Press Release to Media 4-2-07

April 2, 2007 (Nashville, TN)—A parents’ group opposed to uniforms in Metro public schools is charging that the study process which led to a proposal before the school board was hopelessly biased. With the school board slated to vote on a Standard School Attire (SSA) policy in just eight days, the group MPASS (Metro Parents Against Standard School Attire) is raising questions about the methods used by the committee appointed to examine the issue.

The MNPS “study” committee examining SSA was co-chaired by pro-uniform principal Tonya Hutchinson, whose school, Isaac Litton Middle School, instituted uniforms this year but has not yet evaluated their success. The committee included five other pro-uniform principals, and—toward the end of the process, at the insistence of Nashville’s Parents’ Advisory Council—two parent representatives.

Along with a student representative, the parents appointed to the committee attempted to persuade the group to look seriously at arguments on the other side of the issue, but met with little success. The principals on the committee were “so passionately in favor of implementing an SSA policy that they were guided by that desire, rather than any dispassionate exploration of the evidence,” said Mark Schoenfield, one of the committee’s parent members. “What was meant to be fact finding morphed into propaganda when they realized that no solid evidence supported a district-wide implementation.”

MPASS is charging that the SSA Committee ignored the facts and misrepresented published research evidence that clearly shows there is no scientific correlation between school uniforms and improvement in discipline, safety, or academic achievement. In the committee’s March 27 report to the school board, evidence was contorted or simply ignored so that the desired result could be achieved.

Until this report was presented to the school board on March 27, the vast majority of Metro parents had no reason to expect that the process would be so biased and flawed. Most parents have been kept in the dark about the research evidence on school uniforms.

The SSA Committee’s effort to gauge parent opinion on the subject of school uniforms was also unacceptably biased. In the school board’s unscientific telephone “survey” last month, parents who participated were not informed that current policy already allows individual schools to choose SSA on a school-by-school basis.

The “discussion” portion of the SSA decision process also seems to be missing. Is it sound policy making to present a plainly biased report at one school board meeting for the first time, and then schedule a board vote on it at the next meeting, with no time allotted for discussion of that report? An issue so important to the lives of MNPS students and parents should involve those most affected, especially when the officials appointed by the school board to fairly examine the issue have clearly not done their job. Tennessee Department of Education guidelines require parental involvement from the beginning of the process. Parents who have objected to the implementation of a district-wide policy have repeatedly been ignored by the school board—just like the evidence.

MPASS is urging school board members to vote against the proposed policy because it is both unjustified on the merits and the product of a tainted “study” process. MPASS encourages school board members to inform their constituents about the existing school-by-school uniform policy that can be used to explore whether standard school attire works in Nashville’s school communities. Equally important, MPASS reminds our education leaders that scientific evidence should not be disregarded when such a far-reaching policy is being considered.