Schools Are Not Parents

For many students, high school is a frightening experience. Between the hours of 9:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m., high school students navigate a world filled with intense academic and social pressure. The opportunities for humiliation are many, from giving an obviously wrong answer in class to being rejected by every potential date for the senior prom. But public-school students have at least been spared the humiliation of having to pass urinalysis tests without ever even being suspected of drug use--until now.

This Sunday The New York Times reported on the struggle taking place in many school districts over how to implement drug testing of students. The Times reports that last spring the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that schools may perform random drug testing of students involved in extracurricular activities. Although such testing is still relatively rare--only five percent of school districts currently perform such testing, largely because the legal issues surrounding it are still murky--more and more school districts are considering it.

School drug testing raises several issues that have not been successfully addressed by those who advocate performing such tests. One is why it should be limited only to students involved in extracurricular activities. As the Times notes, studies show that students involved in these activities are actually less likely to use drugs, alcohol, or tobacco than other students. By testing only students involved in extracurricular activities, school districts are not only excluding potential drug users, but actually failing to test those students most likely to be using drugs.

A more problematic issue intertwined with drug testing is the way it will affect the complex power relationship among students, parents, and school administrators. Placing the burden of conducting drug tests on the schools reinforces what has become an all too common theme in education over the last 20 years: the notion of school as parent.

With regard to a host of teen issues from pregnancy to mental health to drug use, schools have been asked to shoulder responsibilities once properly given to parents. At the same time, advocacy groups and public-interest lawyers on both ends of the political spectrum have left schools with only a hedged-in ability to act as parents. Schools are expected to form character through moral discipline but are not allowed to use the discretion necessary for this arduous task. Any decision a school makes for or against condom distribution, for or against drug testing, or for or against requiring a student to receive psychological counseling is likely to bog that school down in a legal nightmare.

School districts that attempt to perform testing will have to show that their testing is truly random--that all students engaged in any form of extracurricular activity whatsoever, be it the football team or Future Homemakers of America, will be equally subject to testing. Just as the need for airport security guards to screen random passengers inhibits their ability to fight terrorism, the need to screen students randomly will inhibit schools' ability to fight drug abuse. Any school principal worth his salt should deduce that Future Homemakers of America are less likely to be passing around steroids than is the football team. But principals will not be able to make use of these common-sense conclusions if drug testing must be random.

Regardless of whether random drug testing leads to treatment or punishment of the offender, school districts are using testing as a band-aid for much larger problems in American high schools. Since the Columbine massacre, the media have noted that the enormous populations of some high schools impede the ability of faculty and administration to notice the problems an individual student faces. Ultimately, drug abuse is much more likely to be discovered through the caring and concern of teachers and administrators who know their students well than through random urinalysis. Parents are clearly more effective at dealing with problems of drug abuse; after all, few mothers and fathers must care for the psychological well-being of over 1,000 children.

If school districts truly wish to root out drug abuse among students, they would be wiser to deal with the conditions that lead to drug use in the first place. School districts should work to make schools and class sizes smaller. That way faculty and administration will have sufficient interaction with individual students to sense whether they are having the kinds of academic or personal problems that often cause people to turn to drugs. Parents should work harder not to transfer burdens and responsibilities onto the schools that really rest on their own shoulders. School boards are clearly not parents, and our society should stop expecting them to act in a parental role.J.R. Wilheim is a Columbia College senior concentrating in religion and history.