Zili Sloboda is Senior Research Associate at the University of Akron’s Institute for Health and Social Policy. Prior to coming to the University in 1999, she was the Director of the Division of Epidemiology and Prevention Research at the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
How did you get involved with DARE?
In the mid 1990s, the organization I worked for, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, funded research on Drug Abuse Resistance Education – or DARE – that raised concerns about the long-term impact of their elementary school curricula. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation was interested in DARE because it was at the time – and remains to this day – the only delivery network for prevention services in the United States. The foundation decided to fund a research study focused on a national sample of seventh graders in six cities, in which half the group are assigned to a new curriculum, Take Charge of Your Life, and the other half are in a control group. DARE officers were trained to deliver the new curricula to students in the seventh grade and then to the same students two years later.
Why was Robert Wood Johnson willing to invest money in DARE despite the lack of positive research findings?
It’s all about the delivery network. There are relationships between law enforcement officials and educators in about 80 percent of school districts in the country, which is a tremendous achievement. Also, DARE instructors receive training and ongoing supervision, which is important because research shows that programs get diluted over time. The thought was that effective interventions could be very rapidly diffused through the DARE network.
What’s different about this new DARE model?
The first difference is that we’re focused on middle school students when they are in the 7th and 9th grades, instead of elementary school students. The idea is that they are more at risk of drug abuse than younger children. We also revamped the curricula. Early in the process, we hired a curriculum expert who found that while the older middle and high school curricula had a lot of great information, the curricula was too didactic. There wasn’t enough time to cover everything, so it became a one-way lecture. Kids learn best when they’re actively involved in the learning process and when they get a chance to ask questions and learn on their own terms. That takes a lot of patience. One of the things we do with 7th graders is a lesson on the functioning of the brain. We show the kids what parts of the brain are responsible for certain behaviors, and then a picture of how a brain functions when affected by alcohol. The kids love to figure out why people slur their words when they are drinking! They come up with the conclusions themselves.
One critique of DARE is that trained educators, instead of police officers, should be providing the drug prevention training. What do you think of this critique?
It’s something that I hear a lot. My response is that it’s not the label that matters, but what skills the person has. Teaching drug prevention is not the same as teaching math or English or science. The goal is to give young people skills so when they’re in a tough situation, they can react appropriately. I also think there’s a generational issue at work here – prevention researchers who grew up in the 1960s may have negative attitudes and stereotypes about police officers. But I think a lot of reaction to DARE is not based on program outcomes.
What is it based on then?
A lot it is in response to how DARE treated the research community. Until recently, DARE was pretty antagonistic. Under the current president, however, DARE has a much better relationship with the research community. They have a scientific advisory group that includes many of its critics. The change of leadership at DARE made a big difference. A lot of people who I talk to who are critical of DARE haven’t been involved in things recently.
You are still writing up the results of your five year study. What milestone of success will people be looking at?
The obvious question concerns rates of drug use in the experimental group, compared to the controls. I’m also interested in looking at who the kids are that seem to be responding to the program the most. One obstacle, however, is that it’s becoming very hard to get a good control group. Most kids get some kind of drug prevention education these days. And that is good news for our kids, but a big challenge to researchers.
What’s next for DARE?
We will see how research findings get incorporated into DARE programming. Our program is small relative to the work DARE is doing in elementary schools, even though most research to date has shown that elementary school education alone doesn’t get the job done. The next steps are important, but I hope that having a scientific advisory group in place will help them make informed decisions.