The
Law & Education:
Will Student Uniforms Become the Norm?
By Martha
McCarthy, Ph.D.
In
general, school authorities can ban student attire that
disrupts the educational process, is lewd or vulgar, promotes
unlawful activity, or conflicts with the school’s
objectives. Courts have interpreted the legal standards
as authorizing public schools to prohibit a range of student
attire including Marilyn Manson t-shirts, gang symbols,
sagging pants on boys, and halter tops on girls. Yet, students have prevailed in a number
of cases where courts have found attire restrictions to be
arbitrary, vague, overly broad, or discriminatorily applied.
Some
of the most sensitive recent attire controversies have
pertained to clashes between the school’s interests in promoting
civil expression and students’ rights to express their
religious beliefs. For
example, the disruption standard recently was not satisfied
where a student was suspended for wearing a T-shirt with
the phrases “Homosexuality is a Sin, Islam is a Lie,
and Abortion is Murder.” In
this Ohio case, Nixon v. Northern Local School District, school authorities argued that the shirt violated
the school district’s dress code by promoting values
contrary to the school’s mission and invading the rights
of others. However, the federal district court disagreed and enjoined
school authorities from banning this shirt that expressed
the student’s religious beliefs in the absence of a
disruption. Other courts also have allowed students to wear shirts expressing
similar religious views as long as the attire did not disrupt
educational activities.
Some schools
are adopting restrictive dress codes or student uniforms
to avoid such sensitive attire controversies. Indeed,
voluntary uniform policies are gaining popularity, particularly
in urban areas, including New York City. And
courts have been inclined to uphold such policies as long
as they are not designed to suppress expression, they include
waivers for students opposed to uniforms on religious or
ideological grounds, and assistance is available for students
who cannot afford the specified attire. Public
schools have successfully defended both restrictive dress
codes and prescribed student uniforms that advance legitimate
school objectives such as reducing socioeconomic tensions,
increasing attendance, and improving the school climate. Courts
have rejected assertions that student uniforms violate parents’ Fourteenth
Amendment rights to direct the upbringing of their children
or students’ First Amendment expression rights.
For more
than a quarter of a century the Supreme Court has recognized
that students do not abandon their constitutional rights
when they enter public schools. Yet, despite the communicative elements of student attire,
dress codes and uniform policies are being judicially upheld
if they advance important government interests unrelated
to the suppression of student expression. School boards, with the support of parents,
increasingly are concluding that they can reduce time-consuming
and divisive conflicts over student attire by adopting policies
that severely limit what students can wear at school. If
this trend continues, the United States may follow most other
countries in making student uniforms the norm in public schools.#
Martha
McCarthy, Ph.D. is the Chancellor Professor, School of
Education, Indiana University.