State-Level Education Standards for Substance Use Prevention Programs in Schools: A Systematic Content Analysis

Abstract

Purpose Three-fourths of public schools in the U.S. maintain instructional programs to discourage alcohol, tobacco, and other drug (ATOD) use. State-sanctioned instructional standards attempt to direct this ATOD preventive education. No existing research, however, systematically codes these standards across all grades and states. We performed such an analysis. Methods We retrieved ATOD standards information from all 50 states and the District of Columbia from multiple sources, including the National Association of State Boards of Education's State School Health Policy website. Three independent researchers classified and cross-validated ATOD standards (inter-rater agreement = 98%) based on recommended content domains and pedagogic delivery methods. Results We find substantial grade-level variation in standards. Elementary schools emphasize generic social skills and affective skills, whereas middle and high school standards focus on knowledge about biological and behavioral consequences of ATOD use. States also vary widely in their content and coverage of standards. Two-thirds of states do not include standards in all content areas considered “evidence-based.” Conclusions The ATOD curricular agenda for the majority of states falls well below recommended content and delivery benchmarks. We intend for our harmonized dataset—the first of its kind—to promote research that examines the relation among state ATOD standards, actual classroom instruction, and adolescent ATOD use.

State Education Standards for Tobacco Prevention and Classroom Instruction

“…In prior work, we collected and rigorously coded tobacco-related education standards for 45 states. 18 These instructional standards – like the other policies described above – are intended to reduce youth tobacco use by establishing a set of shared expectations in the highly decentralized context of American public education. In core academic areas such as mathematics and English, state and federal educational accountability policies enforce instructional standards by testing student mastery of standards and providing sanctions and rewards to schools based on student performance.…”

Drug use prevention: factors associated with program implementation in Brazilian urban schools

“…The United States, where three-fourths of schools include these programs in the curriculum, has a greater prevalence of such programs than Brazil. This prevalence is the result of political effort, investment and scientific dissemination, which in addition to stimulating the adoption of prevention programs in schools, also contribute to improving the quality of program implementation [ 12 , 26 ]. Thus, identifying the factors associated with the implementation of drug use prevention programs is fundamental to producing knowledge that increases the prevalence of program implementation.…”

Effects of state education requirements for substance use prevention

“…Wakefield, Gerlinger, Domina, Bruckner, and Carpenter (2016) show that a host of detailed state demographic and political variables-which have been shown in prior work to correlate strongly with the timing of state adoption of criminal justice policies such as three strikes laws (Karch & Cravens, 2014) and other public health policies such as clean indoor air laws (i.e., smoking bans; Shipan & Volden, 2006)-cannot readily explain the timing of adoption of a state ATOD education policy, consistent with our core identifying assumption that the variation in when states began to require such education is plausibly unrelated to the unobserved determinants of youth substance use in a state. For a content analysis of ATOD educational standards, see Bruckner et al (2014). race, and Hispanic ethnicity), a dummy for being not married, dummy variables for living in a large standard metropolitan statistical area (SMSA) and any SMSA other than a large SMSA, father's education (high school or less, some college, bachelor's degree or more, and an indicator for father education missing), mother's education (same variables as for the father), and dummy variables for missing data on sex and marital status.…”