School Uniforms: a Few Wrinkles

The President--or rather, the Presidency, with all its attendant bells and whistles--whirled with a starred-and-striped whoosh through Long Beach, leaving the place a little breathless, as one is apt to be after the touchdown of a major celebrity. Or a tornado.

The commander-in-chief who had to learn his salute on the job had come in praise of the wearing of uniforms in public schools.

Bill Clinton already said as much in his State of the Union address. He had dispatched Atty. Gen. Janet Reno in December on a recon mission to the Long Beach school district, the nation’s first to require uniforms. And he had endured “I told you sos” from his wife, who thought it was a good idea when their daughter, Chelsea, started school a decade ago.

Jackie Robinson Academy is the newest and most academically experimental of Long Beach’s public schools, and there, where the boys and girls of K-through-eight wear navy and white, is where the president chose to alight Saturday.

For a half-hour, then, Principal Alexis Ruiz-Alessi’s office served as the command post of the Free World. From her orderly desk, sitting in front of the TV with the plush-toy dolphin on top, Clinton could have launched a nuclear strike.

By Monday morning, the patio where Clinton had spoken was redolent with the weekday whiff of cafeteria French fries. In the school library, still hung with handmade banners of welcome, a poised fifth-grader named Mercedes Davis, who had shaken the president’s hand two days before, was summoned from learning multiplication tables in Japanese to discuss her wardrobe, and why she liked it.

It helps you listen to the teacher. You don’t have to show off and you don’t have to worry about who has better clothes. When you wear baggy clothes and you’re not in a gang they still think you’re in a gang and might beat you up. Your mom doesn’t have to pick out your clothes. It saves money.

If all that were not enough, Women’s Wear Daily, the canon for couture, will soon be writing its own appraisal of Long Beach chic.

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The man for whom Jackie Robinson Academy is named broke the color barrier in baseball because he wanted to wear a uniform--the uniform of the major leagues.

But this country has a long and equivocal relationship with uniforms.

In that little set-to with the soldiers of George III, British Army regulars were no more than what they wore: “Redcoats.” “Ragtag” was a matter for bragging--the few, the proud, the scruffy, who could kick those well-tailored Limey butts. The buckskins and butternut boys at the Alamo held out against what is invariably cast as the toy-soldier prissiness of Santa Anna’s regiments.

Richard Nixon’s designs for a White House guard decked out in fussy Grand Duchy of Fenwick uniforms could have called down a military coup on his head. Even the grandeur and command presence of C. Everett Koop, who revived the defunct uniform of the surgeon general and ruled the nightly news in epaulets and gold braid in his war against cigarettes and unsafe sex, couldn’t persuade his underlings to wear the Public Health Service uniforms of yore.

Yet such is the state of public schools that here was Clinton, child of the sartorially anarchic ‘60s, surrounded by--as the Long Beach Press-Telegram put it--”more Navy blue than an admiralty dinner,” and urging the nation’s schools to adopt the same policy.

He is compelled by frustration--with crime, with inattention and indifference--and by figures that point to fewer playground fights, better concentration and more interest in school since mandatory uniforms began appearing on the kid-sized hangers of Long Beach.

Studies, like statistics, can serve two arguments. Research shows that uniforms enhance group pride, loyalty, cooperation, morale. Yet some groups wear Scout uniforms and pledge to help others . . . and some groups wear white sheets and pledge to torment others.

If uniforms alone made us all into our own better angels, there would have been no Lt. Calley, no Tailhook. If uniforms made everyone behave, then Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guards could have defied orders, and been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

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The President’s voice was heard in another elementary school, not in congratulations, but in condolence.

This school is brown stucco and buff brick, and swathed in cyclone fencing. Its windows are covered with wire. A black and white school security car sits at one curb, its motto painted in white: “Protecting our future, the children of Los Angeles.” A TV news van sits at the opposite curb.

At the side door is an admonition: “A safe school--everyone’s responsibility. Report weapons on campus.” And yet the bullet that hit fifth-grade teacher Alfredo Perez in the head came from outside Figueroa Street School. No metal detector, no school uniform could have deflected it, and that is telling: Not all of the problems that play themselves out in a school can be solved by a school, and if we expect white cotton shirts and navy pants to do that job, we are delegating the task to nicely dressed men of straw.