This study is “a reminder that present enthusiasm for universal dissemination of short-term DBT-based group skills training within schools, specifically in adolescence, is ahead of the evidence.”
Dear KIDSFIRST: Your heart is in the right place, but your title suggests that you are completely confused about the "public" schools (which are in fact government schools) and their school boards. You must understand that:
1) The government schools are feeding troughs for corrupt vendors. With essentially unlimited public funds to be looted, the opportunity for crooks is unmatched elsewhere. For example we've had eighty years of curriculum publishers utterly destroying public school reading instruction, leading to our ongoing catastrophe in student literacy. Curriculum publishers make billions raking the government schools through one destructive fad after another. They know perfectly well that they are selling poison disguised as a cure year after year; there's no money in selling something that works (and would therefore result in districts keeping their working curricula), so the publishers' only incentive is to sell more new, improved poison disguised as a cure. See: http://mychildwillread.org/the-problem.shtml
2) The current fascination of the government schools with pseudo-psychotherapy is just another manifestation of crooks looting the system. A whole new industry has discovered the bottomless well of dollars to be sucked out of clueless taxpayers in the name of "education".
3) The most egregious looters of the government schools are the teachers' unions, which are obviously in total collusion with the other looters; our evidence for this is the degree to which the vast majority of teachers are scammed (with union cooperation) into going along with the fad of the day, whatever that might be. Yes there are naive individual teachers who earnestly believe that they are doing is for the benefit of the kids, but, like the parents, they have no idea what's going on when they're bamboozled into conforming with the fads of the system.
4) School boards have nothing to do with representing the community; rather they are PR agents for the system. Their job is to A) provide the illusion of community representation and B) rubber-stamp district policy, which is actually federal and state policy designed by the looters of the system. As with the teachers and their unions, there are occasional well-meaning, naive school board members who think they're serving the community, when in fact their hopeless naivete allows them to be easily manipulated as useful idiots.
So, you see, putting evidence of reality in front of school boards is pointless.
I agree with your assessment of the situation. However, I believe change is possible. People like Sonja Shaw in California, Ryan Walters in Oklahoma and Ron DeSantis in Florida can and do secure positions of leadership, expose the corruption, rally good citizens to get involved and help to make change, and put kids ahead of agendas.
There are school board members who see. We need to encourage them to boldness and pull the blinders off the others.
It doesn't matter how many good people there are or how much influence they seem to have. Governors are utterly powerless against this annual-$700-billion behemoth. Trying to fix the public schools is like trying to fashion a skyscraper using only materials from a landfill and a cesspool. As a reminder: "No, we are not going to fix the public schools": https://daveziffer.substack.com/p/no-we-are-not-going-to-fix-the-public
While change is possible. It will take a large portion of the population. Even those who seem to be making change, are often making changes at the cost of our liberty. Take the SOPIPA bill in Florida touted by DeSantis. This bill begins with a reinforcement of taking away Parental Rights--those parental rights that were originally protected by FERPA in 1974 requiring parental consent before data was collected or shared by third party vendors. It is just one of the loopholed and poorly devised bills "helping" children in schools. And while it seems citizens are involved, when bills are copied from other states, loopholes exist for industry, and citizen voices are COMPLETELY ignored by their representatives, it is not what it seems.
Im way late to the party on this post, but thought I’d throw this out there anyway. I was a high school teacher for 5 years, and I taught for a couple of more at the university while I was in graduate school. My wife has been a high school teacher for 14 years. Our kids will never go to school in her district because of a lot of this sort of thing. There are a lot of well-meaning individuals that buy into stuff that doesn’t work. I’m struck by the fact that I didn’t have to take a statistics course to receive my teaching degree, and I think it shows in a lot of educational programs.
The solution to pretty much every problem in schools is pretty simple - school has to be hard. A rigorous, challenging, stimulating curriculum- and the backbone and follow-through to make the students do the work - would cut out so much student downtime, which is what leads to a lot of these problems.
I was listening to a Thomas Sowell talk today about rates of STI's and teen pregnancy increasing after the intro of sex ed (after being on a downward trajectory beforehand), and a similar to relationship between poverty rates and welfare, and how this has no effect on whether the programs continue or not.
Four schools, one city, 1000 participants that were not randomly assigned to the experimental / control groups. No “placebo”intervention for the control group (just normal classes). Poor experimental design means this is probably a big nothing-burger.
Negative outcomes in the treatment group could simply arise from children knowing they’d been non-randomly assigned to a “therapy-treatment” group, and probably wondering why. If I’m an adolescent, I’m ruminating on that fact and getting depressed, too.
Negative outcomes (even from being assigned to something) that is supposed to be producing positive outcomes isn't a nothing burger. The intervention that is supposed to do something good, didn't.
At the very least the program should be halted and treated with skepticism. It definitely isn't something to be waved away and the rollout continued.
Non random assignment of individuals to the treatment group, plus the lack of adequate controls, means the results (positive or negative or big or small or whatever) could have nothing to do with the treatment program itself. It’s quite possible that all the students marked for the treatment group shared something in common that increased their likelihood of poor mental health outcomes at the end, independent of receiving the treatment.
This matters if schools are looking at this as a way of justifying expanding the programme out to EVERY student. And this is precisely why you are so concerned by apparent negative outcomes. However, the study says precisely nothing about what would happen if everyone received the treatment. You don’t need to be concerned on the basis of this poor study. Concerned out of an abundance of caution, maybe, but not out of an abundance of evidence. This isn’t that.
Because the negative treatment outcome could be due to the stigma of being (and being seen to be) treated, it could disappear if you treated everyone (ie no stigma). That’s my point.
For what it’s worth, you and I both probably agree that getting borderline depressed teens to “focus on their feelings” and self-ruminate probably isn’t good for them. Sadly, this study was designed so poorly that it doesn’t have a lot to say on the matter. It contributes little at all, other than confusion and bad stats.
This was interesting. I didn't think this would be the case. What do you think the answer is? Focus more on self-care techniques like problem solving, meditation, yoga, exercise?
Focus more on actually getting things done. Most therapy promotes self-reflection. While this can be useful for adults, most teenagers simply turn it into rumination and obsessive self-criticism. The most useful skill for adolescent mental health is learning objective skills that permit meaningful accomplishment in the real world in an area where failure is a distinct possibility.
Achieving a goal is vastly better for adolescent mental health than "self-care." That said, exercise can be incredibly helpful if it's framed as working towards achieving a goal rather than "self care."
Dear KIDSFIRST: Your heart is in the right place, but your title suggests that you are completely confused about the "public" schools (which are in fact government schools) and their school boards. You must understand that:
1) The government schools are feeding troughs for corrupt vendors. With essentially unlimited public funds to be looted, the opportunity for crooks is unmatched elsewhere. For example we've had eighty years of curriculum publishers utterly destroying public school reading instruction, leading to our ongoing catastrophe in student literacy. Curriculum publishers make billions raking the government schools through one destructive fad after another. They know perfectly well that they are selling poison disguised as a cure year after year; there's no money in selling something that works (and would therefore result in districts keeping their working curricula), so the publishers' only incentive is to sell more new, improved poison disguised as a cure. See: http://mychildwillread.org/the-problem.shtml
2) The current fascination of the government schools with pseudo-psychotherapy is just another manifestation of crooks looting the system. A whole new industry has discovered the bottomless well of dollars to be sucked out of clueless taxpayers in the name of "education".
3) The most egregious looters of the government schools are the teachers' unions, which are obviously in total collusion with the other looters; our evidence for this is the degree to which the vast majority of teachers are scammed (with union cooperation) into going along with the fad of the day, whatever that might be. Yes there are naive individual teachers who earnestly believe that they are doing is for the benefit of the kids, but, like the parents, they have no idea what's going on when they're bamboozled into conforming with the fads of the system.
4) School boards have nothing to do with representing the community; rather they are PR agents for the system. Their job is to A) provide the illusion of community representation and B) rubber-stamp district policy, which is actually federal and state policy designed by the looters of the system. As with the teachers and their unions, there are occasional well-meaning, naive school board members who think they're serving the community, when in fact their hopeless naivete allows them to be easily manipulated as useful idiots.
So, you see, putting evidence of reality in front of school boards is pointless.
I agree with your assessment of the situation. However, I believe change is possible. People like Sonja Shaw in California, Ryan Walters in Oklahoma and Ron DeSantis in Florida can and do secure positions of leadership, expose the corruption, rally good citizens to get involved and help to make change, and put kids ahead of agendas.
There are school board members who see. We need to encourage them to boldness and pull the blinders off the others.
It doesn't matter how many good people there are or how much influence they seem to have. Governors are utterly powerless against this annual-$700-billion behemoth. Trying to fix the public schools is like trying to fashion a skyscraper using only materials from a landfill and a cesspool. As a reminder: "No, we are not going to fix the public schools": https://daveziffer.substack.com/p/no-we-are-not-going-to-fix-the-public
While change is possible. It will take a large portion of the population. Even those who seem to be making change, are often making changes at the cost of our liberty. Take the SOPIPA bill in Florida touted by DeSantis. This bill begins with a reinforcement of taking away Parental Rights--those parental rights that were originally protected by FERPA in 1974 requiring parental consent before data was collected or shared by third party vendors. It is just one of the loopholed and poorly devised bills "helping" children in schools. And while it seems citizens are involved, when bills are copied from other states, loopholes exist for industry, and citizen voices are COMPLETELY ignored by their representatives, it is not what it seems.
Very well said!!
Im way late to the party on this post, but thought I’d throw this out there anyway. I was a high school teacher for 5 years, and I taught for a couple of more at the university while I was in graduate school. My wife has been a high school teacher for 14 years. Our kids will never go to school in her district because of a lot of this sort of thing. There are a lot of well-meaning individuals that buy into stuff that doesn’t work. I’m struck by the fact that I didn’t have to take a statistics course to receive my teaching degree, and I think it shows in a lot of educational programs.
The solution to pretty much every problem in schools is pretty simple - school has to be hard. A rigorous, challenging, stimulating curriculum- and the backbone and follow-through to make the students do the work - would cut out so much student downtime, which is what leads to a lot of these problems.
I appreciate your comment, and agree 100%.
I was listening to a Thomas Sowell talk today about rates of STI's and teen pregnancy increasing after the intro of sex ed (after being on a downward trajectory beforehand), and a similar to relationship between poverty rates and welfare, and how this has no effect on whether the programs continue or not.
Brilliant observation. Absolutely correct. The very definition of insanity.
Four schools, one city, 1000 participants that were not randomly assigned to the experimental / control groups. No “placebo”intervention for the control group (just normal classes). Poor experimental design means this is probably a big nothing-burger.
Negative outcomes in the treatment group could simply arise from children knowing they’d been non-randomly assigned to a “therapy-treatment” group, and probably wondering why. If I’m an adolescent, I’m ruminating on that fact and getting depressed, too.
Negative outcomes (even from being assigned to something) that is supposed to be producing positive outcomes isn't a nothing burger. The intervention that is supposed to do something good, didn't.
At the very least the program should be halted and treated with skepticism. It definitely isn't something to be waved away and the rollout continued.
I don’t think you understood my point.
Non random assignment of individuals to the treatment group, plus the lack of adequate controls, means the results (positive or negative or big or small or whatever) could have nothing to do with the treatment program itself. It’s quite possible that all the students marked for the treatment group shared something in common that increased their likelihood of poor mental health outcomes at the end, independent of receiving the treatment.
This matters if schools are looking at this as a way of justifying expanding the programme out to EVERY student. And this is precisely why you are so concerned by apparent negative outcomes. However, the study says precisely nothing about what would happen if everyone received the treatment. You don’t need to be concerned on the basis of this poor study. Concerned out of an abundance of caution, maybe, but not out of an abundance of evidence. This isn’t that.
Because the negative treatment outcome could be due to the stigma of being (and being seen to be) treated, it could disappear if you treated everyone (ie no stigma). That’s my point.
For what it’s worth, you and I both probably agree that getting borderline depressed teens to “focus on their feelings” and self-ruminate probably isn’t good for them. Sadly, this study was designed so poorly that it doesn’t have a lot to say on the matter. It contributes little at all, other than confusion and bad stats.
Good point.
This was interesting. I didn't think this would be the case. What do you think the answer is? Focus more on self-care techniques like problem solving, meditation, yoga, exercise?
Focus more on actually getting things done. Most therapy promotes self-reflection. While this can be useful for adults, most teenagers simply turn it into rumination and obsessive self-criticism. The most useful skill for adolescent mental health is learning objective skills that permit meaningful accomplishment in the real world in an area where failure is a distinct possibility.
Achieving a goal is vastly better for adolescent mental health than "self-care." That said, exercise can be incredibly helpful if it's framed as working towards achieving a goal rather than "self care."