Reduction of public school districts in the United States since 1939
start.eegspectrum.com/Newsletter/apr06a.gif
A Monthly Summary of News and Events
Vol. 9 No. 4 - April 2006
This newsletter is sponsored by EEG Spectrum International Intl, Inc.,
a leader in providing clinical service and training professionals.
Past issues are available at start.eegspectrum.com/Newsletter/
Information on how to subscribe or cancel a subscription appear at the end.
The opinions related in this newsletter reflect those of the author only.
Copyright (C) 2005 by David Kaiser or ESII. All rights reserved.
|
|
|---|
All links at: news.yahoo.com/fc/Science/Brain_Research
Across town a recently suspended teenage boy allegedly headed towards the high school in order to wreak revenge on the principal. Some say he planned to attack the student body as well, reminiscent of the 1999 Columbine assault. Fortunately police were tipped off and road blocks were set up in front of the school. The nearby elementary school, where my daughter attends, was also put into lockdown as a precaution. The would-be domestic terrorist, or alienated teenager, depending upon one's perspective, was captured by police after a 100-mile-per-hour chase through the back roads of Churchville, a small town of 1,800 people in upstate New York. As it happens, thanks to school district consolidation with a neighboring city, more children attend middle and high school in Churchville than actually live in the village...
What follows is an excerpt from a companion piece to "School Shootings, High School Size, and Neurobiological Considerations," an article soon to appear in the Journal of Neurotherapy. The companion piece describes how we moved from 1821 to 1,821, from English High in 1821, the country's first public secondary school, to Patrick Henry High, a typical mega-school in Roanoke, Virginia with 1,821 students. A century of scientific learning separates the era of one-room school houses from today's mega-schools and in this time we have learned much about childhood and maturation, the mechanisms of learning and the power of social situations, but very little of this knowledge has been applied to public education. We know from addiction research that recovery often requires a change of environment, away from the drug-strewn world that advanced the condition. In this light what good is normalizing brain function with neurotherapy when children are returned to a dysfunctional social environment six or seven hours a day.
| A disgruntled school board treasurer blamed his farm foreclosure on taxes he paid for building the new school. For revenge he planted dynamite in the school basement, drove into the school yard at the start of the school day, and detonated it. He then fired a shot into dynamite stashed in his back seat. The two explosions killed 38 students and 6 adults including the disgruntled farmer. So began school violence in America, in Bath, Michigan, May 18, 1927. |
For most of our history America has been a nation of small schools. At the turn of the century five out of six elementary schools were single-teacher schools, a school marm working in a one- or two-room school house. By mid-century nearly half of all elementary schools remained one-teacher schools but circumstances had begun to change. State and local agencies were closing and consolidating schools at a record pace, mostly in an effort to improve the cost efficiency of public education, or so they believed. With school consolidation came crowding, especially as the general population rose, and along with crowding came its traditional responses such as competition, aggression, and violence. Last decade 30 million crimes were committed in our public schools and 28 million crimes were committed upon children away from school. Think about that. The streets are now safer than the schools.
Violence in schools has become tolerated, even expected - how else to explain why 738,000 violent crimes committed at schools last year garnered so little media attention? Nearly three-quarters of public schools will experience violent incidents this year. Girls are 17 % more likely to be a victim at school than away, boys 23 % more likely at school than away. Why? What has happened? Let's start with the physics of it all - the buildings, the institutions of learning. Take the state of California, for example, which once possessed the best public educational system in the nation. In the last 20 years the state of California has turned to building the wrong kind of buildings for our children; 33 new prisons were built and only one university. Juvenile detention center capacity was greatly increased and numerous mega-schools were opened. Mega-schools are high schools with enrollments above 2,000. Last year 23 new monstrosities were opened nationwide. Add to this the 1,414 mega-schools already operating in this country, and take a look into any one, and it becomes apparent why there is school violence and dropping test scores and other social ills affecting our children. We've come a long way from the one-room school house in only 50 years, and nearly all of it in the wrong direction.
The use of aggression, even violence, to improve social status is nothing new to our species. All adolescent primates strive for social status, especially males. Witness current events around the world. Organized violence always has as its goal the improvement of the social status of the group perpetrating it.The emergence of mega-schools during the last two decades has simply transformed adolescent status competition into a lethal and indiscriminant form of competition. The most sensational example of this form of competition has been random school shootings. In the last decade 17 multiple-injury student school shootings took place in the United States, 13 at high schools and 4 at middle schools. Nearly all high school shootings occurred in large schools, most with enrollments over 1,000. School shootings are certainly rare, but they are tip-of-an-iceberg events, canaries in the coal mine. They reflect an accumulation of social ills beneath the surface and their emergeance en masse in the late 1990s, around the time suburban public high school enrollment surpassed 1,000 students (median) may not be coincidental. They are the response of an immature mind to unprecedented social complexity. Median public high school enrollment have now grown to 1,200 students in suburbs, 1,600 in cities and 43 % of all freshmen now attend mega-schools. Imagine entering the halls of a school with 500 other students your age (2,000 in the entire school), people who you are expected to compete against and connect with. How can a 14 year old develop a unique and secure identity in such an ocean of strangers? Many cannot and drop out, emotionally if not physically.
The details of school shootings are described in my Journal of Neurotherapy paper and elsewhere, so a few facts here will suffice. Smaller high schools (400-600 total enrollment) experience one-eighth the rate of serious crimes and one-third the rate of lesser crimes such as theft and vandalism. Smaller schools are beneficial to students in all areas of life, social as well as academic, regardless of whether the school is in a city or in the suburbs or in the country. Smaller schools are superior to larger schools on athletic participation, extracurricular activity participation, absenteeism, dropout rate, student satisfaction, minor and serious rule infractions, self-esteem and locus of control, interpersonal relationships, sense of community, parental involvement, interpersonal relations between teacher and students, and even teacher attitudes. Why teachers' attitudes? Because they are also affected by the complexity of the social environment. And parental involvement is higher in smaller schools probably because the parents were involved when the consolidation wave swept through their towns but through their involvement they blocked it and kept a rationally-sized school. While it's true that small schools are slightly more costly per student, this is a fact out of context as small schools are more accountable to students and actually cost significantly less per graduate than larger schools. The largest public school in the country, Belmont Senior High in Los Angeles with 5,299 students consists mostly of freshmen and sophomores as few stick around to graduate (a 62% dropout rate).
Ironically, the original advocate for school and district consolidation would probably be appalled by current enrollments. In the 1950s and 60s James Conant, past president of Harvard University, contended that the small high school was the number one problem in U.S. education and advocated for its elimination through district and school consolidation. "Small" in 1967 was about 30 graduating seniors, however, so he advocated for more like a 100 seniors in order to provide a diverse curriculum to equip students to met the challenges of the modern world. But once the consolidation process began, the original intent was apparently lost. Since 1940, 200,000 public elementary and secondary schools have been cut down to 65,000 in 2005, despite a 70% increase in population.
Children undergo a dependency of two decades or longer, the longest period of socialization of any animal. Our disproportionately large cortex, and the associated high intelligence, is primarily an adaptation to the complexities of primate social life. Like I tell my students, the back of our brain is all we need to do nearly everything we want to do on this planet - if we were the only person alive. The front of the brain evolved because we are not the only person alive and are faced with other primates wanting to do the same things as we want in a limited resource environment. (This may explain why teenagers think they can do anything, because they can, except get along with other teenagers who think the same way.) Social intelligence drove brain evolution in the primate order and the size of our brain likely limits the number of individuals we can regularly interact with in a meaningful manner. Dunbar (1992) estimates the natural group size for humans at 150 individuals. This is the number of people our brains evolved to handle, the size of the social group we can feel reasonably comfortable within. When this number is exceeded, socially instability follows and we either splinter into smaller daughter groups or undergo turmoil and social conflict. We should keep the 150 number in mind as we consider the size of our schools.
| 9th Grade enrollment in public high schools (School year 2003). | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Locale | High schools |
Median 9th Grade |
Largest 9th Grade | Percent above 150 |
| City | 2,725 | 429 | 2,167 | 81 % |
| Suburb | 4,131 | 326 | 1,853 | 81 % |
| Town | 1,691 | 167 | 800 | 57 % |
| Rural | 6,567 | 76 | 1,542 | 26 % |
| All Locales Includes 176 unspecified | 15,290 | 172 | 2,167 | 46 % |
When half of all public high schools exceed our natural group size, it is not surprising that maladaptive social behaviors, including violence, frequently occur. In large schools behavioral regulation through face-to-face interaction and rapport is beyond the capabilities of student, teachers, and administrators so time and money earmarked for learning are instead used for maintaining order. When group size is natural, 150 for adults, probably 100 to 120 for teenagers, we police ourselves, as we have for eons; but when our groups become unnatural in size, we rely on modern methods of social control - we need police.
One bright spot in public education is the recent growth of the small-school movement. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, for instance, has provided two billion dollars in funding to increase graduate rates across America and many grants are dedicated to reducing school size. The National Association of Secondary School Principals now recommends that secondary schools be capped at 600 students. All told, this will require a reversal in school construction -- the building of small schools -- an expensive choice but a wise one.
-DK
News & Reviews
NEW BOOKS
A Clinical Guide to Sleep Disorders in Children and Adolescents
by Gregory Stores
Thorough description of childhood sleep difficulties, including assessment and treatment
--www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0521653983/eegspectrum
Bipolar Disorder
by Robert P. Reiser, Larry W. Thompson
Discussion of bipolar disorder, in the Advances in Psychotherapy-Evidence-Based Practice series
--www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0889373108/eegspectrum
Clinical Neuropsychology: A Pocket Handbook For Assessment
by Peter J. Snyder, et al
Geared for mental health professionals working with older adults; an aid in selecting tests to address specific clinical concerns.
--www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1591472830/eegspectrum
Making the System Work for Your Child with ADHD
by Peter S. Jensen
Strategies for parents in seeking treatment and educational support for their ADHD childen.
--www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1593850271/eegspectrum
Alternate Therapies In The Treatment Of Brain Injury ...
by GJ Murrey (Editor)
Alternative therapies for brain injury, such as art and music therapy, to augment patient quality of life
--www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0789021358/eegspectrum
Psychopathology in the Genome and Neuroscience Era
by CF Zorumski, et al
Reviews psychiatric genetics, epidemiology, and neuroscience.
--www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1585622427/eegspectrum
The Brain and Its Self: A Neurochemical Concept of the Innate and Acquired Drives
by Joseph Knoll
Mammalian brain evolution and sociality.
--www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/3540239693/eegspectrum
fMRI Investigation of the Effects of Neurofeedback Training
:
Neurofeedback training normalize functions of areas of the brain involved in selective attention and response inhibition in ADHD children.
Should sex-specific norms be used to assess ADHD or ODD?
:
Authors argue for use of sex-specific norms for ADHD and ODD to detect marginal girls who would otherwise not be diagnosed, but are impaired.
Normalcy of neurosis: Evolutionary origins of OCD+
:
Presents model of OCD as a dysregulation of neural circuitry for threat detection and harm avoidance.
Expression of Conscious Feelings in Children with High-Functioning Autism.
:
Socio-emotional impairments in autism may be related to perceptual or expression deficits of of conscious feelings.
Cortical excitability and age-related volumetric MRI changes.
:
Age-associated MRI changes correspond with age-related increases in cortical excitability.
Methylphenidate on attention in children with ADHD
:
Children with ADHD on methylphenidate treatment continue to exhibit specific serious deficits in components of attention.
Persistent EEG overactivation in neurogenic pain
:
Evidence of thalamocortical dysrhythmia in chronic neurogenic pain.
EEG theta rhythm in infants and preschool children.
:
Theta frequency changed from 3.6 to 5.6Hz in infants to 4-8Hz in children and is related to behavioral performance involving substantial attentional and emotional loads.
Upcoming CoursesA Pathway to Brain Regulation - Neurofeedback helps improve neuroregulation. It's used by health care professionals for ADHD, depression, anxiety disorders, LD, mood disorders, and behavioral problems. This 4-day course, Neurofeedback in a Clinical Practice, provides the basis for using Neurofeedback clinically. - *28 CEs
Our course is a hands-on experience right from the start. Attendees consistently say this format is a very good way to learn Neurofeedback. "Neurofeedback should be viewed as one of the three essential or primary forms of intervention - psychotherapy, psychopharmacology, and Neurofeedback. In my experience, neurofeedback is every bit as important and powerful as the other two forms of treatment." - Dr. Laurence Hirshberg, Brown University Medical School, psychologist specializing in Developmental Disorders and Autism. Contact Karie Kramer, our training coordinator, for more information 818-789-3456 ext 847 or see www.eegspectrum.com/Training * EEG Spectrum International, Inc. is approved by the APA to offer continuing education to psychologists. ESII maintains responsibility for the program. |
Conferences for Neurofeedback Clinicians & Researchers | ||
|---|---|---|
| CONFERENCE | LOCATION | DATES |
| ISNR - www.isnr.org | Atlanta GA | Sep 7-10 |
Jamie died in the mountains and Craig died at sea. Everyone was happy with Craig’s death but no one was pleased about Jamie’s. Why?
Most problems have simple solutions if we can overcome our mind sets, our biases. The above riddle is simple if we don't immediately jump to the conclusion that Jamie and Craig are humans...
What is unique about this sequence? 8 5 4 9 1 7 6 10 3 2 0
Again, overcome our mindset and see Arabic numerals not as numbers but as labels. Rewrite the labels "eight five four..... three two zero" and note the order.
What starts with the letter E, ends with the letter E, contains only one letter but it is not the letter E?
A word can mean many things so the word "letter" in one instance may not refer to the same thing another time.
A woman had two daughters who were biological sisters born on the same hour of the same day of the same year but they were not twins.
We immediately set limits, assumes aspects of a situation that were implied but never fully stated. Did I say only two children were born to the woman this day?
I mention mindsets because we have a mindset in neurotherapy that I cannot disperse on my own. That mindset is the idea that we need to create games to attract the interest and attention of distracted children. Many companies are providing feedback with the fastest and coolest animations, with thrills and excitement, but I'm reminded of Oliver Sacks' "Awakenings" where patients who suffered from a Parkinson-like torpor due to encephalitis could catch a ball thrown at them despite appearing to all the world as dead because, as Sacks explained, the patient borrowed the will of the ball. Well, kids today borrow the will of the videogame. The problem with many children is that they suffer from agency deficiency. They can only act if the environment is already acting at full speed for them. They cannot take a stationary event -- be it a still photo or page of text -- and supply enough of their own agency to draw reward from it. They want to be carried by the world, and that is their disorder. So when we create games that carry them, aren't we actually furthering their disorder, their agency deficiency?
The original SMR neurofeedback exercise was a row of lights and represented a crude hockey game. And it worked not despite of its crudest but because of its crudeness. The current mindset is to attract the interest of the client, but the client must still provide the type of motivation and agency that can turn a row of LEDs into a rewarding experience. They must not be carried, else they will never learn to walk on their own. A few years ago a company raised many millions in venture capital to create a feedback device that altered the parameters of video gameplay, and about 18 months later it entered bankrupcy, if I recall correctly (check LexusNexus to see the reports). If addiction treatment centers catered to the interests of addicts (prior to treatment), would anyone ever recover? "We want your business so you continue to snort coke while undergoing our treatment plan... we wouldn't want to cramp your style." Well, that is what goes on in much of the world of neurofeedback. Watch this cool and fast video game and play it with your brain -- and oh, by the way, try to dampen your arousal while you're at it...
-DK
hurricanes, alphabetical, envelope, triplets