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Ncaa Drug Testing

From 1995, the year the U. S. Supreme Court upheld the right of public schools to randomly drug test student athletes,1 until August 2001, when another and more wide-reaching student drug-testing case reached the Court,2 nearly one-third of Arkansas' 310 school districts embraced student drug testing as a perceived deterrent to student drug use. This research, through content analysis, attempted to answer the questions, "What types of information did local newspapers in Arkansas provide their readers concerning student drug testing before local school boards adopted drug-testing policies?" and "What sources were most frequently quoted in articles about student drug testing?"

Literature Review

Spurred on. by the National Collegiate Athletic Association's 1986 adoption of drug testing to support fair and equitable competition among athletes,3 and by various national and state survey results showing drug use among students in grades 7-12 had reached significant proportions,4 public schools across the nation5 and in Arkansas implemented various types of drugtesting programs for their student populations. The trend, and indeed the prospect of drug testing in general, led commentators, health professionals and researchers to identify the following salient issues related to student drug testing:

1. Rationale for implementing a student drug-testing policy, including perceived high incidence of drug use by school-aged children,6 administrative desire to appear to be doing "something" to combat drug use by students7 and financial support of the drug-testing business.8

2. Reliability and accuracy of selfreport drug-use surveys, noting that such surveys sometimes suffer from over-reporting of drug use under-reporting of drug use, and inconsistency among individuals' answers9 and questioning the validity of self-reported drug use among various sub-populations.10

3. Necessity that a drug-testing program targets students most likely at risk, both for a program's credibility and for its legality."

4. Interrelationships among drug testing, extracurricular activities, and drug use, citing possibilities of drugshifting12 and avoiding extracurricular activities,13 as well as the protective aspect of such activities.14

5. Accuracy of drug tests, citing low accuracy of the fairly inexpensive immunoassay test chosen by some school districtsl5 and the consequences of incorrect test results.16

6. Protocol of drug-testing programs.17

7. Legal implications of student drug testing, noting various interpretations of the initial U. S. Supreme Court drug-testing case in 1995.18

8. Efficacy of drug testing as a deterrent to targeted behaviors.19

9. Alternatives to drug testing, citing effective, research-based drug education programs20 and drug-use prevention guides for caregivers.21

Method

To determine how Arkansas newspapers covered the development and implementation of drug-testing policies in the state's public schools, each of the state's 310 school districts and the three state-run schools were contacted. Contact persons in 101 districts indicated there were student drug-testing policies in place, while contact persons in nine other districts said implementation of such a policy was being discussed. These contact persons identified 73 newspapers that covered their areas. Using the Associated Press Managing Editors Association categories for categorizing Arkansas newspapers for contest purposes, publications with circulations of less than 8,000 were designated as small newspapers; publications with circulations from 8,000 to 15,000 were designated as mediumsized newspapers; and publications with circulations of more than 15,000 were designated as large newspapers.

To obtain relevant newspaper articles, accessible on-line archives of identified newspapers were searched; newspaper editors and reporters were contacted and asked to send article copies; school administrators were contacted and asked to forward copies of all relevant stories on file; and the Arkansas Historical Commission's microfilmed archives of newspapers relevant to this study (12 in all) also were reviewed.

Articles dealing directly with local policy adoption and implementation were coded according to the following 13 categories:

1. Announcement of policy consideration, implementation or changes

2. Specifics of policy implementation

3. Impetus/justification for policy creation, changes, continuation

4. Alternatives to drug testing

5. Legal issues concerning drug testing

6. Problems (real or perceived) with drug testing or policy

7. Research on effects/effectiveness of drug testing

8. Repercussions for students from failing drug tests

9. Local administrative input about drug testing

10. Local teacher input about drug testing

11. Local parent/community input about drug testing

12. Local student input about drug testing

13. Input from outside sources about drug testing

The latter five categories also were coded as to their positive, neutral and negative tones. Two coders, working independently, coded each designated article.

Results

Overall, 16 newspapers yielded 65 news articles covering local student drug-testing policy adoption or implementation in 27 school districts. Eighteen of the 65 articles came from six small newspapers, 19 came from three medium-sized newspapers and 28 came from seven large newspapers.

Coders marked a total of 324 content-related and source-related items in the 65 articles, and their agreement rate was 89.2 percent. Coders also marked 169 source-related tones (positive, neutral and negative), with acceptable agreement rates being 83.9 percent for school administrators' comments and 80.0 percent for students' comments.

In the eight content categories, results showed 29.7 percent of the content dealt with announcements of administrators' policy consideration, policy implementation or policy change, and 28.7 percent of the content dealt with factual information about the specifics of policy implementation. Additionally, 19.8 percent of the content dealt with impetus or justification for creating a student drug-testing policy, although no stories suggested that drug-testing programs should target students most likely at risk or discussed the interrelationships among drug testing, extracurricular activities and drug use. Another 12.4 percent of the content dealt with legal background or legal issues related to drug testing. The remaining content dealt with perceived problems with drug testing (5.4 percent), alternatives to drug testing (3.5 percent) and repercussions related to actual failed drug tests (.5 percent). There was no content concerning research on the effects or effectiveness of drug testing or the accuracy of self-report surveys of drug use.

In the five source-related categories, results showed that 57.7 percent of the quoted source material came from school administrators, and 20.0 percent came from outside sources such as lawyers, organization spokespeople and governmental personnel. The remaining source-related content came from parents and other community members (8.8 percent), teachers (6.6percent) and students (6.6 percent). In the two source-related categories with acceptable intercoder agreement, administrator comments concerning drug testing were primarily neutral (56.2 percent) and favorable (39.7 percent), while few such comments (4.1 percent) were rated as negative; similarly, student comments were primarily neutral (50.0 percent) and favorable (37.5 percent), and relatively few (12.5 percent) were negative.

Discussion and Conclusions

Despite the fact that a wealth of information about drug testing can be easily accessed in a minimal amount of time using scholarly data bases and the World Wide Web, the dominant content of news articles regarding student drug-testing concerned administrative consideration of, or basic facts about, drug-testing policies. This indicates that education reporters generally are not going beyond typical sources to obtain information on this topic. Similarly, topics such as 1) interrelationships among drug testing, extracurricular activities and drug use, 2) perceived problems with drug-testing programs and 3) alternatives to drug testing were under-reported, showing a need for reporters to gain a more thorough understanding of these complex issues.

Findings also showed an overall lack of balance related to sources, with more than half of the quoted material being derived from school administrators who rarely were critical of proposed drug-testing policies. While one might expect administrators to be primary sources in stories involving school board meetings, one also would hope that reporters would seek out comments from health professionals who could cast an informed light on health issues such as student drug use and what to do about it.

The vast majority of Arkansas newspapers providing stories about school districts' implementation of student drug testing failed to inform their communities adequately about issues surrounding policies being implemented in their schools. Future research could examine coverage of other education-related issues to determine if incomplete coverage of the drugtesting issue was an anomaly. It also might be important to survey education reporters and editors to determine why student drug testing was covered so minimally.

Notes

1. Vernonia School District v. Acton, 515 U.S. 646 (1995).

2. Earls v. Board of Education of Independent School District No. 92 of Pottaioatomie County, 70 United States Law Week 4737 (June 27, 2002).

3. See John M. Evans, "The NCAA Drug Program: Out of Bounds but Still in Play," Journal of Law and Education 19, no. 2 (Spring 1990): 161-191. For a comparison of organized drugtesting programs, see Brian Lee, "Drug Testing and the Confused Athlete: A Look at the Differing Athletic Drug Testing Programs in High School, College, and the Olympics," Florida Coastal Law Journal 3, no. 1 (Fall 2001): 91-112.

4. Lloyd D. Johnston, Patrick M. O'Malley, and Jerald G. Bachman, Monitoring the Future: National Results on Adolescent Drug Use (Bethesda, Md.: National Institute on Drug Abuse, 2001); Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, Summary of Findings from the 1999 National Household Survey on Drug Abuse, (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2000); Lloyd D. Johnston, Patrick M. O'Malley, and Jerald G. Bachman, Monitoring the Future: National Survey Results on Drug Use, 1975-1999 (Bethesda, Md.: National Institute on Drug Abuse, 2000); and Arkansas Department of Education, Arkansas Youth Risk Behavior Survey (Little Rock, Ark.: Arkansas Department of Education, 1999).

5. See Jessica Portner and Mark Walsh, "Drug Testing Latest Tactic in Prevention," Education Week 18, no. 29 (April 7,1999): 16, reporting that by 1999, at least 100 school districts in 20 states had adopted policies that subjected student athletes to suspicionless, randomized drug testing.

6. Amanda E. Bishop, "Students, Urinalysis and Extracurricular Activities: How Vernonia's Aftermath is Trampling Fourth Amendment Rights," Health and Matrix 10, no. 2 (summer 2000): 217-247; National Association of Secondary School Principals, "Drug Testing: A Tool to Combat Drug Use Among Youth," A Legal Memorandum (May 1999): 1-4; Nancy J. Flatt-Moore, "Public Schools and Urinalysis: Assessing the Validity of Indiana Schools' Student Drug Testing Policies After Vernonia," Brigham Young University Education and Law Journal (1998): 239-268; and Eric N. Miller, "Suspicionless Drug Testing of High School and College Athletes After Acton: Similarities and Differences," University of Kansas Law Review 45, no. 1 (November 1996): 301-328. While medical opinion is conspicuously absent from most articles discussing rationales for drug testing, the American Academy of Pediatrics has since 1996 opposed drug testing of adolescents. See Committee on Substance Abuse, American Academy of Pediatrics, "Testing for Drugs of Abuse in Children and Adolescents (RE9628)," Pediatrics 98, no. 2 (August 1996): 305-307.

7. Respondents in the Earls (2002) case, in their U.S. Supreme Court brief, point out "... as the record and decisions below document, the [student drug-testing] Policy's genesis was in demands that the School Board do more about perceived student drug use..." (p. 2). Their brief in this case at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit notes that the school district openly admits as a reason for its drug-testing policy "...send[ing] a message to the community about the school's tough on drugs stance..." (p. 21).

8. Barbara Ehrenreich, "Your Urine, Please," The Progressive 64, no. 3 (March 2000): 15-16.

9. Ismail H. Akinci, Ralph E. Tarter, and Levent Kirisci, "Concordance Between Verbal Report and Urine Screen of Recent Marijuana Use in Adolescents," Addictive Behaviors 26, no. 4 (July/August 2001): 613-619; Einda Richter and Patrick B. Johnson, Current Methods of Assessing Substance Use: A Review of Strengths, Problems, and Developments," Journal of Drug Issues 31, no. 4 (fall 2001): 808-832; Lana Harrison, "The Validity of Self-Reported Data on Drug Use," Journal of Drug Issues 25, no. 1 (winter 1995): 91-111; Brenda G. Cox, Michael B. Witt, Mark A. Traccarella, and Angela M. Perez-Michael, "Inconsistent Reporting of Drug Use in 1998," in Survey Measurement of Drug Use: Methodological Studies, eds. C. Turner, J. Lessler and J. Gfroerer (Rockville, Md.: National Institute on Drug Abuse 1992), 109-153; Jerald G. Bachman and Patrick M. O'Malley, "When Four Months Equal A Year: Inconsistencies in Student Reports of Drug Use," Public Opinion Quarterly 45, no. 4 (Winter 1981): 536-548; Thomas P. Petzel, James E. Johnson, and Jack McKillip, "Response Bias in Drug Surveys," Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 40, no. 3 (June 1973): 437-439.

10. John M. Wallace and Jerald G. Bachman, "Issues and Concerns on Validity of Self-Reports in Student-Based Studies on Minority Populations," Substance Use and Misuse 32, no. 12 & 13 (October / November 1997): 1949-1954; Michael Fendrich and Xu Yanchun, "The Validity of Drug Use Reports From Juvenile Arrestees," International Journal of Addictions 29, no. 8 (June 1994): 971-985.

11. National Association of Secondary School Principals, "Drug Testing: A Tool to Combat Drug Use Among Youth;" Geoff Munro, "Drug Testing in Schools," Australian Drvig Foundation, 1998, (21 July 2001); William J. Bailey, "Suspicionless Drug Testing in Schools," Indiana Prevention Resource Center, 1998, (15 May 2001); Missouri Principals Resource Center, "Student Drug Testing," March 1997, (24 July 2001).

12. Geoff Munro, "Drug Tes tingin Schools."

13. William J. Bailey, "Suspicionless Drug Testing in Schools;" Robert Taylor, "Compensating Behavior and the Drug Testing of High School Athletes," Cato Journal 16, no. 3 (winter 1997): 351-364.

14. "The Case for High School Activities...," National Federation of State High School Associations, 2002, (28 May 2002).

15. William J. Bailey, "Suspicionless Drug Testing in Schools."

16. William J. Bailey, "Suspicionless Drug Testing in Schools;" Geoff Munro, "Drug Testing in Schools."

17. Ibid.

18. Martha M. McCarthy, "Another High Stakes Test," Principal Leadership 1, no. 8 (April 2001): 14-19; Linda Oshman, "Public School Lessons: Setting Limits on Suspicionless Drug Testing After Vernonia," Houston Law Review 38, no. 4 (winter 2001): 1313-1342; Robert D. Dodson, "Ten Years of Randomized Jurisprudence: Amending the Special Needs Doctrine," South Carolina Law Review 51, no. 2 (winter 2000): 258-289; Amanda E. Bishop, "Students, Urinalysis and Extracurricular Activities: How Vernonia's Aftermath is Trampling Fourth Amendment Rights;" Shannon O'Pry, A Constitutional Mosh Pit: The Fourth Amendment, Suspicionless Searches, and the Toughest Public School Drug Testing Policy in America," Texas Tech Law Review 33, no. 1 (2001): 151-239; Nancy J. Flatt-Moore, "Public Schools and Urinalysis: Assessing the Validity of Indiana Schools' Student Drug Testing Policies After Vernonia."

19. In a series of personal communications beginning in July 2001, Linn Goldberg, M.D., Oregon Health & Sciences University, explained that no research exists concerning the effects of drug testing on students. His team's ongoing, three-year, randomized, comprehensive study of the effects of drug testing on students in public schools includes analysis of immediate effects as well as longer term effects.

20. National Institute on Drug Abuse, Preventing Drug Abuse Among Children and Adolescents: A Research-Based Guide (Bethesda, Md.: National Institute on Drug Abuse, 1997).

21. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Keeping Youth Drug Free, (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2000); Ginna Marston and Sally Marshall (project directors), Growing Up Drug-Free: A Parent's Guide to Prevention (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, 1998).

Conaway is a master's candidate, and Plopper is a professor in the School of Mass Communication at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.

Copyright Newspaper Research Journal, Department of Journalism, University of Memphis Fall 2003
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