You know spring is in the air when news emerges of kids being kicked out of class for violating their schools’ outdated and arbitrary dress code policies.

This week CBC Go Public reported that administrators reprimanded a 17-year-old student named Cadan Walterson for arriving at school wearing a baseball hat his mother purchased for him at Urban Planet, the Mecca of fabulous, tacky teen fashion.

The hat was confiscated, reportedly, because Cadan’s teacher assumed its black and white paisley print was indicative of gang activity.

But here’s the rub: while the black and white print does have a history with gangs who wear bandanas decorated with a near identical design, it is also popular on Converse shoes, teddy bears and even curtains sold by Martha Stewart. In fact, Cadan’s mom, Victoria Walterson, says she owns a shirt with the same pattern. In other words, it’s entirely mainstream.

Put another way, the Hell’s Angels may have a fondness for leather, but the majority of kids who show up at school wearing leather jackets are not criminals.

Needless to say, neither is Cadan. (Whether he is a fan of Martha Stewart curtains remains unknown.)

What is known is that North American schools are facing a dress code crisis, in which every spring, indignant teens, be they in Winnipeg, Texas or Toronto, defy their school’s dress policies loudly in the press.

Schools across the continent from Ottawa to Cape Cod are being forced to reckon with highly publicized student demonstrations against policies prohibiting yoga pants (deemed “too tight” by some administrations), hats and baggy pants.

You might recall last year’s Crop Top Day, a student-held protest at the Etobicoke School of the Arts where teenagers rebelled against what they perceived as a sexist dress code, one that required girls to cover up so as not to distract their male peers.

The good news is that there is a simple solution to this seemingly never-ending public relations nightmare. Rather than ignore or rebuke protesting students or in some cases try to amend dress code policies for the modern age, schools should simply eliminate them altogether.

They should do so not because it is inherently unreasonable to request that students come to school dressed respectfully and professionally (which of course the vast majority do) but because administrators seem to be incapable of making these requests in a fair and consistent fashion.

Research in Canada, specifically by Rebecca Raby at Brock University, and in the United States has indicated time and time again that dress codes are enforced unjustly and inconsistently.

Male students of colour are singled out for wearing hats in class. Female students with big busts are singled out for wearing tank tops, when their less endowed peers roam the halls in similar clothing undisciplined.

Like beauty, propriety is in the eye of the beholder, something made very clear to me not only when I was in high school but when I visited the Etobicoke School of the Arts last fall and discovered that among the handful of students I spoke with, the beef wasn’t with the dress code itself, but with the seemingly random way in which it was enforced.

The irony is that enforcement may be uneven and unfair not because dress codes are too strict, but because they aren’t strict enough. In the 1960s, for example, policies around dress were often meticulously detailed.

According to Threaded, the Smithsonian Institute’s fashion history blog, the boys’ dress code at one American high school in 1962 prohibited hair “worn in the following styles: flat top (any haircut with the hair shorter on the top than on the sides and back); upswept, ‘duck-tail,’ or unusually long.”

And “any bleaching or colouring of hair” was “strictly forbidden.” The dress code for girls at Broward High School in Hollywood, Fla., in 1965 was just as fastidious: “Shirt tails are to be tucked in. Extreme sundresses or culottes are not to be worn. Bare mid-riffs are not allowed. (Girls) may not wear hair scarves, curlers, clips or other hair setting paraphernalia in the classroom.”

These stipulations are retrograde and extremely fussy, but they may actually be preferable to modern public school dress codes, many of which (especially at more progressive institutions) are so unspecific—“dress respectfully for a professional environment” — that they open the door for inconsistent enforcement and discrimination.

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The dress codes of the ’60s were no doubt oppressive, but at least they were universally oppressive.

This doesn’t mean schools should go back to banning culottes and flat-tops. But if administrations can’t enforce their dress policies fairly and consistently, they should scrap them altogether.

Because what’s worse, after all? That teenagers push the boundaries of taste and fashion, exposing the occasional midriff, or boxer waistband? Or that administrations unknowingly foster a climate of inequity in their schools? I’ll take the midriffs and waistbands any day.