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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThe Disturbing Link Between ADHD and Conservative Education Reform
http://www.alternet.org/education/disturbing-link-between-adhd-and-conservative-education-reform***SNIP
Using Centers for Disease Control surveys, Hinshaw and Sheffler found that when rates of ADHD diagnoses are broken down by state, it turns out that there are dramatic discrepancies. Based on the most recent survey, from 2011, a child in Kentucky is three times as likely to be diagnosed with ADHD as a child in Nevada. And a child in Louisiana is five times as likely to take medication for ADHD as a child in Nevada.
And these states arent just outliers. The five states that have the highest rate of diagnoses Kentucky, Arkansas, Louisiana, Indiana and North Carolina are all over 10 percent of school age children. The five states with the lowest percent diagnosed Nevada, New Jersey, Colorado, Utah and California are all under 5 percent. The disparity is even greater for kids prescribed ADHD medication. The same five states are at the top of the list, all of them with over 8 percent of kids getting medication. The states at the bottom of the list for medication Nevada, Hawaii, California, Alaska and New Jersey are all under 3.1 percent.
The authors set out to look for factors that could account for those sharp discrepancies.
We thought it might have to do with the supply of providers how many pediatricians or child psychiatrists in a given region or the ways states supplement Medicaid, explains Hinshaw. It might have to do with advertising. But it doesnt take a genius to figure out that most kids first get noticed for ADHD in a classroom setting. So we wondered, are there policies about schooling that might be relevant?
What the team found was that high rates of ADHD diagnoses correlated closely with state laws that penalize schools when students fail. Nationally, this approach to education was enacted into law in 2001 with No Child Left Behind, which makes funding contingent on the number of students who pass standardized tests. In more recent years, similar testing-based strategies have been championed by education reformers such as Michelle Rhee. But many states passed these accountability laws as early as the 1980s, and within a few years of passage, ADHD diagnoses started going up in those states, the authors found, especially for kids near the poverty line.
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The Disturbing Link Between ADHD and Conservative Education Reform (Original Post)
xchrom
Mar 2014
OP
dreamnightwind
(4,775 posts)2. Looks interesting
Bumping this for attention and so I remember to read the article later.
chervilant
(8,267 posts)4. "Education Reformers"
count among their ilk those who prefer a preponderance of factory fodder and service industry drones "graduating" from public education -- preferably with complacent and compliant attitudes (ritalin and similar meds help insure unquestioning complacence). When I was teaching college algebra at a small community college, I found that the vast majority of the students I encountered lacked even the most rudimentary math skills, but they could sit quietly and look attentive.