued with the help of the 
ACLU. She rightly considered the very process "humiliating" and 
"accusatory." Indeed, by all accounts, the roughly half of the nation's 14 
million schoolers who take part in extracurricular activities are less 
likely to use drugs than other students.

No matter. "We find that testing students who participate in 
extracurricular activities is a reasonably effective means of addressing 
the school district's legitimate concerns in preventing, deterring and 
detecting drug use," wrote Justice Clarence Thomas for the majority, which 
also included Justices William Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. 
Kennedy, and Stephen Breyer. This decision echoes a 1995 ruling that 
declared that student athletes have similarly reduced "expectations to 
privacy."

In dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote that the challenged policy 
was "not reasonable, it is capricious, even perverse." It is, of course, 
all those things and more. But Ginsburg perhaps failed to see the 
pedagogical import of widespread and arbitrary drug testing.

American schools are routinely--and often correctly--blasted for failing to 
teach kids much of anything. But with the help of ubiquitous "zero 
tolerance" policies that have made them grim, authoritarian mini-gulags and 
this latest Supreme Court decision, schools are driving home a very 
valuable and unmistakable lesson, one almost tailor-made for our 
suspicious, surveillance-ridden, post-9/11 world: That every 
student--especially those who want to be active in their schools--should be 
presumed guilty until proven innocent.

That dispiriting attitude is now constitutionally vetted, as are school 
vouchers. It seems likely that the former will only increase the appeal of 
the latter.
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MAP posted-by: Beth