Turning schools into mental-health clinics won't improve safety

Congress wants to turn schools into mental-health clinics, writes Carolyn D. Gorman in City Journal. Seventy percent of federal funding for school safety would be directed to three school-based mental-health grants under a bill that passed the House Appropriations Committee, she writes The money will expand programs found to be ineffective and sometimes counter-productive, while ignoring schools' real safety problems.

'Unsafe schools are a function of unenforced discipline and unfollowed behavioral codes of conduct, academic disengagement, inadequate physical infrastructure, poor attendance, and family breakdown.'

School-based mental-health programs "flag kids with even slight distress for potential intervention, and push them toward the mental-health system for diagnosis," Gorman writes. The evidence of effectiveness is weak, and overdiagnosis is common.

Universal screening produces no benefits, short-lived benefits or harm, concludes a 2025 review of the research. A survey based on 19 years of data found access to mental-health services increased use with no evidence services increased achievement or attendance, Gorman writes. "A multiyear Toronto study found that heavy investment in school-based screening and treatment produced more diagnoses and more medicated children — again, without clarity about whether that treatment was appropriate or needed, and with no academic improvement."

"School counselors and psychologists, social-emotional learning programs, and woke wellness messages" are not "primary solutions to genuine safety challenges," Gorman concludes.

Furthermore, teaching may be superseded by ideology, she writes. "California’s statewide math framework, for instance, cites as its evidentiary support for 'trauma-informed pedagogy' a study in which a teacher converted a number-line exercise into a lesson on 'food deserts,' showed students a video of a single mother struggling to afford food, and asked the kids how it made them feel."

According to the study author, this produced "radical healing," as students cried, expressed anger at the government, and committed to political activism. "Whether the students ever learned to add and subtract went unexamined," writes Gorman.

"Trauma-informed" now often a euphemism for low expectations, writes Justin Baeder. However, "lowering expectations out of pity communicates that you don't believe in the student's potential."

"American education has adopted a working assumption that most students are carrying invisible wounds that explain their worst behaviors," writes Robert Pondiscio. The idea that “behavior communicates an unmet need” has weakened discipline and classroom management. A"quasi-therapeutic posture ... treats misbehavior as a distress signal, calling for empathy and support rather than consequences."