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.