Federal bill aims to add trauma-informed practices to Lyndon Johnson’s still-expanding Great Society

CATEGORY: SCHOOLS

Rep. Katherine M. Clark (D-MA)

Source: Congress.gov
Read time: 2.2 minutes
 
This Happened
On July 11, 2024, text became available for bill H.R. 8526 – Trauma-Informed Schools Act of 2024. It was introduced into the House of Representatives on May 23, 2024 and referred to the House Committee on Education and the Workforce.
 
Who Did This?
Katherine M. Clark is a Democrat representative from Massachusetts. As the minority Whip, she currently is the highest-ranking woman in Congressional leadership.
 
The Premise
H.R. 8526 proposes to amend the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 to mandate trauma-informed practices in schools. The bill has not moved out of committee. Specifically, it proposes to insert a definition of trauma-informed practices: a “shared understanding among teachers,… school leaders,… and other staff that— ‘‘(i) adverse and potentially traumatic experiences are common among students; (ii) trauma can impact student learning, behavior, and relationships in school.”
The bill aims to implement three practices:

1. adopt restorative justice to replace disciplinary practices that can suspend or expel disruptive students
2. teach a social-emotional skills curriculum to students
3. train educators in the concept of implicit bias

 
The rest of the bill contains details on amending the application process for federal funding. To receive funding, eligible schools (those with a high proportion of at-risk students) must submit applications with implementation plans to local school agencies, who must submit plans to state agencies, who must submit plans to the federal government. Thus, every level of education bureaucracy would include mandates to implement trauma-informed practices.
 
Analysis
The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 was part of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society aimed to eliminate poverty and racial injustice by greatly expanding the federal government’s control of health care, education, and welfare programs. H.R. 8526 continues that progressive leftist tradition by adding trauma as another domain for federal intervention.
 
Consistent with other definitions of trauma-informed practices, the definition in the bill is enormously broad and includes “adverse” experiences that are everyday stresses, not life-threatening trauma. This allows governmental control of language that redefines any perceived inequity in society as a more pernicious threat of psychological harm than it really is.
Trauma-informed trainings are not balanced presentations of scientific evidence (see here and here). They are biased to present a liberal theory that human nature is highly malleable via the hypotheses of toxic stress—that trauma permanently damages brains—and the adverse childhood experiences (ACE) literature—that early childhood common stressors cause a huge variety of physical illnesses in adulthood. These hypotheses have been debunked as lacking credible evidence (debunked here and here).
The definition of trauma-informed in the bill is revealing for its intent by the bill’s sponsors to primarily create a “shared understanding.” The intent is not to educate educators and students on the research of what we know about human nature and our response to trauma, it is to enthrone a fabricated sense of reality that the science is settled in support of their theory.
 
Implicit bias increased in popularity in 2020 during the Black Lives Matter riots and the rise of DEI, with the assertion that Whites were systemically racist even if they didn’t know it. The psychological research trying to establish implicit bias as a real construct, however, has received severe criticisms.
 
Social emotional learning may be considered the child development version of implicit bias. It is promoted as a curriculum for teaching children how to access an emotion vocabulary and develop adaptive social behaviors, but teaches that these are tools for examining root causes of inequity. It has been criticized as a Trojan horse for introducing Critical Theory and a meta-analysis of 90 programs found no evidence of a beneficial effect six months after programs ended [1].
 
Why Is This Happening?
The trauma-informed practices movement has made inroads with courts and local government policies, but it has found the greatest traction in local educational settings [here, here, and here]. This bill represents an attempt to expand a foothold into the federal educational level.
 
The bill is written as an intention to improve child outcomes through science, but there are zero research studies showing that trauma-informed practices improve any outcomes for children. If implemented, the only thing the bill would ultimately achieve is embedding in federal law, with all the infrastructure and funding that entails, the permanent training of educational staff and students in an unproven ideology.
 

REFERENCES
[1] Cipriano C, Ha C, Wood M, Sehgal K, Ahmad E, McCarthy MF (2024). A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of the Effects of Universal School-Based SEL Programs in the United States: Considerations for Marginalized Students. Social and Emotional Learning: Research, Practice, and Policy, 100029, doi: 10.1016/j.sel.2024.100029


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