A landmark study of “Take Charge of Your Life,” touted as the new D.A.R.E., found that the new curriculum reduced the use of marijuana among teens who reported using it at the start of the study, but increased the initiation of smoking and drinking among teens. The end result: D.A.R.E. America, the organization that oversees the program, will no longer use the new curriculum. Over the last 15 years, national evaluations and independent reviews, including a study by the General Accountability Office (GAO), have repeatedly questioned the effectiveness of D.A.R.E., the most popular and widespread school-based substance abuse prevention program, leading many communities to discontinue its use. This was also due to the program not meeting U.S. Department of Education effectiveness standards. To meet these criticisms head-on, D.A.R.E. began testing a new curriculum for middle and high school programs called “Take Charge of Your Life” (TCYL). The program focuses on older students and relies more on having them question their assumptions about drug use than on listening to lectures on the subject. The program works largely on changing social norms, teaching students to question whether they really have to use drugs to fit in with their peers. Emphasis shifted from fifth-grade students to those in the seventh grade and a booster program was added in ninth grade, when kids are more likely to experiment with drugs. Police officers serve more as coaches than as lecturers, encouraging students to challenge the social norm of drug use in discussion groups. Students do more role-playing in an effort to learn decision-making skills. There is also an emphasis on the role of media and advertising in shaping behavior. A large-scale experimental study was launched to test the effectiveness of the new program. The study was led by researchers at the University of Akron with $14 million in funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Eighty-three school districts in six metropolitan areas from across the country—Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, Newark, New Orleans, and St. Louis—involving nearly 20,000 seventh-grade students, were randomly assigned to the program (41 school districts) or to a control group that used the schools’ existing substance abuse prevention education program (42 school districts). Five years later and two years after the program 

ended—when students were in 11th grade—researchers once again interviewed the students about their pastmonth and past-year use of tobacco, alcohol, and marijuana. Study results showed that there was a significant decrease in marijuana use among teens enrolled in the TCYL program compared to those who were not, but this only applied to those who were already using marijuana at the start of the study. The program had no effect on the initiation or onset of marijuana use. More problematic was the finding that 3 to 4 percent more students who took part in the TCYL program, compared to those in the control group, used alcohol and tobacco by the 11th grade. The main conclusion of the researchers was that the TCYL program should not be implemented in schools as a universal prevention intervention. This was the original designation of the program, and it was to be achieved by altering students’ intentions to use drugs—preventing  them from trying drugs in the first place. Further analyses suggested that “both the content and intensity of the specific lessons around the targeted messages may not have been powerful enough to affect student substance using behaviors critical thinking.

 

 

 

writing Assignment:  Put yourself in the place of a school principal faced with having to make a decision about the continued use or replacement of D.A.R.E. in your school. In an essay, write about what steps you would take to improve the effectiveness of D.A.R.E. or what type of program you would use in its place.