It helps make schools safer environments

The argument

High school athletes should be drug tested because testing will help make schools safer environments, and the argument grounds that claim in the particular responsibility a school carries. The starting point is how much of a young person's life a school accounts for. Schools are the homes of students typically for seven hours a day and five days a week, which is enough time that the conditions inside them shape a student's circumstances rather than merely interrupting them. Schools should therefore do everything they can to make sure their collective student body is attending classes in a safe and protected environment. That obligation is not only a matter of good practice: Supreme Court Justices like Clarence Thomas believe that a public school environment is one where the State is responsible for maintaining discipline, health, and safety. If the State bears that responsibility, proponents argue, it must also hold the tools to discharge it, which is why schools should enforce and implement drug testing policies on their student-athletes. The harm being guarded against is presented as collective rather than individual. Drugs not only affect a student's ability to learn but also disrupt the teaching environment, affecting students and instructors as well. This is what moves the question out of the domain of purely personal choice, since one student's drug use imposes costs on classmates who did not choose it and on the teachers responsible for the room. Testing is then justified by where it is targeted. High school athletes are those most susceptible to drug use, so testing them reaches the group where a deterrent will do the most work, and if they are tested at school they will be less likely to use and misuse drugs. Drug testing will lead to more conducive and safer environments for learning for all students.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Drug testing of high school athletes should not occur; it will not lead to safer school environments. Drug testing might actually make students feel less safe and less trusting towards their instructors and school mentors. High school athletes who get drug tested at the demands of their school coaches may become warier and guarded around their coaches, people who are supposed to build trust and make their players feel safe and secure. The constant threat of invasion of privacy and violation of personal space accompanies the drug testing of high school athletes. Instead of making students feel safer, it will make students anxious, stressed, and untrusting of their school environment. Drug testing high school students will not lead to a safer climate within schools.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The premise establishes a general duty of care, which every party to this debate accepts. It does not select drug testing from the range of measures that duty might license, and stated in this form it would justify almost any intrusion presented as safety-related. [Rejecting P2] The harms described concern drug use, not the absence of testing. Establishing that drugs impair learning leaves untouched whether testing is what reduces use — which is the contested claim and the one the argument needs. [Rejecting P3] Both halves are unsupported. That athletes are 'those most susceptible' is asserted with no evidence, and the deterrent effect is the weakest link: the larger evaluations of school-based random testing have generally found little or no reduction in student substance use. [Rejecting C] The counter-argument on record adds that the measure may work against its own goal, since subjecting students to testing at a coach's instance can damage exactly the relationships of trust that make a school feel safe, and replaces that security with the anxiety of routine surveillance.