Tag / adhd

by nflanagan

Are Schools the Problem?

I was somewhere between irritated and curious when I saw the headline: America’s Children Are Unwell. Are Schools Part of the Problem? The subhead: From A.D.H.D. to anxiety, disorders have risen as the expectations of childhood have changed.

Well, yeah. A.D.H.D. is now better defined and diagnosed. And I certainly believe that anxiety is on the rise with our youngest people—their world came crashing down five years ago with a global pandemic.

Although I don’t think the subhead writers were thinking of this, anxiety must be through the roof for children of the undocumented, attending school while praying that their mom will come home after work and that they will still be citizens after the Supreme Court gets another whack at the Fourteenth amendment.

But have our expectations of children really changed? And are schools at fault?

Annoying headline aside, there’s a lot of alarming data in the article:

‘One million more children were diagnosed with A.D.H.D. in 2022 than in 2016. The numbers on autism are so shocking that they are worth repeating. In the early 1980s, one in 2,500 children had an autism diagnosis. That figure is now one in 31. Nearly 32 percent of adolescents have been diagnosed at some point with anxiety; the median age of “onset” is 6 years old. More than one in 10 adolescents have experienced a major depressive disorder, according to some estimates.’

It’s actually an informative read. Diane Ravitch deftly reviewed the piece in a blog post entitled Our Pressure Cooker Schools Are Destroying Children and Childhood. In fact, people have been writing about the ever-growing pressure on kids to excel for decades (especially those in high schools where getting into the Ivies or considering a gap year is common).

A couple of decades ago, ironically, we were talking about high-pressure Asian schools and why Singapore topped the international test scores. Was that what our kids needed—a literal kick in the pants? More competition? And why wasn’t the school providing that?

Here’s the thing: Schools in general—more about that word in a minute—aren’t the cause of students’ mental health issues. Schools do what they can with what they’re given, and what they are directed to do, for the most part.

First, a “school” is not precisely defined. Let’s say a good school has competent teachers, capable and cooperative support staff, thoughtful administrators, a clean and safe facility and enough resources to serve the kids assigned there. Those features can all be undone by bad policies and the social factors surrounding the school.

When the halls are lined with buckets catching snowmelt, when there is no library or science equipment, when one of the children hid a gun in his backpack—where do we place blame? On voters who turned down the school bond issue? On the beleaguered principal? The careless parents who set a bad example? State legislatures that take money away from high-poverty public schools and give it to those who can afford private schools?

To say that “schools” are responsible for an uptick in mental health issues for students is not only unfair—it’s not accurate. The world—especially in 2025—is a scary place. For many (not all, but many) kids, school is the safest place for them to be, and I include in that number children who live in nice houses and have plenty to eat.

Have our expectations for children changed? Yes, and often in damaging ways.

Just talk to teachers. They’ll tell you that kindergarten is the new first grade. They’ll share stories of kids whose behavior is driven by shame and frustration. They’ll tell you that 15 minutes of outdoor play is a benefit, not a waste of time better used on worksheets. They’ll testify that building a cooperative community is always the first step toward learning, in pre-school and in chemistry class. They can tell stories about seeing kids work through an academic roadblock, with patience and humor—not shaming and blaming.

Veteran teachers will also pinpoint the time at which screen time and access to inappropriate, even dangerous, content began to change the way kids talk to and about each other.

Maybe we start addressing mental health issues by understanding just what it is that is making children anxious and distracted, and putting our attention and resources there.

 Don’t misunderstand—I’m not saying that schools (in addition to all the other jobs they’re expected to do) can “fix” a child with failing mental health. But schools can be a significant factor in contributing to a child’s sense of security, belonging and worth.

by nflanagan

A Veteran Teacher’s Thoughts about ADHD

I can remember the first time I heard about ADHD. It was in the early 1990s—and the person who was educating me was the mother of one of my students. His teachers—six of us, plus an admin—were sitting around a table, meeting to discuss his classroom behaviors (not good), when she whipped out stapled packets of articles on ADD.

He’d been officially diagnosed, and she was part of a parent support group, which provided materials for teachers. The packets she gave us were thick—maybe 50 pages—and filled with scientific-sounding information about diagnosis and treatment of this disease, then thought to apply to perhaps three percent of all students.

Reading through it (rather than round-filing it, as a couple of colleagues did), you could see what was coming. The Attention-Deficit Era had begun. He wasn’t hyperactive or oppositional-defiant, or a troublemaker. Not anymore. He had ADD.

Let me say, upfront, that I believe ADHD is a real thing, and using medication judiciously to treat it is often a lifesaver for parents and teachers. Let me also say that the way some classrooms operate is not conducive to deep learning for a range of students who need lots of movement and hands-on activities. And—side note– this is often not their teachers’ fault, given our increasing national focus on testing, compliance and narrowing the curriculum. Raising the damned bar.

I was horrified to read in Paul Tough’s excellent piece in the NY Times Magazine, Have We Been Thinking About A.D.H.D. All Wrong?  that nearly a quarter of 17-year old boys in the United States have now been diagnosed as having ADHD. Tough does a good job of tracking the factors—drug treatments, specifically—that have made one in four boys unable to focus in a quiet classroom without chemical assistance.

He rightfully notes that ADHD symptoms also look like a lot of other things: anxiety, head injury, lead exposure and many other traumas.

But the piece ends on a hopeful note, with lots of testimony from young adult men who have found the right jobs and life circumstances and seldom experience troublesome ADHD symptoms. Which makes me ponder what there is about school that makes the kids we used to call hyperactive need drugs to get by every day, even though the medicines don’t improve their learning.

“Believing the problem lay in their environments rather than solely in themselves helped individuals allay feelings of inadequacy: Characterizing A.D.H.D. as a personality trait rather than a disorder, they saw themselves as different rather than defective.”

The kid whose mother insisted he had a disease, rather than merely being disobedient? He was, in fact, hyperactive and prone to (cheerfully) destroying order in a classroom. Once, while I was moving band equipment, chairs and stands across the hall from the band room for an assembly in the gym, I instructed him to load percussion equipment on a flat pushcart. (Teacher tip: Always give restless students an important job.)  

Instead, he assembled the drum set on the cart, then had another kid push him down the hall while he pounded out a little Metallica. Down the hall—and past the office. It didn’t end well for either of us. He wasn’t a bad drummer, by the way. According to mom, it was his favorite class.

I looked him up on internet, and he’s now a multimillion-selling real estate agent. Go figure.

I taught for two more decades after that day I first heard of ADD. Lots more students were diagnosed with ADD, over time—then, ADHD. My colleagues and I talked often about accurate language, and accurate diagnoses, and the differences in kids when they were medicated. Sometimes, parents let teachers know their child had been diagnosed—sometimes, they didn’t.

I took kids to camp and on field trips where I had to administer their ADHD medications, or have conversations with their concerned parents about behavior issues when they were unmedicated—at an evening performance or band camp.

And I often felt grateful that I was teaching band, with 65 students at once, all holding noisemakers. There was a lot of stimulation in the band room, plenty of activity. There was also discipline (because otherwise there would be chaos), but my attention-deficit kids could tolerate rules and procedures, as long as they were moving and doing things. Mostly.

I also taught 7th grade math for two years. I found that maintaining student focus with 28 students in a desks-and-chalkboard setting was often way more difficult than keeping 60 band kids on track.

Read Paul Tough’s piece, if you get a chance. It’s nuanced and layered with contradictions, like most things about schooling, and raising healthy children. We could be doing lots more for kids who are immersed in screens and entertainment daily, and have difficulty staying on task when that task involves paper and pencils.

But then—we could be doing a lot more for many kids, who bring their various backgrounds and issues to school. If only we had the resources. And a genuine commitment to the next generation.

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