In many cities and towns across the southern United States, today is the first day of school. Under ordinary circumstances, it’s a day of excitement and anticipation in which the enduring mythologies of ritual and community rekindle our appetite for invention, discovery, and growth. As a teacher, as a parent, and, a long time ago, as a student, I have over the course of my life learned to look forward to the first day of school as others look forward to Christmas or the Fourth of July.
But as any Kossack can tell you, these are times not given to ordinary circumstances. And today, with regard to the mission and scope of public education, nowhere is this more true than here in Nashville, Tennessee.
Join me on the flip, and I'll tell you why.
Today in Nashville, rather than getting their students acclimated to the challenges and joys of another school year, public school principals and teachers will be closely inspecting their young charges to make sure that their clothes conform to a new, compulsory, and highly restrictive dress code, the details of which may be found here.
This initiative supplants a previous dress code, which prohibited ripped, revealing, or excessively loose-fitting clothes; clothes that endorse drug use, gang membership, or other illegal activity; and so on. It also required that all shirts be tucked in, presumably so that students could not conceal a gun or other weapon. It was, by all accounts, reasonable, and individual schools could expand upon it as they saw fit. Nevertheless, but for the instance I describe below, the old policy was rarely articulated and never enforced.
The long and the short of it is that the Metro Nashville Superintendent of Schools, Pedro Garcia (who was, as I understand it, at one point on Bush's short list for Secretary of Education), and his largely hand-picked School Board, pushed this new policy through by stifling dissent from those principals, teachers, and administrators opposed to the measure (but who, in this case as in others, dare not go on record for fear of losing their jobs); by manipulating, misrepresenting, or ignoring the overwhelming scholarly evidence that school uniforms do nothing to improve either academic performance or in-school behavior; and by manufacturing the impression consensus even as it effectively shut parents out of the decision-making process.
Calling this sweeping initiative Standard School Attire—a semantic sleight-of-hand that, in avoiding the word "uniforms," relieves the district from any obligation to provide the clothing it demands—Metro Nashville Public Schools has set forth strict guidelines for how principals and teachers are to respond to noncompliance, regardless of the underlying reason. This response begins with the student’s removal from the classroom and proceeds quickly to suspensions of one day or more.
It's worth noting that back in the spring, just prior to the School Board's vote on the measure, the district decided to demonstrate how this this new get-tough stance would work by suddenly enforcing the existing (and until then, languishing) dress code by suspending students en-masse at the time of the year when many of them were taking the state's standardized tests.
It's also worth noting that there are approximately 74,000 students in the Metro Nashville Public School system, of whom about 46,000 qualify for the free and reduced lunch program. It's a safe bet that if you can't afford to feed a child, then you can't afford to buy him or her a new wardrobe just because the school tells you to, either. And, by my admittedly rough calculation, the donations that the district asked both retailers and charities to send along number less than 1,000 sets of clothing, including the 400 donated by Wal-Mart and Coca-Cola.
Yet perhaps what's worst of all is that this policy's architects wrote it in such a way that, whatever its encroachments on students' civil liberties generally, it is virtually impossible for a parent to opt out on his or her child's behalf. There is absolutely no opt-out on the basis of philosophical, moral, or ethical grounds; requests to opt out on religious grounds will be considered only if the religion and the rationale are determined by district administrators to be "bona fide"; and parents of students with medical problems or disabilities must produce detailed documentation to that effect even if doing so violates the family's right to privacy.
All of this in a school district whose record of performance is, it may be reasonably said, lackluster at best. In such a context, it becomes possible to recognize SSA for the reactionary and cynical bit of stagecraft that it is.
My fellow Kossacks, astute bunch that they are, will be quick and correct to see in this story ominous resonances with the larger national narrative as it's been rewritten in the past six-and-a-half years. A contempt for the processes of democracy and the institutions that make such arrangements possible. A blatant disregard for intellectual inquiry, empirical data, and the opinion of experts in the field. A fixing of facts to fit the policy. A refusal to acknowledge the civil rights of students in their minority. We know it. We've seen it all before.
For me, personally, all of this is complicated by the fact that my only child, a nine-year old boy, is autistic. He's high-functioning but he doesn't understand what's at stake here, and he certainly wouldn't understand if they were to drag him out of the classroom should I decide, as a matter of principle, not to comply. That being said, I've been fighting for his rights since the day he first walked into a classroom, and I see no reason to stop fighting now.
This is my first diary, although I've been reading Daily Kos attentively and appreciatively for nearly three years. I don't know what sort of response it will garner, if any, but I am grateful for the opportunity to get this off my chest, and I thank in advance those who take the time to read it.
[Update] Because this diary has been included in the Education Round-Up for August 18, I added the second paragraph in the diary's body to make clear that there already was a dress code at MNPS before the implementation of Standard School Attire.
Also, with the first week of school now in the books, here is some feedback by those who've been affected by the measure:
Finally, if you're wondering what MNPS's next bold move will be, one need look no further than a man named Ben Wright, a self-described "transformational speaker" just hired by the district. Mr. Wright is one of the nation's leading advocates of the single-sex classroom in American public schools.
Again, thanks for your interest. --wh