DARE HEADLINE WAS HARMFUL

Will the next headline scream "Christianity doesn't work," with a subhead
that reads "Popular religion makes no difference in Metro Detroit"?

The News could then put on Page 11 near the bottom that "since the church's
mission is to help keep people free from sin, if the church were effective,
it would show up by the church members' assertions that they had never
sinned."

It could be as simplistic as Feb. 27's headline "DARE doesn't work."
Fortunately, it probably wouldn't do the harm that the DARE headline did.

People are going to sin, yet the church does make an impact. Kids are going
to use drugs regardless of programs, but the programs are still needed. The
question really is about how many kids, how often, and to what extent. Just
because the message of the Drug Abuse Resistance Education program is zero
use doesn't mean that is what people like you and I should evaluate them on.
Yet with the tone of the article, I can see why the cops don't trust an
outside evaluation.

By way of example just look at The News' own table. The News used it to say
DARE does not make a difference.

I see that of those students who had DARE training in the fifth grade, about
six more out of every 100 children did not have five-plus drinks in a row
within the past two weeks (when compared with the non-DARE group).

Stop and actually think about that fact. Five-plus drinks in a row is very
risky behavior for kids. The non-DARE group had an average of 44.25 percent
of the kids in this category, while the DARE group had 38.5 percent. These
numbers should disgust all of us, but at least the DARE kids behaved
significantly better.

How many high school students in the Metro area were out drinking and
driving last Friday night? The 6 percent that listened to the police
officers in the fifth grade were not the ones you had to worry about. That
must equal thousands of youngsters.

It makes me think that we need better ways of viewing what is realistic to
expect from this and other programs.

Our society is always looking for the one big quick fix. One of the places
we should start is by setting reasonable goals and performance measurements
that are not simplistic.

Measureable results are important. The trick is to understand what is the
right thing to measure and hope people will report on it thoughtfully and
responsibly.

Greg Dorrien
Executive Director
West Midland Family Center
Midland