School boards across the country are cracking down on teachers showing their cracks:
Teachers are expected to bear long days, challenging students and demanding parents. Now, apparently, some teachers are baring too much of themselves.
So school boards and superintendents increasingly are pursuing dress codes for teachers. At issue is the same kind of questionable attire most often associated with students.
In some districts, teachers can get dressed down for wearing skimpy tops, short skirts, flip flops, jeans, T-shirts, spandex or baseball caps. Spaghetti is fine in the cafeteria, but shirts supported by spaghetti straps are not welcome in the classroom.
And that’s just how some of the male teachers dress. More from AP:
District 11 in Colorado Springs, Colo., for example, prohibits sexually provocative items. That includes clothing that exposes “cleavage, private parts, the midriff or undergarments,” district rules say.
In Georgia’s Miller County, skirts must reach the knee. Elsewhere in the state, hair curlers are disallowed in Harris County and male teachers in Talbot County must wear ties two or three times a week.
“There’s an impression that teachers are dressing more and more well, the good term for it would be ‘relaxed,'” said Bill Scharffe, director of bylaws and policy services for the Michigan Association of School Boards. “Another term for it would be ‘sloppy.'”
Regulating dress is touchy, teachers say.
Teachers may view policies that get too specific as restrictive and demeaning. And what to do about broad policies that are enforced inconsistently? What works for a physics teacher may not fit a kindergarten teacher who sits with students on the floor.
“Because we work with children, and we’re trying to relate to them, sometimes we need to have guidelines that say, ‘You know folks, here’s the line, and you really need to stay on this side of it,'” said Karen Moxley of Grapevine, Texas, who teaches gifted seventh-graders.
That is a VALID POINT, actually.
If you visit a lot of schools, you notice that the days when teachers dressed up are over. Even 10 years ago if you went to a school with a male principal there would be a good chance he’d be wearing a tie. You only saw jeans once in a while.
Now, you see fewer male principals wearing ties. Very few. Why? Because ties in general have declined as a necessity item. We can’t say “in popularity” because a tie is the most worthless piece of clothing ever. It’s something that just hangs there. Like a husband in a Jewish marriage (sorry we couldn’t resist that..) Jeans? They are increasingly popular in schools.
But there are two views educators (and entertainers) have about schools:
- You need to dress UP for students and kids so they see how it looks and realize how important it can be, as a sign of showing respect to others. It instills in them the importance of dressing up and passes a cultural torch to a new generation.
- You need to dress more informally because by dressing UP you’re adding a barrier to bonding. And the point in teaching (or performing in schools for) kids is to get across the information that need to teach them. If dressing more informally increases the social and mental bond that opens up their mind to take in and retain information, there’s nothing wrong with that.
And, indeed society’s standards have changed.
You don’t see as many adults dressing up as you used to. Just look at some of the films from the 50s and even early 60s and they look quite quaint: people dressed in ties at home, even wearing formal hats. When was the last time you visited a house and saw Ward and June Cleaver? Today it’d be June Cleavage.
Most of our Presidents, also, have observed the jacket and tie rule in the Oval Office (probably even if a young intern was there) but dressed more informally when on vacation or in other settings.
The most formal President in the past 40 years was Richard Nixon. He would walk the beach at San Clemente dressed in a suit, tie, and good shoes. It was rumored that he also swam and showered like that.
So the problem isn’t the trending. The problem — as always — is with people who take a bit of leeway too far..and try to expand it.
Teachers: kids truly don’t want or need to see every part of you. Leave it to their imaginations and chances are they’ll puke anyway.
OTHER VIEWS:
The Education Wonks
Outside The Beltway
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.