By decade’s end, though there were precious few school uniform policies in our public schools (it is es- timated that less than 1 percent of middle schools and 1.5 percent of elementary schools had them), the reactionary and superficial climate that nourished the idea of putting public school students in uniforms was growing and would continue to grow in the decades that followed.
In my recent book, The School Uniform Movement and What it Tells Us About American Education: A Symbolic Crusade (2004), I make a strong historical, cultural, and empirical case that the 1980s did indeed set the stage for what would become a significant reform move- ment in American public education. The movement to uniform public school students is significant in several ways:
■ The number of schools with mandatory uniform policies in ele- mentary schools today is 15 times what it was in the mid-1980s.