Schools Get Low Marks in Sex Education

While battles rage as to whether students should be taught about sex and whether school is the place to teach it, a national survey shows that what is currently being taught in the nation’s schools is not being taught well.

The report by the Guttmacher Institute for the National Education Assn. surveyed 4,241 school nurses and teachers who would most often be responsible for teaching sex education.

Of those surveyed, 93% reported that their schools offer sex-education instruction. However, the vast majority of the teachers said they need more help to improve lessons about pregnancy prevention and to expose the dangers of sexually transmitted diseases such as AIDS.

NEA health information network director Jim Williams, a member of the advisory panel for the study, said that schools are still a long way from making effective sex education widely available.

“There’s no doubt that educators and parents--everyone concerned about the mental and physical health of our young people--simply must continue to search for new ways to provide appropriate education about sexuality and family planning,” he said.

Williams said schools must do a better job of getting parents involved in the development of sex-education lessons--as well as encourage parents to be better providers of sex education to their own children.

Virginia has become the latest battleground, as school systems begin to develop state-mandated family life education programs that also include sex education.

In Fairfax County, the nation’s 10th largest school district with 125,000 students, the committee developing the curriculum recommended that topics like contraception and abortion be taught earlier than the current 10th-grade level.

The panel also proposed introducing new topics, such as auto-erotic asphyxia. However, pressure on the school board resulted in a vote that allows teaching about abortion and contraception earlier than the current grade level, but later than the committee proposed.

It also scrapped any introduction of new topics. Parents also have the option to remove their children from some portions of the program.

Rose Hanes, executive director of Population-Environment Balance, said her organization would favor as much sex education in public schools as is possible.

“More focus needs to be on sex education, and anything that is done probably would prove to be helpful,” Hanes said. “Personally, I think the teaching could be better.

“So much attention is paid to drugs. I would be happy if sex education or population control would be mentioned half as many times as drugs are mentioned on television.”

On the other side, Jeanne Allen, an education analyst for the conservative American Heritage Foundation, said she is not sure sex education should be taught in school.

“Schools have a hard enough time teaching basics,” Allen said. “What some schools have done is adopt a very, very radical sex-education program that defies parental authority.

“Parents have a responsibility for basic morality and what children should be learning. In Fairfax County, they are fighting the curriculum because it is teaching things like masturbation and contraception. That’s not an agenda that belongs in the schools.”

Thomas J. Lipping, executive director of the conservative Save America’s Youth, said he believes there is a need for sex education in the schools, but it should be tempered with values.

“The kind of approach that prevails today boils down to a skills course,” Lipping said. “It’s no surprise that there is rampant sexuality today. They’re just doing what they’ve been taught.

“Sex education should emphasize values as well as just education. The parents should be there (in the education process), but this is not an inappropriate subject in the school.

“But if all we give them is pure, raw information, the way it is done now, we are sowing the seeds that get kids into trouble.”

Lipping attacked what he called “the aggressive Planned Parenthood” approach that he says fails to teach values. His group supports “Project Respect,” a Chicago-based group that devised a sex-education curriculum that supports abstention from sex.

The course, “Sex Respect,” teaches that premarital sex invariably causes emotional or physical harm, and urges abstinence in all situations instead.

Some inner-city school districts have dropped the program, saying it did not reflect reality.

Ronald Stodghill, superintendent of the Wellston school district in suburban St. Louis, said “Sex Respect” was not appropriate for the district’s students.

“The reality is that our youngsters are engaged in sexual activity in their early teens,” he said, noting that the course’s criticism of sex outside marriage might have offended some of the district’s single parents.

Debra Haffner, executive director of the Sex Information and Education Council of the United States, agrees with Lipping about teaching values in sex education.

“I think the Guttmacher study shows we are doing our children a terrible disservice,” Haffner said. “We are concentrating on trying to prevent problems.”

She said the study did show an increased interest in sex education and added that the AIDS epidemic has also increased awareness about the subject.

“Dozens of communities come to us and ask for assistance. In the last year and a half, we have had more requests than ever before,” she said.

“If there is a silver lining in the awful epidemic of AIDS, it means we are doing something for our children in the area of sex education. It is just too bad that it took this.

“I would say that less than 10% of our nation’s students receive comprehensive sexuality education. We’ve got to get away from programs that are aimed at reducing disasters.

“We need to talk to them about forming values and developing relationships, clarifying attitudes. We need to talk to them about intimacy and dating. Programs that are aimed only at trying to reduce teen pregnancy are doomed to fail.”

Although Haffner and Lipping are on opposite ends of the debate, they agree that sex-education programs need to be family- and community-based.

“Often schools are not providing information until high school, when many students already are having sexually intimate relationships,” Haffner said. “The communities can change that.”

Planned Parenthood has come under fire for its stance on sex education, but Kathleen Stack, of the organization’s Educational Resources Clearinghouse, says the group’s proposals are not radical.

“We support comprehensive sex education from kindergarten through 12th grade to include information on birth control, what methods are available and how to obtain them,” Stack said.

“We want information to be taught on the whole range of issues, including abortion and abstinence, instead of just sex education that teaches the body parts. We want this in age-appropriate fashion. Of course, we don’t support teaching second graders about AIDS and abortion.”

Although most experts agree that parents should have primary responsibility for teaching their children about sex, they say the job usually falls to teachers.