Joe, this is not a topic that should be politicized by tying it to your desire to destroy our educational system.

That said, I think that the vast majority of parents with a child on ritilin sees that it is 'enormously helpful'.

There are some exceptions and some instances where an alternative to drugs would work better, but these are to be expected when such large numbers are involved.

You obviosely believe your nephews parents exercised good judgement when the put their child on ritilin and that most other parents who make the same choice are exercising poor judgement. That is very elitists of you don't you think?

See my essay, Boyhood is a disorder that must be cured, but ADHD is real, too.

Penicillin is way over-subscribed, too. That's treated as a medical crisis, not a moral one.

There's a practical advantage to a school having difficult kids given official diagnoses: they get aides in the classroom. If we had enough aides to go around, there'd be less pressure to diagnose borderline cases.

Anyway, I'm a little surprised to see such a crusade from someone who appreciates first hand just how useful ADHD meds can be. Is this a little like the verb conjugation "I make love, you have sex, she sleeps around"?

"Who, of course, kept pushing for an ADD diagnosis because that was easier than showing any flexibility or confronting teacher issues."

Speaking as a public school teacher for 3 years, teaching classes with 35 students each, you have it exactly backwards. Things have changed a lot since 1950's, when every student was expected to get with the program. Now a special set of kids each has their own individual program, and a teacher has to change his lesson plan this way to accommodate the needs of this student, and spend extra time for that student for his special needs. Who loses out? The majority of kids who don't have pushy parents, and who get less time devoted to them since the squeaky wheels are getting all the grease.

I'll say at the outset that I support the institution of a universal voucher system. I have no problems with school choice, and we already use voucher-style systems for many other government programs.

However, I think that with respect to this problem (misandric academic culture), Occam's Razor doesn't demand all that much: just separate education for boys and girls. You don't have to fight out the voucher turf wars to resolve this. You don't even need to shoehorn the voucher issue in here by saying that, sans vouchers, public schools as currently conceived can't separate along gender lines. If the research is available to support the contention that boys and girls prosper best from different pedagogic styles, that will satisfy the intermediate scrutiny levelled by the courts against cases of gender distinctions challenged as equal protection violations.

There may, admittedly, be entrenched political interests opposing the abandonment of the one-size-fits-all model of public schooling. However, one could say the same thing, and moreso, about any proposed shift to a voucher model. Thus, this point is a wash.

There's also no rule saying that you have to segregate by gender. You could just have a "competitive school" designed with boys in mind but with doors open to girls who are atypical for their gender and would prosper better in that environment, and a "cooperative school" for the reverse.

Schools are the wrong institution to be advocating behavioural diagnosis tied to prescription of drugs. Especially in this case, the potential conflict of interest is huge. Brave New World, indeed.... and the linked story above is chillingly illustrative.

Precisely because these institutions are so involved in pushing the drugs, this is a moral/political crisis, and not just a medical one. A school system that confined itself to offering discipline (another sore spot), and suggested testing if asked but otherwise remained entirely uninvolved in such decisions, would be a different matter. In that environment, the people in the process would be solely those who have the ultimate responsibility of their child's interests, rather than those having the ultimate responsibility of an institution's insterests.

Which is as it should be, but often isn't. If we still had 4 million cases prescribed after that, then Andrew would be correct.

Meanwhile, the story related by the link - of kids who are now performing above their age level without drugs in spite of the school system's attempts to block these positive resolutions of the issue - remains all-too common.

I'll add that whatever additional solutions like separate education of boys and girls, more sanity re: the changes described by Nate, et. al. are advocated, the bottom line is that you won't see change in the public system without compeition and parents who have real choice that lets them vote with their kids' feet.

With that, we'll see all kinds of alternatives that will help parents find the environments that suit their children. Without it, the only rational thing to expect is the bureaucratic inflexibility and potential for abuse represented by the present system.

At least for the poor and lower middle class. Manhattan liberal types will continue to send their kids to private schools, of course.

1. Ritalin can really help. And antidrug hysteria can hurt. My daughter has been diagnosed with ADD, but her mom is reluctant to give the Ritalin shes been prescribed. Even when shes struggling trying to focus, and begs for it

2. No its not the 1950s anymore. The quantities of homework kids get is enormous compared to what I remember. Thats hard enough on "normal" kids, but puts a huge strain on ADD kids.

3. When parents come in looking for an IEP, its not cause theyre pushy. Its cause they have kids who are suffering, and for whom school has become hell.

4. A good IEP doesnt have to take that much teacher time. Nonetheless schools fight you tooth and nail to deny you an IEP.

5. Of course the schools never actually tell you to get meds, cause of the law.

The idea that private schools are an improvement is dead wrong. Sorry, but my kids are in a very nice private school that pushed us to put one of them on Ritalin and intimated that if we didn't do it, we wouldn't be coming back.

The fallback? The public school system which cannot make that kind of threat.

As it happened, medical professionals backed us -- we did not put our kid on Ritalin -- and the private school finally acquiesced. But everyone, from the private school staff, to the medical professionals, made clear that when there is a kid who presents any kind of challenge, it's the public schools who carry the ball, and the private schools who dump you into the street.

Sorry, but you can't use Ritalin to push vouchers. It's the privates who toss you out at the first sign of trouble, and the publics that step up.

1. Whether there it too much homework these days is a matter of perspective. The Asian-American parents would complain that we weren't giving enough homework, but I suppose they have very high standards.

2. I never saw an IEP that was specific enough to be helpful, yet general enough to be adaptable to my lesson plans. And I don't blame the kid or the parents except that often kids with IEP's had major behavioral issues that their parents refused to acknowledge.

3. I treat the public school system like the mlitary. They are both obscenely complex, bureaucratic, and often inefficient monoliths, but they ultimately get the job done because of good people that do good work. Whether one wants to outsource parts of the military to Halliburton or private contractors or open up the public school system to competition from vouchers doesn't really change the fundamental solidity of both systems, nor can these types of changes on their reform any huge problems.

Michael, note that school choice is about much more than just private schools, and includes options within the public system as well.

As the linked story clearly illustrates, having that kind of choice is often necessary.

I have to agree with the Dads comment about public school homework and I would extend it to performance expectations as well. Standards are much higher now than ever in the past. I noticed this when my child started kindergarten way, way long ago. Homework, it is crushingly huge, starting in the first grade. This started I think way back in the early 90's with the reduction of class size to no more than 20 kids through third grade. Standards, according to the administrators I talked to, have been ramped up every year since, for every grade through twelve. This naturally leads to more and more homework.

By middle school however the kids are used to the large amount of homework assigned, and so are the parents.

Joe:

It's true, the voucher notion does not just cover private schools.

It's interesting to me that among the many countries which outperform us on elementary education, all are public systems, usually if I'm not mistaken, national systems. Somehow we're supposed to acept that every other developed nation can educate their kids using free public schools, but we cannot.

Every other developed nation can put together a competent educational system, they can all offer superior free medical care, they can all manage to build excellent roads and bridges, and yet we are forever told, their systems are on the edge of collapse while we are without peers.

Sorry, but I smell ideology all over the voucher idea, not a practical concern for providing good education. Ideology and magic thinking.

Joe, I hate to agree with Ken, but every parent who has a kid on ritalin or a related drug thinks "My kid really needs it. It's all those other kids who are put on it needlessly." Frankly, I think ADD stands for Aquired Discipline Deficiency. Ritalin is a major racket. Doctors and pharmacists make all kinds of money and parents and teachers who are too weak and/or lazy to discipline kids get docile children. Everybody's happy. Personally I favor the approach to ADHD on the video Chef shows on the Ritalin episode of South Park.

My whole family are educators, my mom is has her masters in child psychology, and currently tests children for special needs/learning disabilities/things like ADD and ADHD.

1)They are overprescribed. It should take 10-20 hours to make a proper diagnosis towards ritalin. Unfortunately, doctors rarely take the time and effort needed to propery test the children and their responses... unfortunately they usually just take a school's/parent's word that the child can't sit still and medicate them. No matter how obnoxious a school is, that is the doctor's job to take the high road.

2) ADD and ADHD (especially the latter) are very specific cases. I could tell immediately that the 'parent's letter' did not have children with ADD. They just weren't hectic enough. They sounded more or less decent. An ADD child simply cannot focus on a single subject for very long, and constantly forgets that class is even occuring.

ADHD is even worse. I had a friend who was ADHD in middle school, when he wasn't on his meds he would bounce around the room like a rubber ball. He had trouble completing a sentence, because by the time he finished the first sentence he was onto the second. I finally couldn't hang out with him anymore because he was in trouble every 2 minutes. there's no way he could not be, he had to keep moving constantly and always ended up in someone's way.

3)Ritalin does 'speed' up your children, but at the same time makes your children 'hyper-focused' on a single subject. The same thing happens with caffeine or speed. ( I had a friend who tried to write a paper on speed, but accidently started working on a collage... long story short: at 5 am she had an incredible collage but no paper)

I still agree that school choice is important, however one of the reasons public schools drop through the tubes is because of private schools. See, private schools generally do not accept learning disabled kids; or low achieving kids. Only public schools do that, so more and more of their resources have to go to a disproportional number of 'troubled students'

Interestingly enough there are people who want these type drugs. We put them in jail.

http://powerandcontrol.blogsp*t.com/2005/10/war-on-unpatented-drugs.html

You know if government wasn't clamping down on drugs people could get what they want and figure out what works for them. All this to protect us from a phantom menace:

http://powerandcontrol.bl*gspot.com/2005/11/is-addiction-real.html

BTW Joe, when I send you mail it gets bounced. Your mail to me is working.

Michael R.,

The best of the "Free" healthcare systems are one's like the French which buy you insurance.

BTW - schools as we know them are obsolete.

We have the internet.

Joe
You are so far off base on this I can only conclude you are a complete idiot.

School society and parents have a say in this. Fortunately a quick and accurrate reading of the posts to yours are ALL accurate. For every good situation in a school, with a doctor and parents there is the nightmare situation.

It's a f@#((*&^ pity you do not understand. The nightmare of ADD and ADHD is something you wouldn't wish on your worst enemies children. That you think vouchers would solve the problem makes me wonder if I should not reconsider.

Robert M has a classic example of the self-refuting argument.

"For every good situation in a school, with a doctor and parents there is the nightmare situation."

And that's why there needs to be choice.

Michael Reynolds says:

"Every other developed nation can put together a competent educational system, they can all offer superior free medical care, they can all manage to build excellent roads and bridges..."

Ah, now I see the problem. The problem is that this characterization is completely untrue. You'd be horrified by the very early streaming in the European systems, or for that matter the rote of the Japanese; nobody really has a solid solution in the medical care area it's pick your poison; and infrastructure is frequently not up to snuff or the subject of public-private experiments precisely because of existing deficiencies.

Look closer.

This much we can be very, very sure of: competition coupled with information, works. It makes providers more responsive, expands choices, and is far, far better than bureaucrats or politics at removing failure.

Nate I dont care what the asian american parents think Theyre wrong. There have been numerous studies on the negative effects of too much homework. Ive seen it up close.

Not all ADD kids (or adults for that matter) are behavior problem, or unable to focus on anything. ADD is to some extent a misnomer - its really attention disregulation - they can sometimes hyperfocus, and be unable to shift as needed.

the comparison to caffeine is illuminative. The difference between caffeine and Ritalin is that Ritalin gets more benefit relative to the side effects than caffeine does. yet no one has any problem with giving kids caffeine in massive amounts, yet they go crazy over Ritalin. I dont really understand it.

Ken & concerneddad:

You say standards are overinflated and that Asian-American parents have it wrong in pushing their children way they often do. Yet the results at the end of the day are strongly against you: Asian-Americans are, as a rule, our highest-achieving ethnic minority (without getting into whether Jews qualify as an "ethnicity" or not, a topic for another time and place), and it isn't because of drug use.

In addition, I strongly doubt whether a lighter workload would really solve any of the disciplinary or academic problems caused by many kids that currently get to pass themselves off (or get passed off) as merely having a "condition" rather than being troublemakers (or just plain dim bulbs).

I would argue that asian-americans, like the jewish population, or most successful students in general; are succesful because the family is very involved in their scholastic life. Study after study shows that the more parents are involved, the more succesful their children are.

A recent example (don't have the study, but discussed on 60 minutes). Male scholastic achievements are most similar to female scholastic achiement when equal numbers of men and women are on the PTA. In places where father's place higher emphasis on sports achievment, scholastic achievement drops.

BTW: Japan also has the highest suicide rate in the world. I think they may push a little too hard...

Y'know, it's interesting to see this come up as an issue. Now, in the interest of full disclosure; we already voted with our feet; we've home-schooled from day 1.

I find it interesting that we have a point/counter-point ongoing regarding homework. It's either too much or not enough, with seemingly the point that homework needs to be "work". It needs to get something done.

We have an educational system that is loading more and more (I mean this more in the "operational" sense of the word) and producing, from what I read, less and less. Concerns about academic achievement, interest and participation in science and other "hard" (not as in difficult) subjects is growing.

Public schooling, IMO, needs to be ratcheted down to a point of achievability. I think we're expecting it to do too much, with the result that it does little. I think the Public educational system had ADD.

Disclaimer: Please understand that I don't advocate Home-schooling for everyone. There is no catch-all for everyone. Heck, these are the people my daughter is going to have to interact with for the rest of her life. I WANT the system to improve. :) We need our educational system to focus.

My apologies for the somewhat rambling nature of this. I haven't taken my Focusin. :)

I absolutely think the school system is NOT acting in the best interest of the children but in their own best interest. I have an 18 year old son who was diagnosed ADHD and he can tell you the horror story of not only the awful side effects of the meds but what having that label put on him has done.

I have an 8 year old girl whose teacher began a campaign to have her labeled ADHD and medicated (funny that school is now being closed due to lack of funding and low SAT scores), even AFTER two doctors and two therapists said NO ADHD. My daugher was being bullied by another girl (whose mother volunteered daily and did alot of the teachers mundane paperwork - hmmm), the teacher refused to listen to my daughter, refused to acknowledge any problem other then my daughter being ADHD. When tested in different subjects my daugher's scores were atleast a semester ahead in ALL subjects. The teachers response was "Her intelligence will only get her so far!!!" My daughter can read at a fifth grade level in second grade. She can sit for hours doing work. She is definitely NOT ADHD. But this teacher (interestingly she referred four children last year alone to be labeled and medicated and I am the ONLY parent who refused to blindly accept this garbage) kept pushing ADHD even saying she knew a lady who could help get the drugs if I couldn't afford it!! Boy we are warned in school of drug pushers but who'd think it would be the teacher!!!

I finally took my daughter out of school. She was losing sleep/appetite, daily begging me not to make her go to school, stomache problems (she has never ever had these problems). The teacher and school ignored her being bullied and only offered to "problem solve" after I started writing the school board/superintendent and others. I asked she be moved to another class and they refused. I found out once I took her out of class that every time I spoke out the teacher became more abusive. She would alienate my daughter from the rest of the class and even grab and squeeze her face till she cried. My daughter was being abused by the girl and the teacher as well.

I have to say that those of you who believe that adhd or add is a discipline deficiency must not have a child who suffers from this problem. We have three children. All have been disciplined and raised by the same standards. One of our children has adhd, the other two do not. As the parent of an adhd child, I have to say that we are more involved with school and our child than we had to be with the older two. Lazy and uninvolved we are not.

We discipline but discipline cannot change something that a child is not able to control. Rather than tear our child apart as is suggested by those who suggest that this is somehow not a real issue but caused by poor parenting, we do everything we can to help our child be successful and bear the judgement of narrow minded self righteous people who call us poor parents.

Our child suffers from this problem. Yes, I said suffers. She suffers social problems, school problems, etc. We have chosen to give meds only after trying everything else. When we saw there was no other solution and saw that it was negatively impacting our daughters self esteem, we decided to give it a try and I have to say we have seen major benefits.

If a child had an obvious disability such as loss of a limb, etc no one would suggest their parents were poor parents because their child required assistance to walk. Our daughter has a vision problem so we provide glasses. She has adhd so we provide what she needs. This is the requirement of parenting and not the result of poor parenting. If we ignored our daughters needs, then you could suggest that we were poor parents. I am grateful that we are our daughters parents and not someone who believes that someone like her needs more discipline. This is how child abuse occurs. Children who are abused are often those who abuse their children and/or are menaces to society...drug abusers, criminals, etc.

On the private vs public school issue, I have to say that we've tried private school and found them very unaccomodating. We are currently in a public montessori school in our parish and have been very pleased so far.