Drug Testing In Schools

The right of schools to randomly test students for drugs has been debated in the courts for years. In a landmark 1995 decision Vernonia School District v. Acton, the US Supreme Court ruled that schools could test student athletes for drug use. Three years later the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit (covering Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin) extended the right to test all participants in extracurricular activities, but in 2000 the Indiana Supreme Court banned such testing where the student concerned was not suspected of taking drugs. In 2002 the US Supreme Court ruled that drug testing was permissible for students involved in “competitive” extracurricular activities. Does society’s desire to combat a growing drug problem override the right to privacy?

PROS
Drug use among teenagers is a clear and present problem. Current measures to tackle drugs at the source (i.e., imprisoning dealers and breaking the supply chain) are not succeeding. It is especially important to protect teenagers at an impressionable age and at the time when their attitude to education greatly affects their entire lives.

Some sacrifice of human rights is necessary to tackle the drug problem. Students who do not take drugs have nothing to fear. The purpose of random drug testing is not so much to catch offenders but to prevent all students from offending in the first place. Peer pressure is the primary cause of experimentation with drugs.

Discouraging drug use among athletes, model students, etc., sends a powerful message to the entire student body. Urine, hair, and breath samples can be used to detect use of most common drugs, including marijuana, cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamines.

CONS
 Our justice system is based on the principle that a person is innocent until proven guilty. To enforce random drug testing (thereby invading the privacy of students who are not suspected of drug use) is to view them as guilty until proven innocent.

Nothing justifies the sacrifice of the human rights of innocent people. Innocent students do have something to fear—the violation of privacy and loss of dignity caused by a drug test. Other methods of preventing drug abuse are less invasive. These include encouraging extracurricular activities, fostering better relations with parents, tackling the problems of poverty and safety, and so on.

Teenagers, especially drug-taking teenagers, are attracted by rebellion and the chance of beating the system. Draconian, Big Brother–style tactics of random drug testing will only provoke resentment and encourage students to break the law. Peer pressure increases as they unite against school authorities. Drug users will only turn to drugs that are more difficult to test, such as “designer” drugs, or use masking agents before being tested.
Read More : Drug Testing In Schools

CLASSIC SCHOOLING RESEARCH

Understandably, researchers interested in studying classroom instruction couldn’t help questioning the broader relevance of the classic laboratory investigations of undergraduates paid to memorize nonsense syllables. They felt a need to study children actually being taught in a classroom setting.

Thus, they tended to do their research based upon what real teachers did with real students within real classrooms. In so doing, these researchers both gained and lost something. What they gained was the ability to observe learning in the real-life school settings in which they were primarily interested and to which they aspired to generalize their research.

What they lost was any real degree of control over the research setting, in the sense that they had to deal with (a) much more diverse students who, unlike the undergraduates participating in paired-associate experiments, could not always read or understand directions; (b) teachers who potentially could vary in their instructional ability and conscientiousness; and (c) tests that weren’t designed to match what students were taught (i.e., standardized achievement measures). Still, some of this research, much of it conducted before the fi eld’s steroidal boosts in the mid to late 1970s — which I attribute to (a) Gene Glass’ popularization of meta-analysis 5 (that, among other things, defi nitively demonstrated the positive learning effects of small class size 6 ) and (b) Benjamin Bloom’s emergence as the preeminent learning theorists/ researcher of the 1970s and 1980s 7 — did uncover some very interesting findings, even if none quite transcended the “grandmother principle.”
Some of the more important of these fi ndings as they relate to school learning included:



Increased Instructional Time (or Time-on-Task)
Despite the obvious differences in settings, the classic learning principle that more instructional time (although classic learning researchers seldom labeled their presentation of nonsense syllables instruction ) results in greater learning did indeed apply to the classroom. In its most elemental form, the more time that is allocated to teach a topic, the more students will learn.

In fact, the amount of instructional exposure is one of the strongest determinants of school learning yet discovered. Of course none of this would come as a surprise to anyone’s grandmother. Neither would secondary evidence showing that children who are assigned homework (which, after all, translates to extra time-on-task) learn more than those who do not 10 or that those who attend summer school (which involves increased instructional time) learn more (or forget less) than those who do not.

Other similarly obvious manifestations of the relationship between instructional time and learning include the negative impact of school absences and even tardiness. Strangely, given its obvious importance, as far as I’m aware no one made a serious attempt to document the dose–response relationship between the amount of school instruction until the mid-1970s, when David Wiley and Annegret Harnischfeger 13 conducted a secondary analysis of data from 40 Detroit schools contained in the Equality of Educational Opportunity Survey. Defining the number of hours of schooling delivered to students in any given school, they used the following simple formula:

[# Hours of Instruction Delivered = Daily Attendance (which encompasses
absences) x # Hours in the School Day x # days in the School Year]

They found huge discrepancies in the total number of hours of schooling in this one city, ranging from 710 to 1,150 hours per year. “Typical pupils in some schools receive 50 % more schooling than pupils in other schools.” Then, controlling for student characteristics as best they could, they found that “over a year’s period … in schools where students receive 24 % more schooling, they will increase their average gain in reading comprehension by two-thirds and their gains in mathematics and verbal skills by more than one-third” (p. 9).

Needless to say, this finding reflects an extremely powerful relationship between the amount of school instruction and student learning. Yet, as powerful a factor as the amount of instructional time is, historically it has not been found to be the most powerful determinant factor influencing school learning. That distinction belongs to a relationship that was probably recognized the first time children were ever grouped together in classrooms.
Read More : CLASSIC SCHOOLING RESEARCH

MBA : Differing Schools of Thought

Marketing involves those activities necessary for the planning and delivery of products or services from the producer (or performer) to the customer, to satisfy the customer and to meet the organization’s objectives. These activities ultimately support the sales function (and profitability) and include:
• Product development
• Market research (including forecasting)
• Advertising
• Public relations (product publicity)
• Sales promotion
• Customer service

Differing Schools of Thought
Certainly, there may be ideological differences between departments within an organization and often between members of the same department as well. In fact, some individuals may claim to subscribe to a particular school of thought without truly understanding the implications of their positions. As this pertains to the marketing discipline, there are basically four ideological “camps”: the product concept, the selling concept, the marketing concept, and the societal marketing concept.


The Product Concept
Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.” This concept—the product concept suggests that the integrity of the product supersedes all other considerations and that quality alone determines the fate of the product. Therefore, no substantive marketing effort is required. A critical flaw in this approach is that potential customers may not even be aware of the product’s existence, much less be able to evaluate it for purchase.

Another shortcoming is that “quality” may be subjective, differing from one individual to the next. (Surely, you’ve heard the saying, “One man’s meat is another man’s poison.”) Those who subscribe to the product concept are often of the “techie” persuasion, with a background (or responsibility) in engineering, production, and operations management or a similar area.

The Selling Concept
The selling concept is predicated upon the notion that consumers will not make purchases in the absence of strong selling and promotional efforts. The negative stereotype of the automobile salesperson comes to mind in this regard. This individual has little concern for the consumer’s well-being once the sale has been made. As a result, purchasers tend not to return. Surprisingly (or perhaps not), this doesn’t bother the salesperson, since there are “a lot of fish in the sea.” A major limitation of this position is that it greatly underestimates the cost of losing a customer and wrongly assumes that there is an infinite universe of potential customers from which to draw. “Shirtsleeves” salespeople with little exposure to other influences within the marketing function may be prone to this mindset.

The financial people within their organizations, those who set or at least influence the setting of sales quotas, may also embrace the selling concept, in that they may, intentionally or otherwise, directly or indirectly, be pressuring the sales force to generate short-term profits at the expense of longer-term customer satisfaction.


The Marketing Concept
The marketing concept reflects the so-called “classical training” that MBAs receive. It is based upon the premise that the company must conduct research to learn what the customer wants. Having done so, the marketing mix or four Ps—product, price, place (channels of distribution), and promotion—are adjusted so that the customer will buy the product and use it with a high level of satisfaction. This approach complements the product concept, communicating the attributes of “the better mousetrap,” and rather than assume that “the world will automatically beat a path to your door,” makes that path to the company’s door as attractive and easy to reach as possible. The marketing concept also tends to emphasize relationship-building, since (as
we will learn later on) a company’s future and long-term profitability ultimately depend upon satisfying the customer, not only initially, but repeatedly over time.

Marketing-oriented organizations such as Procter & Gamble (P&G) liberally employ “800” toll-free telephone numbers to address any concerns that customers might have. This is not as altruistic as it might seem. After all, the information that the company receives from the resulting telephone calls is, essentially, valuable and free market research.

If, for example, a sizable number of customers were to call and complain that they had found the corners of the Ivory soap bars they had purchased to be chipped, the company’s product management team would almost certainly remedy the problem, perhaps by repackaging the product for greater protection. Moreover, P&G also unconditionally guarantees its products and offers refunds or exchanges, generally at the customer’s option.

The Societal Marketing Concept
The societal marketing concept is actually a version of the marketing concept that includes the long-term welfare of the consumer and that of the general public as well. A notable success story in this category includes biodegradable laundry detergents in an age of ecological consciousness. However, the motorcycle manufacturing company that created a vehicle which reduced the loud, high-rpm sound typically associated with motorcycles to a quiet purr did very poorly with the product and was forced to abandon it. Apparently, the company’s research and planning effort did not reveal what most of us probably suspect to be the cause: motorcycle enthusiasts actually want that noise.

In an organizational environment, policy decisions are often made by committee. The parties bring their various orientations to the table with them so that even an organization which, on the whole, embraces the marketing concept may have “pockets” of countervailing forces. Therefore, the various influences we have just discussed rarely exist in pure form within the organization. (One might seriously question the desirability of an organization in which everybody shared the same influences and agreed on everything.)
Read More : MBA : Differing Schools of Thought

Schools and their social context

While social disadvantage may not be an excuse for poor achievement in academic terms it certainly is an explanation. As Power et al. (2002: 26) conclude in their study:
[Educational] outcomes in deprived areas are worse than those in non-deprived
areas, whether they are measured in terms of qualification, attendance, exclusions
or ‘staying on’ rates. Inner-city areas in particular feature as having low outcomes.


They go on to point out that in England in the 1990s ‘the gap in outcomes grew rather than narrowed’ (p.64). They also point to the need to reduce the ‘compositional effects that appear to result from high concentrations of disadvantaged students’ (p.65). A significant issue emerges in their conclusion that:
… schools serving deprived populations could do more to ensure better home–school
relations, which appear to be less facilitative than those in schools serving nondeprived
areas. (p.66)


Schools in deprived areas have a great deal in common with schools in nondeprived areas – the same curriculum, assessment regimes, inspection and accountability models, etc. There are significant differences in funding, teacher supply and access to resources but these are not consistent as causal factors. What is consistent is the notion of deprivation.


This raises the question of the nature of the relationship between schools and their communities. Mulford and Silius (2001: 5) found that there was not a direct causal relationship between high community involvement and improving student outcomes:

On the basis of our results, and if a choice needs to be made between working with
and being sensitive to the community and improving home educational environments,
then the latter will have more direct and immediate ‘payoff’ for student
outcomes … Of course, having a strong community focus may be important for
other reasons such as for the development of social capital in the community, especially
in poor inner city and rural communities.


The distinction between family and community is a valid one – the impact of the family is more direct, immediate and sustainable. However the family is a classic manifestation of community. The status, significance and value attached to the family will often be a product of broader, community-based values. The resilience and potency of the family will be a function of generic factors – most significantly social capital.
In their study of the factors influencing the development of young people in the USA, the Search Institute (2000) found what they describe as a ‘crumbling infrastructure’ which has a number of key manifestations:

1. Most adults no longer consider it their responsibility to play a role in the lives of their children outside the family.
2. Parents are less available for their children because of demands outside the home.
3. Adults and institutions have become more uncomfortable articulating values.
4. Society has become more and more age segregated.
5. Socialising systems (e.g. families, schools and congregations) have become more isolated, competitive and suspicious of each other.
6. The mass media have become influential shapers of young people’s attitudes, norms and values.
7. As problems and solutions have become more complex, more of the responsibility for young people has been turned over to professionals.

These symptoms are in stark contradistinction to what would normally be regarded as criteria for an effective community. Amit (2002: 18) offers criteria to describe a community:

People care because they associate the idea of community with people they know,

with whom they have shared experiences, activities, places and/or histories.

Community arises out of an interaction between the imagination of solidarity and

its realisation through social relations.

If there are not the ‘shared experiences’ and the ‘realisation through social relations’ then community cannot be said to exist and the factors identified by the Search Institute can be said to be both cause and effect. What is being described is a paucity of social capital – the lower the level of engagement in a community, the lower the level of social capital, and so the more likely it is that an area will be deprived – not just in economic terms but also in social terms. Social poverty is as negative and destructive as economic poverty. For Putnam (2000: 296–7) there is an absolute link between levels of social capital and success in the education system:

States that score high on the Social Capital Index – that is, states whose residents

trust other people, join organisations, volunteer, vote and socialise with friends –

are the same states where children flourish: where babies are born healthy and where

teenagers tend not to become parents, drop out of school, get involved in violent

crime, or die prematurely due to suicide or homicide. Statistically, the correlation

between high social capital and positive child development is as close to perfect as

social scientists ever find in data analysis of this sort.

Social Capital is essentially about networks, trust, engagement, communication, shared values, aspirations and interconnectedness. High social capital produces the benefits that Putnam describes above. He also points out that ‘social capital appears to be a complement, if not a substitute, for Prozac, sleeping pills, antacids’ (p.289). Social capital appears to be the panacea for the social, psychological and physiological ills of society, and it might even extend to education.

What is clear is that high social capital enhances academic success. Therefore one answer to academic under-achievement might be not just to strive to improve the efficiency of schools but rather to increase social capital. 

Read More : Schools and their social context