Is Common Core Causing Drug Abuse in Children?
Alfonso Sanchez
Business Owner at Pacific Shore FCC and Founder at EduCenter News
What’s the Problem?
Tens of thousands of children die each year from a drug overdose, according to statistics provided by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Many of those children did not start with illegal drugs but were medicated by physicians with prescription drugs for ADHD, Anxiety, and antipsychotics. These drugs can be highly addicting and could be detrimental to a child’s cognitive development. What’s worse is that more and more children are being misdiagnosed with ADHD each year and improperly medicated because they are unable to sit quietly in a classroom for eight hours a day, five days a week. Is it the kids who have a problem or is the expectation unrealistic and unnecessary?
The CDC put out a statistic declaring that “The estimated number of children diagnosed with ADHD, according to a national 2016 parent survey, is 6.1 million.” That is more children diagnosed with ADHD than there are people in 8 states combined from Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Delaware, Rhode Island, and Montana. That is an alarming number of children but when you look at the symptoms physicians determine as signs of ADHD, it makes you question whether all of these children truly have a legitimate case of ADHD. Here is a list of the signs of ADHD in children:
- daydream a lot
- forget or lose things a lot
- squirm or fidget
- talk too much
- make careless mistakes or take unnecessary risks
- have a hard time resisting temptation
- have trouble taking turns
- have difficulty getting along with others
As a father of three young children and an educator, I’d venture to say those are symptoms of any child with an imagination. It would be more concerning if a child was not exhibiting those kinds of behaviors. Now those children are misbehaving in class because they cannot sit still through an hour-long lecture or silent sustained reading and are sent to the doctors for a diagnosis. In the words of Sir Ken Robinson, educational thinker, and author, “These kids are being medicated as routinely as we have our tonsils taken out and on the same whimsical basis.” He is not wrong for saying so according to the CDC, which writes, “A national parent survey from 2016 reported on medication and behavioral treatment for children 2–17 years of age with current ADHD: 62% were taking ADHD medication, 77% were receiving behavioral treatment and medication.” But they aren’t just being treated for ADHD because most children with ADHD are also being medicated for anxiety or other mental health issues. Here is the statistic from CDC, “According to a national 2016 parent survey, 6 in 10 children with ADHD had at least one other mental, emotional, or behavioral disorder. This includes behavior disorder, anxiety, and depression.” So these poor kids are on multiple meds just so they can sit still and focus in class. Is that a price worth paying for their education?
To read more about ADHD Statistics from CDC website click below:
As if that weren’t enough of a problem, unfortunately, it gets worse; but it will get better soon… I promise. Not only are these children being improperly diagnosed and medicated, but it is also costing our government millions of dollars to provide behavioral programs and instructional assistants for most of the children diagnosed with ADHD. This number is also taken from the CDC website, “Most children with ADHD receive some types of services. Almost 9 out of 10 children had received school support, which includes school accommodations and help in the classroom.” For you math scholars, that is 90% of children with ADHD receiving additional support and help in the classroom; and for what, being a little more energetic and imaginative? The ADHD problem is symptomatic of a larger issue about our education system in America and schools are throwing money away on bandaids rather than preventing children from being medicated. Money should be invested in creating a new approach to how we teach children, reinstating the arts, and reevaluating the goals for education so no child is truly left behind
How Did This Happen?
ADHD is on the rise but we have seen a more consistent rise over the past decade, in comparison with the last century. Teachers are finding more children exhibiting challenging behaviors than ever before. Children are dropping out of school at a 70% rate in inner cities. So what has happened in the past decade that may be triggering this seeming epidemic?
In 2001, the Bush Administration passed the No Child Left Behind Act in an attempt to help minorities perform better in school and improve standards on teacher qualifications, but unfortunately, the results led to the underfunding of schools and a focus on standardization. Grace Chen, of the Public School Review, writes:
“Another issue leading to the No Child Left Behind controversy is the fact that some teachers have felt pressured to focus on subjects rated by the No Child Left Behind testing requirements, rather than focusing on providing children with a well-rounded education. Some schools have been accused of cutting back on studies involving science and the arts to increase the focus on English and math. As a result, some complain education isn’t really improving; it just means sacrificing one subject proficiency for another.”
In 2009, the Obama Administration passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which strong-armed many states into implementing the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) by withholding federal grants to those who would not use the CCSS. The Common Core State Standards were designed to improve global test scores and prepare students for college but we have seen the opposite as a result. The results of our last PISA score indicate that we are behind 30 other states in math and reading, which are ironically the focus of the CCSS. In an opinion piece for the Chronicle of Higher Education, Kirwan, White, and Zimpher write, “Many of us in higher education have observed an increasing number of students arriving at our doorstep not fully prepared to pursue a college degree. This is our collective problem as a nation.” Both of the administrations failed to recognize the systematic problem with our education and managed to make it even more oppressive for children through standardized testing. Sir Ken Robinson made the observation, “It seems to me, it’s not a coincidence totally, that the instance for ADHD has risen in parallel with the growth of standardized testing.”
Another reason why children are having such difficulty staying focused in school is that the model behind our educational values and system hasn’t changed since the Industrial Revolution. Sir Ken Robinson speaks on this when he states:
“The current education system was designed and conceived for a different age. The intellectual culture was formed in the Enlightenment, while the economic circumstance was designed for the Industrial Revolution…We have an education modeled on the interest of industrialization and in the image of it.”
The implications of an education system modeled for an industrial area are that some students are going to excel and become intellectuals or smarts, and those who do not succeed in school will be workers or not-smarts. But we are living in the technological age, where children are stimulated by electronics and have access to all knowledge through the internet. Schools are teaching children to practice rote memorization without retention so that 60% of children don’t feel that what they are learning is valuable in the real world. So they begin to check out, talk to their neighbor, goof off in class, and get into trouble. To keep kids in line, they will be medicated but that is counterproductive.
“These kids are given Adderall and Ritalin and all matter of things, often quite dangerous drugs, to get them focused and calm them down… Anesthetic shut your senses off, deaden yourself to what is happening. And a lot of these drugs do just that. We are getting our children through education by anesthetizing them.”
We need to reinvent education so that kids awaken to their best most creative selves by their teachers and find value in learning again, rather than being medicated to sit down and shut up.
How Can We Fix It?
Many jobs that most children are being groomed for will be automated by the time they graduate, so we ought to be preparing them for jobs that computers can’t do such as the arts, innovating, and humanities. Sir Ken Robinson states when talking about the arts:
“The arts address aesthetic experience, and aesthetic experience is when your senses are operating at its peak. When you're present in the current moment, you’re resonating with the excitement of this thing you’re experiencing, when you’re fully alive…We shouldn’t be putting them to sleep. We should be waking up to what they have inside of themselves.”
The arts are a way for kids to express themselves creatively and work with their hands rather than sit on them. They can collaborate, talk, and fidget because it is more about expression and less demanding but just as effective in developing the brain. Memorization and testing lead to inauthentic learning that leaves the moment after a test is taken. Also, children aren’t being prepared for college but for test-taking.
50 years ago, our kids were learning Greek and Latin as well as English but now our kids are failing in English. You would think with our technological advancement that we’d be getting more intelligent but our schools are stunting kids' brain development. 50 years ago kids spent more time outdoors and learned practical skills for life. As John Dewey wrote in The School and Society: Being Three Lectures (1915):
“An embryonic community life, active with types of occupations that reflect the life of the larger society and permeated throughout with the spirit of art, history, and science. When the school introduces and trains each child of society into membership within such a little community, saturating him with the spirit of service, and providing him with instruments of effective self-direction, we shall have the deepest and best guarantee of a larger society which is worthy, lovely and harmonious.”
Children need to feel that what they are learning is valuable and need the freedom to express themselves through arts and physical activity. If we were to teach children to garden, build objects, collaborate on hands-on projects, play sports, utilize technology, and encourage creative ideas while teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic, we would see more success in college or professions and fewer students being diagnosed with ADHD or behavioral disorders. Then money could be spent on extracurricular programs, teacher pay, and materials rather than fixing symptoms of a broken education. It’s time to rebuild not reform.
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