This would later become "Dressing Alike: Uniforms Hit the Public School Arena." Click here for my first draft.

What is to be Made of Uniforms in Public Schools?
by Micah Holmquist
October 2, 2000

Uniforms in public schools? The very idea seems a bit strange. Showing up to school wearing the insignia of the latest sports star or in the latest fashions is a virtual right of passage for many youth.

Yet increasingly students attending public schools do have to wear uniforms. Uniforms were virtually unheard of in public schools 6 years ago but now are in place at 11 percent of schools according to a survey of principals conducted in May by the National Association of Elementary School Principals. Uniforms exist in small towns, suburbs and cities such as Chicago and New York City.

The reasons for uniforms are almost always the same. Uniforms will decrease crime and violence in schools while improving the behavior of students. Students aren’t concerned about who is wearing brand name clothing and who isn’t when you have uniforms. They thus judge their fellow students as individuals and cliques and peer pressure go down, the logic goes. School pride will also increase as students see their classmates wearing similar clothes and more connected to them. The safer and healthier environment leads to better grades and test scores, proponents of uniforms argue.

These are all laudable goals but a number of questions remain unanswered. Are schools any safer with uniforms? Do students actually perform better or take more pride in their school? Do young people believe that uniforms decrease social pressures? What do they think about uniforms in general? And finally do uniforms represent an increased attack on the rights of young people?

Safer and Better Schools?

The most common argument for uniforms is that they will make schools safer. Such a claim is quite attractive in the current political climate where a number of high profile school shootings, such as the one at Columbine in April of last year, but there is little data to suggest that uniforms decrease school violence.

The school system in Long Beach, CA was the first in the country to make uniforms mandatory for all students in its elementary and middle schools when it did so in 1994. The expressed goal was reducing violence and the number of fights did decline by over 50 percent in the first year with uniforms. What role, if any, uniforms have played in this is unclear, however. The schools in neighboring Los Angeles did not adopt uniforms but still experienced a similar decline in the amount of violence. A pattern exists with many, if not most, schools that adopt uniforms. Violence declines after students start wearing uniforms but it also does at neighboring schools that don’t have uniforms suggesting that a generally falling rate of youth violence and not uniforms is responsible for the success at these schools.

Academic performance is another area where uniforms tend to get credit for success that would have occurred without them. A few of the schools that have adopted uniforms have seen improved test scores. However, sociologists David Brunsma and Kerry Rockquemore looked at the effect of uniforms on students in a 1998 paper published in the Journal of Education Research and found that uniforms actually had a negative effect on academic achievement. Brunsma and Rockquemore also found in their study, which did include students wearing uniforms in private schools, that uniforms did not do much to increase school pride.

Given the lack of data supporting uniforms, what explains their proliferation in recent years? Mike Males has written about contemporary young people and how adults view them in his books Framing Youth and The Scapegoat Generation. According to Males, "school administrators feel good about school uniforms and when you feel good about something, you attribute good things to it." In other words, it feels good to make students wear uniforms, so adults do it.

What do Young People Think?

The voice of youth is notably missing from most discussions of uniforms. A number of surveys have looked at the attitudes of parents and adults towards uniforms but no comparable research has covered what young people think. Most news stories focus on what parents, school administrators, and teachers think about uniforms and pay little, if any, attention, to those that schools might actually ask to don uniforms.

The question of whether or not uniforms improve the social climate of schools by taking attention off of designer clothing and fashion is one that students are particularly well suited to answer. Adolescence is of course a time when many people feel awkward and a standard set of clothing could do lessen this sense. On the other hand, young people are also often trying to establish their own identity during this period. Clothing and, more importantly, having a sense of fashion is one way for many youth to do this. Uniforms could squash such initiatives. Given this range of possible effects, it is not surprising that the young people interviewed for this story did not speak with one voice.

"Uniforms are cool because you don’t have to decide what you are going to wear," says girlstar56, a ninth grader from Phoenix who asked that their name not be used. "If you dress not very cool then uniforms are better." Still girlstar56 wasn’t completely comfortable with uniforms. She thought uniforms might be OK for students in elementary and junior high but not for those in high school. "When you are little you don't have style, you wear whatever your parents want. In junior high you are still young but in high school you should have the free will to wear whatever you want."

Eleventh grader Cheyenne of Louisville, Kentucky doesn’t see many positives in uniforms for students at any level. "The uniform ‘solution’ is only adding to the problem. Students have other ways of expressing themselves." She adds "it turns the whole system into an accessory war, in which in the student without a class ring is discriminated against instead of the kid without a Tommy Hilfiger shirt."

A number of students expressed revulsion with uniforms. "Uniforms are evil. They destroy a sense of individuality amongst students," says eighth grader Randy Patterson of Sarasota, Florida. Several other young people interviewed for this story echoed Patterson’s sentiment with some even comparing school uniforms to fascism and totalitarianism.

Are Uniforms an Attack on Young People?

Are uniforms, in fact, part of an attempt to control young people on the part of schools, the government or even adults as a whole? The number of cities with youth curfews has increased dramatically in recent years and the criminal justice system has also become much harsher with juvenile offenders in recent years. Are uniforms in schools part of the same deal?

Mike Males devotes a chapter in his 1999 book Framing Youth to debunking the myth that young people are not oppressed which makes it a tad surprising that he doesn’t see uniforms as anything more than a "cosmetic crackdown." "School uniforms don’t put a burden on anybody but students and they don’t put much of a burden on students."

Not everyone sees things like this. Cheyenne says that the current generation of school administrators "has embraced uniforms as a realistic way of to impose control on students." David Brunsma and Kerry Rockquemore echo this sentiment in their previously mentioned paper. They label uniforms as means of "social control" that "establish boundaries between members of separate statuses (teachers and students) and the promoting the internalization of organizational goals."

And resistance to uniforms is growing as well. So far, it has mostly taken the form of legal challenges and even organizations of parents opposed to uniforms but students do sometimes take matters into their own hands. 41 high school students in Hurley, Mississippi violated their school’s uniform policy this past March when they attended class with t-shirts reading, "School Uniform Law are Unconstitutional." Administrators threatened the students with suspensions but Ryan Palmer, one of the protesting students, told the Mississippi Press, "Our rights are being violated and there is always a price to pay." The Mississippi Press also quoted Kristina King, another one of the protesters, as saying, "You’ve got to stand up for what you believe in."

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