Mental Health – JC Bowman

Getting to “All Means All”

October 16, 2018 by JC Bowman, posted in JC Bowman, Leadership, Professional Educators of Tennessee, Professional Learning

To build the education system that the 21st century demands, says Professor Paul Reville, we have to look at what’s failed in our attempts to reform the 20th-century education system we’re still living with.

Speaking at the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Bold Ideas & Critical Conversations event on September 19, Reville summarized the ways in which our current system is failing to meet the promise of excellence and equity in education. Despite more than 20 years of intense reform efforts, there is still “an iron-law correlation between socioeconomic status and educational achievement and attainment.”

Charting a new pathway toward “all means all,” Reville outlined eight broad ideas that both assess and take us beyond today’s shortcomings:

There is now a happy coincidence, Reville said, between what we ought to do and what is in our economic interest to do, which is to educate each and every one of our students to a high standard — to educate them for success in employment, citizenship, family life, and as lifelong learners.
Schooling alone is insufficient; it is too weak an intervention to overcome the disadvantages of poverty. “We want a society in which demographics are not destiny,” Reville said, noting that the work to meet that ideal has only just begun.
Our current system is outmoded, he continued, citing short school days and a one-size-fits-all approach. “We have a batch-processing, mass-production model of education that served us very well if we wanted to achieve a society in which we were sending a lot of people into low-skill, low-knowledge jobs,” Reville said. “But for high-skill, high-knowledge jobs in a post-industrial information age, we need a very different system.”
We need a new design — a new way to integrate systems of education and child development that delivers on the goal of preparing each and every student for success.
To get there, “we’re going to need to differentiate,” Reville said. We need a system that meets every child where he or she is, and gives them tools to be successful at each stage of their education.
We must become more intentional in mitigating the issues in children’s lives outside of school that get in the way of their success in school. He argues that we need to braid systems of health, mental health, and education, taking steps to build social and emotional learning and resiliency.
We have to increase access to out-of-school learning for all students. “Affluent families are doing more than ever before in the 80 percent of children’s lives [spent] outside of school to enrich their children’s education. Disadvantaged families can do less and less,” Reville said.
All of these needs and priorities are feeding into the creation of the Education Redesign Lab, a new initiative at HGSE that aims to spearhead a national conversation about how we will build a new system of education and child development that finally delivers on the promise of excellence and equity. Reville envisions a national design process that will bring together all of these elements of reform and create “a visionary blueprint for 21st-century education.”

***

Credit to Usable Knowledge at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Website: www.gse.harvard.edu/uk.

School Culture And Chronic Behavior Problems

September 27, 2018 by JC Bowman, posted in Educators, JC Bowman, Leadership, Professional Educators of Tennessee

High School Classroom

School culture is the set of core values that shapes patterns of behavior, attitudes, and expectations in a school. For educators it can be associated with morale, job satisfaction, and effectiveness, as well as to student learning, achievement, and school safety. The culture in a school can support or limit student learning. Engaged students rarely cause discipline problems.

If we want to develop all children into healthy and productive citizens, we must also develop their essential social, emotional, and intellectual skills. This means we need to address some of the more critical issues many educators in our public schools face: chronic discipline issues with students with behavior issues that cannot be easily addressed in a classroom setting, with an non-supportive school climate.

Our state and local policies must consider a very tiered approach to student discipline. Good policies should be grounded on a plan developed by educators in the district, on a school by school basis, if needed. A one-size-fits-all approach is unlikely to work. For more concrete suggestions, visit our website and view our Backgrounder for ideas and strategies for schools and districts.

Schools and districts must develop, implement, and regularly evaluate a school-wide disciplinary plan to ensure that it employs research-based strategies that have been shown to reduce the number of disciplinary referrals. Expectations for behavior and consequences for misbehavior should be clearly defined, easily understood, and well publicized to faculty, staff, students, and parents. Parents/guardians must be partners in reinforcing positive behaviors at school.

Suspensions, alternative school placements, and expulsions should not be a first step in student discipline. However, it must be included as an option and deterrent to chronic behavior issues. There are also some behaviors that may warrant more severe punishment. The underlying principle: all students and educators should feel safe in their classrooms. All districts should look to enhance their behavioral programs, including mental health, bullying, and suicide prevention programming, and systems.

Clarksville-Montgomery County School System (CMCSS) has implemented an innovative and more comprehensive effort to address some of these issues, which could be a model for other districts in the state. It has been a long-term initiative of Professional Educators of Tennessee to address the growing behavior problems in all of our schools, assist social workers, and identify support for parents. More importantly, we don’t want to lose our best and most highly qualified educators due to the stress of the environment with increased behavioral problems and disciplinary action.

[View/Download PDF]

#####

JC Bowman is the Executive Director of Professional Educators of Tennessee, a non-partisan teacher association headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is hereby granted, provided that the author and the association are properly cited. For more information on this subject or any education issue please contact Professional Educators of Tennessee.

I Don’t Like Mondays

February 26, 2018April 22, 2021 by JC Bowman, posted in JC Bowman, Mental Health, Professional Educators of Tennessee

Research records the very first school shooting incident in the United States occurred in Greencastle, Pennsylvania at Enoch Brown School in 1764. The first school shooting I can recall was carried out by Brenda Ann Spencer in 1979. Spencer killed two and wounded eight at Grover Cleveland Elementary School in San Diego, California. When asked by a reporter why she shot at the school, she heartlessly replied “I don’t like Mondays.” The Boomtown Rats popularized that phrase into a song. Most people probably never knew the background.

We, as a society, romanticize depression, violence and death on social media and in video games. Then politicians and talking heads on television and radio pontificate on issues that many really do not understand and are unwilling to confront. Unfortunately, we live in a culture which devalues life where we become fascinated by one event and we do not see the long-term effect. We are then free to move on, leaving families and communities in real pain still struggling for real answers.

We have to bravely confront mental health issues. Social media in particular has gone from support of people who are clinically depressed to glamorizing the ideas of sadness. Samara Khan writing in Ethos News points out that “depression is a very real, and often very debilitating mental illness that starkly contrasts with the pretty pastel photos on social media.” Dr. Mark Reinecke, chief psychologist at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, told The Atlantic: “During the vulnerable years during which adolescents seek out self-affirmation and recognition from others, this new, easy promise of being recognized as strong, beautiful, and mysterious…can be very tempting.” Reinecke concludes “Too often, it just leads to more teenagers believing and feeling they are depressed, self-pitying, self-harming.”

Sheriff Scott Israel, of Broward County, Florida is pleading with lawmakers to give police and doctors more power to involuntarily hospitalize people for psychiatric evaluation over violent and threatening social media posts. However, the reality is many mental health professionals cannot even get a person with active psychosis and suicidal ideation hospitalized. Our current health care situation forces hospitals to turn people away because they are over-crowded, understaffed, underfunded, and have no authority to keep anyone anymore. We need to strengthen our laws and focus on mental health. In addition, more guidance counselors in schools and increased professional development for all teachers to help identify problem students should be considered.

The majority of school shootings are done by males. Researchers seemingly cannot understand why this occurs. We don’t dare address the topic of the psychological castration of the modern male or to combat what the academic world calls “toxic masculinity.” Author and philosopher Christina Hoff Sommers has repeatedly challenged the issue for nearly two decades. Sommers noted a Bureau of Justice Statistics report on the decline in violence at schools, is at a historic low. She observed “that while violence may be built into the core of a small coterie of sociopathic boys, most boys are not sociopathic. As far back as 1965 Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan called attention to the social dangers of raising boys without benefit of a paternal presence. He wrote in a 1965 study for the Labor Department, “A community that allows a large number of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any rational expectations about the future—that community asks for and gets chaos.”

Alexa Curtis wrote in Rolling Stone: For teens who “are battling mental health issues, witnessing the end of a life” as easily as television portrayed it “could help desensitize kids to this very serious matter.” She then adds: “There will always be people who feel like they have no one to talk to, and those are the people most at risk whom we have to figure out how to reach.” Who can children talk to when they have the urge to hurt themselves or others? If the answer is nobody, then more teenagers taking their lives and the lives of others will only continue. Chances are they don’t like Mondays, they probably won’t like any other day of the week either.

JC Bowman is the Executive Director of Professional Educators of Tennessee. Professional Educators of Tennessee is a non-partisan teacher association headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is hereby granted, provided that the author and the association are properly cited.

Eight steps to building an education system that delivers on the promise of excellence and equity