…and you ain’t gettin’ no healthier!

For some time I have been considering some comments about ADD/ADHD, or at least some questions that might be asked. Among them are:

1. It has been reported there is no clinical description ADD/ADHD which, if so, indicates that it is whatever someone says it is. Should not an alleged medical condition that requires treatment with a drug at least be properly identified?

2. It is estimated that 2 million or more public school students in the nation are now treated with the drug Ritalin for this supposed condition. If it is this common, and serious, why is it that students in the past were not so identified and treated; why are students in nonpublic schools not similarly afflicted (on a ratio basis, at least 200,000 of them should be so regarded); and why are not youngsters in other nations similarly afflicted?

3. Do we know what the long-term affects of Ritalin are on still developing children?

The following testimony has been brought to my attention. Presented by a longtime public school teacher, it succinctly presents some of the issues involved in this troubling situation, and is presented here with the permission of the author.

U. S. HOUSE SUBCOMMITTEE – PUBLIC HEARING ADD/ADHD AMONG CLASSROOM STUDENTS

SEPTEMBER 29, 2000

Mrs Donna Garner, Hewitt, TX 76643

I am a mainstream classroom teacher who has taught English and Spanish for over twenty-seven years. I retired from the Texas public schools this last June and am presently teaching in a private high school. I was appointed by President Reagan and reappointed by President Bush to serve as a Commissioner on the National Commission on Migrant Education. I served on the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) writing team for English Language Arts Reading which was charged with writing K-12 standards for the public schools of Texas. I am also the Lead Writer of the Texas Alternative Document (TAD) for English Language Arts Reading.

I have chosen to stay in the mainstream classroom because I love teenagers, and I care about their future lives. It is because of this concern that I find myself addressing the issue of attention deficit disorder (ADD) and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). It is important that legislators gain a clear picture of what is happening in today’s classrooms, and who could paint that picture any more accurately than an experienced classroom teacher?

The views that I am sharing are based upon my own observations and research since I am not representing any organization, group, or membership. The responsibility of the public schools is to teach children to read and write; that is our first and most important mandate. We educators owe it to our students to utilize the best research and methodology available.

Unfortunately, educators for multitudinous reasons have followed wrong practices; and we now have secondary schools full of students who cannot read and write — a direct result of whole language instruction through the early elementary years.

The research is quite clear: Children must be taught phonemic awareness and then decoding skills through direct, systematic instruction. Unfortunately, that is not what is happening in today’s public schools; and thousands of children are being labeled “learning disabled” when they are actually “reading disabled.” Schools should be held accountable for the continued damage they are causing through their utilization of faulty reading methods. Schools are also committing another terrible mistake. Because of the pressures placed upon the American family, more and more children are the products of dysfunctional families — families where there is no structure, no routine, no consistent discipline, no required self-control or personal responsibility. Instead of the Pre-K and K teachers offering little children the structure they so badly need, the opposite is occurring.

Children who are already lacking in self-control are placed in classrooms where the noise level is deafening. Graphic images are everywhere. Children are expected to focus their attention on the task at hand while they are surrounded with distracting stimuli. For children who have not learned to concentrate while they are growing up, such classrooms only serve to hype them up even further. I have often wondered how many of us adults could focus our attention on a presenter while being surrounded with the same distractions.

Consider the typical Pre-K or K classroom. Chairs are placed in pods or small groups. The teacher’s desk is at the back of the room. Students are sitting close together or facing each other in close proximity to one another. The walls and every square inch of the classroom is plastered with visual stimuli. From the first day of school, the children are placed in cooperative learning groups where they work on performance-based projects; much noise reverberates throughout the room and the school. Individual learning is de-emphasized; group-think is the goal. The teacher is the facilitator — not the authority figure. The disciplinary and academic limits are poorly defined because the teacher does not want to “squelch” students’ creativity or harm their self-esteem. Students spend their valuable class time creating projects, predicting what they think their illustrated stories will be about, guessing at words, inventing their own spellings, and producing error-filled entries in their journals.

Children who have any tendencies to be hyperactive are ignited by such an environment. Little boys who are by nature more aggressive than little girls are being taught by a largely female teacher force who may or may not understand normal male aggression. When little boys cannot seem to function in an “appropriate” manner according to their teachers’ opinions, parents are called; conferences are held; doctors and psychologists are consulted. Little Johnny is subjected to an assessment based upon perhaps a half hour session, and invariably Johnny is diagnosed as ADD/ADHD and placed on Ritalin.

Now everything is fine. Johnny is more controllable and so long as he takes his medicine, he seems to be able to concentrate better. The unfortunate side of this scenario is that Ritalin is a sychotropic drug, and no long-term studies have been done on adolescents to analyze the effects of such drugs. What is actually happening inside Johnny’s body while he is on these drugs?

Life goes on for Johnny. He is labeled ADD/ADHD, is placed under the federal law of Section 504, 34 CFR Chapter 104. Expectations for Johnny are lowered. Aggressive parents armed with their aggressive lawyers pressure classroom teachers to lower the bar of excellence for Johnny; administrators are afraid of $50,000 lawsuits and refuse to support classroom teachers in their efforts to motivate Johnny to grow academically through the utilization of common-sense accommodations and modifications.

Everyone seems to forget that Section 504 does not require schools to guarantee equal outcomes (interpretation — “good grades”) for Johnny – only equal opportunities for him to be successful. Johnny soon learns that whenever he does not want to do his homework or pay attention in class, all he has to do is to complain to his parents and/or school administrators. Another meeting is held, and the classroom teachers are forced to look the other way when Johnny chooses not to meet the classroom expectations. Johnny breezes through elementary and middle school, each year adding a “debit” loss to his academic achievement. He finally gets to high school where the coursework is more sophisticated. Suddenly his grades go down; something is terribly wrong. The child and the parents assume that the difficulty is with the teachers, and another round of meetings occurs. Again the classroom teachers are left unsupported, and the child graduates from high school with a meaningless diploma that he cannot even read.

By this time, Johnny has been on Ritalin or other psychotropic drugs for well over ten years. Is it a coincidence that nearly all the school shooters over the last few years have been partakers of psychotropic drugs? The really tragic thing is that Johnny was probably misdiagnosed from the very beginning What he really needed was some structure and some carefully defined and monitored parameters.

A very different scenario should apply to Suzie who has had a documented neurological dysfunction since birth. It is for Suzie who is legitimately ADD/ADHD that recently developed EEG neurofeedback is an exciting prospect. EEG neurofeedback offers the first real ray of hope for those who suffer with ADD/ADHD, yet most school officials know nothing about its accomplishments.

Congress should play a big part in making sure that the original intent of Section 504 is implemented at the classroom level (i. e., Part 404, “To be equally effective, however, an aid, benefit, or service need not produce equal results; it merely must afford an equal opportunity to achieve equal results.”) The Office for Civil Rights under the Department of Education should offer solid assistance to the public schools by judging compliance issues based upon the original intent of the law. A list of reasonable accommodations should be made available to parents, students, and educators so that all may see what “reasonable” really means. Public hearings should be held where neuropsychologists from the field of cognitive learning are brought forth to testify. Experts in EEG neurofeedback should present their case histories and research. The effects of long-term use of psychotropic drugs by adolescents should be studied and the results widely publicized.

Teachers should be required to study brain development and the empirical, peer-reviewed, replicated reading research of the National Institutes of Health, Child Development and Behavior; and they should have expert mentor teachers demonstrate how the reading research should be implemented with real children in real classrooms.

I appreciate the opportunity to submit my written comments on this very important issue of ADD/ADHD and Ritalin use among our school children.

Published on DrKelley.info, December 24, 2000. Embedded links may no longer be active (Ed. 12.30.10)

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