Word: randomize
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...what about people who work in less perilous, if equally unpredictable, environments - say, with children in public schools? Should teachers be randomly drug-tested too? Yes, says Linda Lingle, the Republican governor of Hawaii, where the teachers' union agreed in 2007 to negotiate terms of a new drug-testing program in exchange for higher wages. Now some Hawaii teachers are resisting. (So far, no drug tests have been administered.) The contentious issue of teacher testing has also become the subject of recent court cases in North Carolina and West Virginia, where educators argue that the cost and time taken...
...important question hasn't been addressed so far in the legal proceedings: Does random drug-testing actually reduce drug...
Probably not. No studies I found have looked at the specific issue of whether random drug tests affect substance use among teachers. But several studies have examined the impact of random testing in another school population - students. In the most comprehensive study on the subject to date, a 2003 University of Michigan study involving 894 middle and high schools found that random student drug-testing tends to reduce marijuana use slightly (about 5%) but actually increase the use of other drugs (about 3%). The authors theorize that drug-using kids may think that prescription and other drugs are harder...
Still, the behavior of high school kids doesn't neatly correspond to that of their teachers - they may well change their behavior in response to random tests. Which leads to a more fundamental question: If we are serious about drug enforcement, why not require every American, or at least every American who comes into contact with children, to be tested randomly? (See pictures of a diverse group of American teens...
...matter won't be resolved without further studies on whether random drug-testing actually reduces drug use, and we may get them under an Administration less ideologically opposed to drug reform than President Bush's. But the data so far suggest that random drug-testing is a costly, ineffective solution to a non-problem...