What happened
D.A.R.E., short for Drug Abuse Resistance Education, began in 1983 as a partnership between the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles Unified School District. Police officers taught a 17-lesson curriculum to elementary school students. A nonprofit, D.A.R.E. America, was founded in 1989 to oversee the program, and it spread quickly across the country and abroad. By 1994 it was the most widely used school-based drug prevention program in the United States.
The evaluations were consistent:
- 1994. Susan Ennett and colleagues pooled the results of eight rigorous evaluations, a method called meta-analysis, and found D.A.R.E.’s short-term effect on drug use was small, and smaller than that of interactive programs focused on social skills.
- 1999. Donald Lynam and colleagues followed 1,002 young people who had received either D.A.R.E. or standard drug education in sixth grade. At age 20 there were few differences in drug use or attitudes, and in no case did the D.A.R.E. group do better.
- 2004. A meta-analysis of 11 studies by Steven West and Keri O’Neal found an extremely small effect that was not statistically significant. They described D.A.R.E. as the country’s largest school-based prevention program in federal spending.
The program changed, slowly. The model was substantially revamped in 2001 with help from a $13.6 million grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. D.A.R.E. later adopted a different curriculum, keepin’ it REAL, built on interactive small-group learning instead of lectures, for middle schools in 2008 and elementary schools in 2013. D.A.R.E.’s own history page says independent evaluations of the original curriculum in the 1990s found “minimal long-term influence on drug use,” and that a later pilot curriculum did not show positive results.
Where it sits in the system
The aim was prevention (level 2) on the depth scale. The lesson is about the system around it. The evidence was public by 1994, yet a decade later the program was still the country’s largest school-based prevention program in federal spending. Charitology’s reading is that the people closest to the program could see children engaged in class and a police officer in the school, while drug use years later stayed out of view. That is the Missing Feedback Loop: the signal that mattered never reached the people choosing what to fund.
The ending runs against the Silence About Failure. D.A.R.E. now says in public what didn’t work, including a curriculum of its own that failed a pilot. That kind of candor is what the Failure Archive hopes to make normal.
What carries over
Fund evaluation early, and decide in advance what result would change the plan. When a well-loved program turns out not to work, keep the relationships and the delivery system, and change the content. Whether the new curriculum works as delivered is a question for the same kind of evaluation.
Lessons for the system
- Popularity and evidence can run on separate tracks for decades. The program stayed dominant while rigorous studies found small or no effects.
- How a lesson is taught can matter as much as what it says. In a 1994 comparison, interactive programs that built social skills did better than D.A.R.E.’s officer-led lessons.
- An evaluation changes nothing until it reaches the people who decide what gets funded.
- An organization can change course on evidence and say so. D.A.R.E. now states on its own history page that the original curriculum had little long-term effect.