The Philadelphia Inquirer Fri  Jun 4  1993

Does the sex-education program work in Philadelphia schools?

By JOHN M. HAAS

Shortly after his inauguration, President Clinton, while urging support for ideas to move people off the welfare rolls, said, “Let’s measure the experiment, let’s be honest about it …. And if it doesn’t [work], let’s have the courage to quit and admit it didn’t.”

The same pragmatic turn of mind seemed to be reflected in Philadelphia School Board Policy 123 on adolescent sexuality adopted in June, 1991. Its goals are generally praiseworthy, notably: “to enable and encourage students to abstain from sexual intercourse until ready to enter marriage”; and “to reduce high-risk sexual behavior leading to teen pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases and HIV infection.”

Superintendent Constance F. Clayton was directed to develop programs to accomplish these objectives along with “a mechanism for monitoring the efficacy of the curricula.” The school board set up an advisory task force, of which I’m a member, to keep an eye on the policy.

At my first task force meeting in November 1991, I asked if the evaluation criteria for judging the program’s efficacy had been developed. I was told no. Then I asked whether the implementation would be delayed until some were. Again, I was told no. It’s now a year and a half later, and scandalously, there still are no evaluation criteria.

We don’t know if the program is effective in reducing high-risk sexual behavior by teenagers. We don’t know if the program is flawed in such a way that it is actually leading to an increase in such behavior by students. And if that were the case, the Board of Education would be bound to terminate or change the program.

Sociologists studying programs directed at changing adolescent behaviors have often observed that they have the opposite of the desired effect. It’s called “the boomerang effect.” For example, programs designed to warn children away from drugs sometimes unintentionally lead students to try them. 

Will the condom-distribution program, as mandated by policy 123, lead to an increase in high-risk behavior on the part of the students and an increase in the pregnancy rate as some studies have shown? We just don’t know.

Will the abstinence program lead to an increase in high-risk behavior on the part of students because their attention is drawn to sexual matters in the very implementation of the program? We just don’t know.

And this regrettable situation is due to the negligence of the school district. 

It is perplexing that the school district would have launched into the implementation of a critical policy in such an unscientific manner. Every task force meeting seemed to bring an announcement of new schools becoming part of this pilot program. When asked how schools could be added to the pilot program before the program was evaluated, the chairman of the task force said that the pilot schools were simply those to receive the program first. Schools were added as money and personnel became available. Thus it comes to be money rather than success rates which determines whether new schools are added to an unproven program.

How responsible is this expansion in the face of a $60 million school district deficit? 

In an article in Pediatrics Magazine four years ago, Drs. James Stout and Frederick Rivera called for rigorous, controlled studies to be conducted in “large cities with high rates of teenage sexual activity such as Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C.”

With Policy 123, the Philadelphia School District had an opportunity to make a significant contribution to the scientific study of a national crisis. It missed its chance because of its unwillingness to address the problem locally in a measured, empirical manner. Instead, it responded to shrill voices and political pressure. One task force member even said he opposed the development of evaluation criteria because they might show the program was not working and cause its termination!

We cannot say that our children are afforded even the respect of guinea pigs since guinea pigs are at least in control groups subject to scientific evaluation. Our children’s lives are at stake and are far too precious ever to be held hostage to political pressure.

The school district must implement a program to evaluate Policy 123 in a cogent, scientifically sound manner. The Board of Education should terminate Policy 123 until the school district decides to conform to its own directives.

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John M. Haas is John Cardinal Krol professor of moral theology at St. Charles Borromeo Seminary