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Efforts to offer therapy at schools have failed. It's time to pull the plug.
American public education is at a crossroads.
Conservative education reformers have made real gains in recent years, on school choice — now universal in 18 states — parental rights, ideology and bureaucracy. As a result, we’re barreling towards what the American Enterprise Institute’s Robert Pondiscio predicts will be an “unprecedented crack-up” of public education.
If the old education model is to enter its last days — if, as Pondiscio says, “we’ve hit and passed ‘peak public school’” — conservative reformers need to set their sights on their next goal. And that goal should be fighting school-based mental health treatment — another woke, wasteful, ineffective idea that’s reduced accountability in schools.
These programs date back to the early 20th century, when progressive reformers urged schools to promote mental health, train teachers to recognize signs of distress, and locate health clinics in schools. If schools could identify problems early and deliver treatment widely, reformers promised, mental illnesses could be prevented; academic and behavioral problems might improve, too.
In the ensuing century, periodic proclamations of looming mental health crises, tragedies like school shootings, and expensive, bipartisan spending efforts have caused school mental health programs to explode. Today, nearly all public schools — 97 percent — offer some form of mental health services, like counseling and talk therapy, universal screening, wellness programming, referrals, or telehealth. The number of school counselors and school psychologists is more than four times the number of clinical psychologists and psychiatrists in a given community.
Continue reading the entire piece here at The Daily Wire (paywall)
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Carolyn D. Gorman is a Paulson Policy Analyst at the Manhattan Institute.