Nudge, push, shove into the Common Core
Somewhere on the road to the Common Core, schools ceased to be about the proverbial 3r's and transformed into high-stakes testing factories with a mental health wing stocked with administrators who take an unusual interest in your child's emotional and social growth. They get to decide whose kid is okay and whose is not. Worrisome in times when local control and accountability in our public schools is rapidly slipping away.
A disconcerting number of school-aged children, mostly boys, are being diagnosed with ADHD: 13.2 to 5.6 percent, boys to girls. Quite the ratio. Parents should be in an uproar. These kids are assigned IEPs (Individual Education Plans) even when they have no learning issues.
Originally, back in the ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) days, accommodations for students were made as they related to learning. When the new and improved ADD was repackaged as ADHD, and it made quite the comeback -- with a much broader "spectrum" that included "classifications." Inattentive. Hyperactive. Impulsive. Any combination of one or more of these three and their many descriptive characteristics meant that school district administrators could step in and take charge of your child's psychological well-being. Distracted? Depressed? Low self-esteem? Bossy? You may have ADHD. Argumentative? Tuned out? Daydreaming? Slob? Fidgety? Multi-tasker? Risk-taker? Lousy in math? You may have ADHD. Can't "focus"? Yup, ADHD. Is it ever remotely possible that the kid's bored? Or just burnt out? You know that high stakes NCLB (No Child Left Behind) nee CCSS (Common Core State Standards) style of assessment learning often means there's a test every day, Monday through Friday.
We are now a nation united by disorders in a time when authority figures can slap a label on any a child who may act or think ever-so-differently, a child who has a different kind of mind, a child who does not conform right down to his very core. Sadly, the Common Core's data-mining is madness -- gathering, monitoring, and documenting our children leaving a fingerprint on the record of the rest of their lives -- even more so when your child's on an IEP. That information is regularly updated and shadows students around for as long as the plan is active. One can only wonder to what extend it may hover your child's life in the Common Core culture. Active or not.
But don't worry. The intellectuals have come up with a list to make you feel better about your kid being diagnosed with ADHD. Some very prominent folks have had it too: Thomas Alva Edison, Albert Einstein, Beethoven, Henry David Thoreau, Tolstoy, Socrates, Lord Byron, Mark Twain, DaVinci, Christopher Columbus, Benjamin Franklin, Galileo, William Randolph Hearst, Hitchcock, Napoleon and Nostradamus, and these are only the dead people on the list, the people who had no idea they had ADHD when they were alive because there was no ADHD. Did you know that the ADHD mind has been said to look, when mapped, like the highly creative and/or genius mind? There are even pediatricians who find that by the teen years, quite a lot of kids "grow out of ADHD." How do you grow out of a mental and emotional disturbance? So, is ADHD really real? Or is ADHD being used as a tool to get a child to conform to an agenda? To the Core?
Many of us recall elementary school as fun. A place to learn, grow and expand. Some of us even remember high school as the place we learned to think. Not how to think. Not what to think. Just think. How many of our own kids have said, "I love learning but I hate school." Is that because school has changed or are all our children just brain damaged?
So, how is it possible to have so many kids diagnosed with ADHD? Well, when the spectrum is redefined, shifted and whittled away enough, you can bet your bottom tax dollar that you too will have ADHD. I fear that if the spectrum gets any broader, ADHD will soon include sneezing and diarrhea.
How long before the line between what is now considered a disorder and what we traditionally recognize as clinical insanity ceases to exist at all?
In addition to City on a Hill, Merrill Hope is a contributing writer at Save America Foundation, and has freelanced at the Hollywood Reporter, Backstage West, & Lady Patriots. She's married, the mother of a teenager (God help her!) & a dachshund lover. Follow her at Merrill Hope @outoftheboxmom.
This article originally appeared on http://www.saveamericafoundation.com/.