Answer Happy

Using the case study in your text, answer the followingquestions:
Case Study: Does the DARE Program Work? Let's consider the adoption of public policy where there is little social science evidence to suggest the policy meets its goals, but it continues to be an important policy. One prominent example of such a program was the DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) program, a program commonly offered in public (and even some private) schools in the United States to dissuade schoolchildren from using and abusing drugs. The motivation for this program was simple: drug abuse-including the abuse of legal drugs, alcohol, and tobacco as well as illegal drugs-is associated with poor academic achievement, crime, and significant health problems for drug abusers. The federal, state, and local governments have created drug use regulations and educated the public about drugs for decades. DARE was an innovative program that linked schools with law enforcement in a way that would, its designers believed, be more effective than existing programs in preventing school-age children from using (or "experimenting with") illegal drugs, tobacco, and alcohol. The program was founded in 1983 by the police and schools in Los Angeles to address local problems with drugs and gangs. It was subsequently implemented in the United States and internationally. At its peak, DARE served 43 countries and 75 percent of school districts in the United States. Originally designed for older elementary school students, DARE programs evolved to address drug abuse, gangs, and violence with students in kindergarten through twelfth grade. The national DARE organization claims that the program helps students make good decisions and ""humanizes the police: that is, young people can begin to relate to officers as people"; through the DARE program, students may think of police officers as friends and helpers in the community. DARE designers felt that the inclusion of police officers as instructors would increase the credibility of the instructors and the program, a result that at least one study corroborated (Hammond et al. 2008). While the DARE organization referred to itself as the "preeminent substance abuse education program"-a reasonable claim given the number of schools that use it- scientific evidence of its effectiveness is scant. The basic question is whether using the fundamental antidrug DARE programs reduces drug use in that population of students compared with students who did not go through DARE. In a 2001 review of drug abuse prevention programs, the U.S. Surgeon General placed DARE in the "Does Not Work" category of these programs (Office of the Surgeon General et al. 2001). A 2003 Government Accountability Office study reviewed the existing body of literature on DARE effectiveness and reported that the existing research found no significant difference in drug use between students who had completed DARE and students who had not. Research by the National Institutes of Health, Department of Education, and Department of Justice corroborated these findings. Perhaps most damaging to DARE was a study published in the American Journal of Public Health, which conducted an overview (a meta-analysis) of the most scientifically rigorous studies the researchers could find. They discovered that, overall, studies proved no effect from the DARE curriculum; in simple terms, the studies concluded that DARE did not have a measurable influence on drug use among school-age children, especially when measured over time. As a result of the many studies that showed DARE's ineffectiveness, federal money supporting DARE programs was cut, and some school districts have dropped the DARE program (Weiss, Murphy-Graham, and Birkeland 2005). Many organizations continued the DARE program through local fundraising and taxation. Several responses to the negative research findings followed. First, DARE advocates argued that the outcomes of drug prevention education are difficult to quantify, that the studies cited by researchers were flawed, and that DARE's satisfaction surveys revealed positive outcomes, including high levels of parent, student, and community satisfaction. Advocates also maintain that positive experiences with law enforcement officers are significant, though difficult to measure. However, none of these claims or objections provides an answer to the fundamental research question about DARE's effectiveness. The second response was subtler, but more revealing. DARE, facing the loss of federal funding and its own credibility, revised its curriculum in response to several studies. The creation of the "new DARE" was likely motivated by the urging of DARE's proponents to avoid losing federal funding and a desire to embrace science. The new program --which emphasizes teaching middle school children-was to be evaluated by a $13.7 million study funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation-a highly respected institution devoted to health issues-to track the effectiveness of the program. However, the evaluators have not yet published results of their research on the fundamental question of DARE's effectiveness. Furthermore, DARE's mission shifted, as do many organizations' missions when their fundamental rationale is questioned. A review of the DARE website reveals that the organization has broadened its programs to anti-gang and anti-bullying efforts as well.
The most recent retooling of the DARE curriculum shifted the program away from the typical antidrug messaging in favor of improved life skills programming under the rubric of "keepin' it real" (Day et al. 2017; Knopf 2017). The method of instruction moved away from lectures to, as DARE put it, greater emphasis on facilitation and discussion. The new program was developed after a review of nine potential programs that seemed to fit well with DARE's philosophy. Working in conjunction with academic researchers, new curricula were developed for middle school students in 2008, elementary students in 2013, and high school students in 2016. And in 2017, in response to the problems with increased abuse of and addiction to opiate drugs, DARE developed supplemental materials for the 2018-2019 school year (D.A.R.E. America 2018). Why was DARE so popular as an antidrug program when so little evidence could demonstrate its effectiveness? There are several potential reasons, and the remainder of this book will help you to understand the logic behind the continued adoption of a program that "doesn't work" The first reason DARE remained popular is because people believed that it worked based on using anecdotal evidence that is, personal experience to draw conclusions about its effectiveness. DARE supporters often raised the issue of DARE's creation of good relationships between police officers and students. In one case, a county sheriff in Ohio noted, "There are studies out there that said that it didn't work, that kids still used drugs. What it doesn't measure is the relationships that are built between the kids and those officers" (Wilson 2009). A parent in Texas, reacting to the impending cut of DARE from her children's school, said, "I asked my kids, 'Do you think that program is worth it?' and they said, 'Yes.' They would never smoke-they never realized how many chemicals are in (a cigarette) and it turned them off to drugs, too" (Meyers 2009). In another instance, a school superintendent in Suffolk County, New York, expressed his disappointment with the decision to drop DARE: It has had a tremendous impact on the students and has become part of our school culture. I'm concerned that when the responsibility for teaching the curriculum falls on the shoulders of the teachers, who already have a full curriculum, that it won't have the same effectiveness that it did when the police officers came to visit. (Saslow 2007) From the schools' perspective, the DARE program fills important needs. This idea of "doing something" is important in politics and public policy. In the DARE case, an expert on adolescent substance abuse noted the powerful reasons why DARE persists in so many schools: This evidence, of course, is not popular with parents, police officers and others since many of them believe DARE works. And kids do say the "right" things after participating. But, research shows there are no long-term effects. A perfect formula for a belief-versus-science polarization. So, why the interest and support for "needing" more DARE programs... despite overwhelming evidence they don't work? Well, it's mostly about the comfort parents, school staff, police officers, and other adults receive when a program is delivered that is visible and, in their beliefs, helpful. It feels good to know that at least something is being done. (Rockholz 2010) Often, policy makers feel a great deal of pressure to "do something about public problems, even when all the information is not available; indeed, as we will learn, information is often hard to come by. Furthermore, once a program is in place, many stakeholders in this case, parents, teachers, the police, school boards, and local community leaders-have so much money, time, and personal belief invested in a program that it is difficult, even in the face of scientific evidence, to change the program. Another way to understand the persistence of DARE is by reframing the essential research question: does DARE work? One can ask, "What does 'work' mean?" As originally defined by DARE's developers, the program was supposed to keep kids from trying or using drugs. The scientific evidence suggests that this does not happen. But are there other benefits to DARE? What about the oft-cited relationships between police and children? Is this a positive benefit? How would one measure this? Do police officers benefit from meeting and interacting with the students in their communities? What about the use of police as instructors? Does this benefit teachers who may not feel comfortable teaching students about drug use and abuse? What benefits, if any, might accrue to a community as a whole for identifying, as so many signs do, particularly in small-town America, that "We are a DARE community"? Did the range of those benefits increase when DARE broadened its mission beyond drug prevention? Could a more scientifically sound program provide these benefits? Or is the drug problem so intractable that is, hard to solve that no program is likely to work? Another way to consider this case is as an example of learning, as I discuss in Chapter 10. In one way, the proponents of DARE learned how powerful rhetoric, symbolism, and storytelling that relies on anecdotes can promote a policy even when the evidence of its effectiveness is scant. Despite mounting evidence that the old DARE was ineffective, and the lack of evidence that adjustments to the curriculum were effective, it continued to be used in many schools around the nation because of the popularity of the idea of working with the police combined with the valued goal of preventing or reducing youth drug use and violence. But another way to review this case is as a form of learning about the effectiveness of policies themselves. The proponents of DARE realized that, even as their goals could remain consistent, the means by which these goals could be met could change as the program is redesigned in the face of new ideas and new evidence. Are there other policies that continue to be used even if they fail to achieve their goals, or that cannot be proven to "work"? What does it mean to say that a program "works" or doesn't? Are policies enacted that are unlikely to achieve the goals that their proponents claim? Why would people propose policies that they may know won't work well? How do we measure whether a policy is "good" or not? Consider these questions and the logic behind these questions as you read this book.