Peter Handel writes at Truthout that President-Elect Biden must change education policy if he wants to heal the nation. By his choice for Secretary of Education, Biden must acknowledge the damage done to America’s children by the high-stakes testing regime of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. Bush’s law and Obama’s program were kissing cousins; both were disasters that hurt the most vulnerable children.
Handel quotes Lee-Ann Gray, a clinical psychologist, who says that the American school system is nothing short of traumatic for many Black students and other students of color. In her book, Educational Trauma: Examples From Testing to the School-to-Prison Pipeline, she exposes how schooling in the U.S. routinely undermines students’ mental health, limits their potential, and, in the worst cases, causes lifelong harm.
As a new administration is poised to take the reins of government, Gray says it is time to demand both widespread changes to the U.S. education system and public measures to address the mental health crisis facing many marginalized students. She urges Joe Biden to start by re-examining Race to the Top, an Obama-era education program that ties funding to performance, and instead begin cultivating compassionate alternatives that promote learning and well-being.
Gray told Handel:
As a clinical psychologist, certified in treating trauma, I observed blatant and overt traumas in the youth presenting for care in California. It was especially evident to me when the prevalence rate of ADD/ADHD rose to the point that teachers were identifying it and referring students to psychiatrists for prescriptions. I saw that schools in America perpetrated little t traumas every day, everywhere. Francine Shapiro, the creator of EMDR, a trauma treatment, indicated that shame, slights, humiliation, embarrassments and failures are smaller traumas that can accumulate to critical symptoms. The rate of bullying and the negative effects of testing are riddled with little t traumas. Standard education protocol in the U.S., with its emphasis on testing, intense competition and conformity, is a breeding ground for little t trauma. This is particularly problematic in low-income schools where students are dehumanized and often face multiple oppressions before entering the classroom.
Finally, I knew I was seeing trauma when I stumbled across psychologist Alice Miller’s concept of “poisonous pedagogy,” which describes how harmful practices are perpetuated in the name of education. From high-stakes testing to harsh discipline to inadequate mental health support, poisonous pedagogy is rife in U.S. schools.
She added:
No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and Race to the Top (RTTT) are two federal reward programs offering schools extra funds for higher test scores. They essentially use a market demand model to demonstrate that students are learning, when, in fact, learning cannot be measured in this way. Testing is a very flawed measure of student success. Moreover, the model used to evaluate school scores is even more flawed in that teachers’ careers depend on the scores of students they’ve never taught. Ultimately, these two federal incentive funding programs bind teachers’ hands so that they aren’t able to employ their professional expertise.
There is more to this thoughtful interview. Open the link and read it.
“The straw(s) that broke the camel’s back” for me were the MS teachers that implied that my son had an “issue” (ADD) that I may need to address with the pediatrician because he clicked his pen in class or purposely broke his pencil so that he could get up to sharpen his pencil instead of doing his CC packets of ELA drivel AND the math teacher who took it upon herself to “teach” SEL right before every test so that the scores would be better(?). My kid didn’t have ADD….he was bored out of his mind. Bored and oppressed children will do anything to make the time fly by.
When I talk to teachers at my son’s private school, they comment at how engaged he is and how he contributes to classroom discussions with insight and humor. Not once has any teacher implied he has an issue. Not once have I been contacted about behavior issues or missing “busy work” homework/classwork assignments. The whole public school atmosphere needs to change. Childhood should be a joyous learning adventure for all children.
A little treat:
Many public schools today are in a permanent state of austerity from disinvestment. With more than half of public school students coming from poverty, we must reinstate many of the supports that help struggling students. Increasing Title 1 and IDEA funding are a start. We also need to provide schools with decent libraries, reading, ELL and speech teachers as well as social workers, counselors and school psychologists. Public schools need safe, welcoming buildings. We have ignored the needs of our most vulnerable students for too long. Privatization and on-line learning are a scam. The money should go to direct services for students. Our teachers and students deserve education that is free from outside political influences.
I think you are conflating the idea of community schools and the proliferating social impact bond (SIBs) markets in education with Dr. James Heckman leading the pack.
In Ohio, charter schools are called community schools. This is not common in many other states, and our charter schools do not provide wraparound services such as screening for dental, eye and other health problems, social workers, and classes for parents/caregivers
One of the first “innovative” community schools with wraparound services is in Cincinnati. Our school board has worked to increase the number of schools with wraparound services. Wraparound services influenced the architecture of some of newer schools. Most services to these schools are provided by non-profits, some through volunteers, and some through school contracts with local providers. None of these services are in line for SIBs. All are coordinated for each school by one person. For more on SIBs see
https://wrenchinthegears.com/author/wrenchinthegears/
A freaking judge in Michigan ruled today that it’s just hunky-dory for businesses to refuse to serve gay people. Trump and his maladministration have set this country way, way back. There is a lot for Biden to undo.
“Since all the data and information people need are available online, it is no longer necessary for students to memorize and learn esoteric bits of knowledge. Instead, they need skills for critical thinking [and] research”
Oops.
Get back in your lane, shrink.
There is a reason they are called shrinks, eh!
I thought they were called shrinks because they make their patients feel very small.
Like Mike TV.
Exactly. Oh Lord, these people who think they know something about our schools!
I hesitate to criticize without reading Lee-Ann Gray’s book, but what she says here about Alice Miller’s work could easily be misunderstood. “Harmful practices perpetuated in the name of education” – poisonous pedagogy – was all about how children are raised in the home. Beaten for lying or to ‘toughen them up’ and worse, practices that were common, accepted, even actively approved of in the Western society of her childhood [‘20’s-‘40’s], with oblivion to the social results. Hopefully Gray has a detailed grasp of the ed-accountability schemes she criticizes, as the connection to Miller’s work is complex, including its vision and its limitations.
Yes, children are harmed, but an equally pernicious effect lies in blaming teachers [stand-in for parents] for student outcomes. For Miller, enlightenment essentially stops, once one has extricated self-blame for abuse and laid it at the foot of parent-perpetrators. As Brit psychology prof Lynn Segal comments (in Guardian 4/20/05 article ‘Suffer the Little Children), “Blaming parents nearly always boils down to blaming mothers… “Ultimately, [Miller’s work] fed into a much more conservative climate that wanted to place the blame for all society’s ills on bad parenting.”
“Testing is a very flawed measure of student success.”
Gee, I wonder why?
Could it be that it is not any kind of true measure whatsoever?
THE most misleading concept/term in education is “measuring student achievement” or “measuring student learning” or “student success.” The concept has been misleading educators into deluding themselves that the teaching and learning process can be analyzed/assessed using “scientific” methods which are actually pseudo-scientific at best and at worst a complete bastardization of rationo-logical thinking and language usage.
There never has been and never will be any “measuring” of the teaching and learning process and what each individual student learns in their schooling. There is and always has been assessing, evaluating, judging of what students learn but never a true “measuring” of it.
But, but, but, you’re trying to tell me that the supposedly august and venerable APA, AERA and/or the NCME have been wrong for more than the last 50 years, disseminating falsehoods and chimeras??
Who are you to question the authorities in testing???
Yes, they have been wrong and I (and many others, Wilson, Hoffman etc. . . ) question those authorities and challenge them (or any of you other advocates of the malpractices that are standards and testing) to answer to the following onto-epistemological analysis:
The TESTS MEASURE NOTHING, quite literally when you realize what is actually happening with them. Richard Phelps, a staunch standardized test proponent (he has written at least two books defending the standardized testing malpractices) in the introduction to “Correcting Fallacies About Educational and Psychological Testing” unwittingly lets the cat out of the bag with this statement:
“Physical tests, such as those conducted by engineers, can be standardized, of course [why of course of course], but in this volume , we focus on the measurement of latent (i.e., nonobservable) mental, and not physical, traits.” [my addition]
Notice how he is trying to assert by proximity that educational standardized testing and the testing done by engineers are basically the same, in other words a “truly scientific endeavor”. The same by proximity is not a good rhetorical/debating technique.
Since there is no agreement on a standard unit of learning, there is no exemplar of that standard unit and there is no measuring device calibrated against said non-existent standard unit, how is it possible to “measure the nonobservable”?
THE TESTS MEASURE NOTHING for how is it possible to “measure” the nonobservable with a non-existing measuring device that is not calibrated against a non-existing standard unit of learning?????
PURE LOGICAL INSANITY!
The basic fallacy of this is the confusing and conflating metrological (metrology is the scientific study of measurement) measuring and measuring that connotes assessing, evaluating and judging. The two meanings are not the same and confusing and conflating them is a very easy way to make it appear that standards and standardized testing are “scientific endeavors”-objective and not subjective like assessing, evaluating and judging.
That supposedly objective results are used to justify discrimination against many students for their life circumstances and inherent intellectual traits.
C’mon test supporters, have at the analysis, poke holes in it, tell me where I’m wrong!
I’m expecting that I’ll still be hearing the crickets and cicadas of tinnitus instead of reading any rebuttal or refutation.
Here we go again. Schools are trauma factories. Trauma is everywhere. Teachers should quit it with their abusive academics and put therapy first. We’re certainly on that course in our district. The tsunami of make-believe SEL (social emotional learning) curricula has hit us hard. It seems every staff meeting and professional development involves ritual invocations of students’ emotional needs (we rarely hear about their need to learn anything). Are kids especially traumatized these days? I do think the push to elicit high-level thinking feats without providing a foundation for knowledge does create stress. But no one is talking about dismantling this pillar of contemporary education orthodoxy. And sadistic classmates create stress –but we’re not supposed to talk about that form of oppression. Instead the plan seems to be to even further marginalize actual learning of information by injecting more and more therapy into school. SEL means, effectively, that every teacher is a therapist. A very ineffective therapist. But I think that is a role many teachers crave –it gratifies their emotional needs even if it does little for the students. Anti-intellectualism continues its march in America.
Thank you. If I here one more principal or teacher or chancellor mention “social-emotional learning” or “trauma-informed teaching” I will throw up. I’ve done several virtual high school tours and the talk about trauma dominates while academics is beyond an afterthought. If I didn’t know beforehand, I would have thought they were schools designed specifically for emotionally disturbed students or victims of trauma.
What the heck is going on with our schools? Could it be an existential crisis –the anti-knowledge, anti-academic disease is so far progressed that we’re desperately latching on to amateur therapy as our new raison d’etre? Have teachers themselves learned so little in their undergrad seminars in wokeness that they have nothing to give kids except emotional support and cultivation of grievances? Or is it that our dreadful, a**-backward attempts to get kids to act like experts without giving them the elements of knowledge first so agitates and depresses students that there DOES appear to be an ongoing mental health crisis when teachers look out across their classrooms? Or is it that the culture of the Barnes and Noble self-help section has so permeated the minds of teachers that that’s what they’re best prepared to dish out? Or is a combo of all?
If I had to sum it up in the fewest possible words, I’d say: critical theory.
See my above post, “As Brit psychology prof Lynn Segal comments (in Guardian 4/20/05 article ‘Suffer the Little Children), “Blaming parents nearly always boils down to blaming mothers… “Ultimately, [Miller’s work] fed into a much more conservative climate that wanted to place the blame for all society’s ills on bad parenting.”
Not to belabor it, but I started getting angry since I posted that yesterday. Do you hear the echo? “a much more conservative climate that wanted to place the blame for all society’s ills on bad [cross out ‘parenting’, replace with ‘teaching.’” Psychoanalysis brought us blaming society’s ills on the mother. This was still in full swing when I took college psych courses in the mid- ‘60’s. E.g., homosexuality was presented in the unit on “deviant psychology,” & Mom got full blame (provided she was paired with a ‘passive’ father, i.e., unequal to the task of compensating for Bad Mom). With Miller we have to take the bad with the good: she pioneered in defining childhood trauma & its legacy, but piled right on in blaming Mom, carrying that on unchecked into the ‘80’s/ ‘90’s. During which D of Ed plans were hatched to blame society’s ills on “bad teaching.” As nearly 80% of America’s K12 teachers are female, it’s pretty damn easy to connect the f’ing dots.
Not to confuse Miller’s serious work with the purely political [& later debunked] “A Nation at Risk” report, designed to distract the public into blaming public schools for economic challenges unmet by govt—nor the purely commercial stds & aligned-assessments accountability movements piggy-backed thereon. All the latter simply represent govt cynically using pop-psych-social fads of the era to serve libertarian goals to shrink govt/ public goods/ taxes & thereby compete better w/rising 3rd-world economies. What is seriously energizing my anger here is that the PC pop-psych-social ideas of that era were so freaking misogynistic. And they still are.
A memorable line from Childhood Disrupted (pg.24) states that, “Well-meaning and loving parents can unintentionally do harm to a child if they are not well informed about human development …”
Yes, people know not to yell when, for instance, a baby is sleeping in the next room; but do they know about the intricacies of why not?
For example, what percentage of procreative adults specifically realize that, since it cannot fight or flight, a baby stuck in a crib on its back hearing parental discord in the next room can only “move into a third neurological state, known as a ‘freeze’ state … This freeze state is a trauma state” (pg.123). This causes its brain to improperly develop; and if allowed to continue, it’s the helpless infant’s starting point towards a childhood, adolescence and (in particular) adulthood in which its brain uncontrollably releases potentially damaging levels of inflammation-promoting stress hormones and chemicals, even in non-stressful daily routines.
How many potential parents are aware it’s the unpredictability of a stressor, and not the intensity, that does the most harm?
When the stressor “is completely predictable, even if it is more traumatic—such as giving a [laboratory] rat a regularly scheduled foot shock accompanied by a sharp, loud sound—the stress does not create these exact same [negative] brain changes.” (pg.42)
Also, how many of us are aware that, since young children completely rely on their parents for protection and sustenance, they will understandably stress over having their parents angry at them for prolonged periods of time?
I know I didn’t know any of this until I researched the topic for the specifics.
Yet, general society continues to misguidedly perceive and therefore practice human reproductive rights as though we’ll somehow, in blind anticipation, be innately inclined to sufficiently understand and appropriately nurture our children’s naturally developing minds and needs.
A psychologically sound as well as a physically healthy future should be all children’s foremost right—especially considering the very troubled world into which they never asked to enter—and therefore basic child development science and rearing should be learned long before the average person has their first child.
By not teaching this to high school students, is it not as though societally we’re implying that anyone can comfortably enough go forth with unconditionally bearing children with whatever minute amount, if any at all, of such vital knowledge they happen to have acquired over time?
Such curriculum would enable our young people to understand (even if just the basics) how the child’s mind develops. Therefore, they could understand how (with curriculum examples) a seemingly-minute yet consequential flaw in rearing/environment, perhaps something commonly practiced/experienced, can have negative lasting effects on the child’s sponge-like brain/psyche.
Yes, such curriculum can sound invasive, especially to parents distrustful of the public education system, but I really believe it’s in our future generations’ best interests.
“It has been said that if child abuse and neglect were to disappear today, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual would shrink to the size of a pamphlet in two generations, and the prisons would empty. Or, as Bernie Siegel, MD, puts it, quite simply, after half a century of practicing medicine, ‘I have become convinced that our number-one public health problem is our childhood’.” (pg.228)
[Frank Sterle Jr.]
Interesting post and food for thought, thanks for sharing.