In a recent piece for the City Journal, Carolyn Gorman made a strong case against a bill adding $243.6 million to the Department of Education’s Safe Schools and Citizenship Education coffers when “safety” has been redefined to mean using K-12 schools as mental-health clinics. Calling the track record of similar measures poor would be a compliment: universal mental-health screening driving overdiagnosis by producing up to 90 percent false positives. In one case she cites, a California math teacher turned a number-line lesson into a unit on food deserts, complete with video of a single mother struggling to feed her children. When the students cried and promised to become activists, that was counted as “radical healing,” an example of trauma-informed pedagogy in action.

But parents and lawmakers should not think that killing this spending bill will do much to slow down the juggernaut of couches and treatment plans aimed straight at our kids.

What Gorman doesn’t explore is that even if this bill is killed, that won’t reverse or even slow down the therapization of education. It’s simply declining to pour gasoline on a tire fire.

Directives to bring more therapy-like teaching methods into the educational environment are already deeply embedded, not just in teacher training, but increasingly in licensure requirements. This is supported and fueled by numerous NGOs’ policy development efforts, leadership training, and institutional “best practices.”

Teacher Training

Trauma-informed pedagogy is sweeping through education schools and other university programs. Touted as an empathetic teaching approach that accounts for the widespread impact of trauma and its effects on cognitive function, this instructional framework aims to foster safety and resilience.

But like the term “safety,” universal “trauma-informed” teaching is a bait and switch. The phrase sounds like awareness, that a teacher should know trauma exists and respond appropriately when issues arise. The reality is an omnipresent pedagogical orientation in which every student interaction is filtered through a trauma frame, and discipline is replaced with empathy and inquiry.

One predictable consequence: some students will quickly realize that acting out is an effective strategy to do what they want without facing consequences, rewarding those children who least need such accommodations. At the same time, less audacious students are harmed through infantilization, missing out on painful relational challenges that teach them that suffering is survivable.

Robert Pondiscio, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, writes that “trauma-informed” school models reorient classroom discipline:

[I]nstead of asking “What’s wrong with this student?” educators are urged to ask “What happened to them?” The result is a quasi-therapeutic posture that treats misbehavior as a distress signal, calling for empathy and support rather than consequences. In many districts, this principle now shapes everything from daily interactions to discipline codes.

Trauma-informed teaching isn’t just optional continuing professional development for teachers. It is being built into the system that produces teachers: state licensure requirements, university preparation programs, and ongoing professional development mandates. Once embedded across these layers, the orientation persists regardless of what any single appropriations bill does.

According to Child Trends, a research organization focused on children, youth, and families, in 2019, 35 states had policies to favor or demand professional development in trauma-informed practices for school resource officers, with additional policies supporting mental health. While this study didn’t directly address teacher standards, it is an indicator of how broadly the framework had spread by then.

That was nearly a decade ago. Today, a quick search turns up resources and information on trauma-informed pedagogy at the University of Denver, the University of Oregon, Barnard College, the University of Michigan, the College of DuPage, and the American Library Association, and that is just the first page of search engine results.

The Tennessee Department of Education’s information on trauma-informed schools includes resources on becoming a trauma-informed teacher, conflict resolution guidance documentation, and even a Trauma-Informed Discipline Guide for Educators. This guide directs teachers to respond to student cursing with, “It sounds like you’re really upset. Let’s take a break and check back in,” and to greet a student returning after leaving class without permission with, “Glad you’re back. Want to talk about what you needed?”

The National Association of State Boards of Education (NASBE) reports that more states are adopting trauma-informed teacher training. Among the examples it highlights:

Trauma-informed training is often embedded in classroom management coursework, as in Washington, Oklahoma, and Utah. In Virginia, teacher candidates must receive training on how trauma affects students and how to identify it.

The Iowa state board requires districts to provide annual training on identifying adverse childhood experiences and “strategies to mitigate toxic stress.” Similarly, West Virginia requires trauma training every two years.

As recently as 2022, NASBE sponsored a webinar to discuss policy and programming, intended to provide teachers the skills to perform trauma-informed instruction under the auspices of building trauma-informed school systems.

The NASBE structure deserves inspection beyond the report and webinar themselves. NASBE is a private 501(c)(3) membership-based trade association whose members are state regulators, specifically, the state boards of education that set policy in each state.

This makes for a relational loop where state regulators belong to a private association that develops policy positions, which they then return to their states to adopt as regulation. In this way, new pedagogies move from private organization to state policy without any legislative voting to even slow it down.

The policy adopted via this pathway is not neutral guidance. NASBE describes itself as “the only organization dedicated solely to helping state boards advance equity and excellence in public education.” Its strategic plan commits to maintaining “a diverse staff in terms of age, race, gender, background, and experience” and “Model equity values by supporting diverse staff to secure thought leadership opportunities.” The equity commitments are made explicit in the strategic plan, but won’t show up in any state legislative record.

There are countless other similar organizations, many of them 501(c)(3) non-profits either populated by government regulators or courting them with things like Social Emotional Learning (SEL), trauma training, or other resources that suit their agendas.

Some of the more prominent organizations blending education and mental health include:

CASEL — The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning is the center for SEL, which has partnered with states to add SEL into standards and curriculum

The National Council for Mental Wellbeing is a mental health membership organization that champions policy and social change. It offers training and gives opinion on Capitol Hill.

The National Child Traumatic Stress Network (NCTSN) is funded by the Center for Mental Health Services (CMHS), the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). It promotes trauma-informed care.

The Aspen Institute’s National Commission on Social, Emotional, and Academic Development is a major proponent of SEL.

The Wallace Foundation is a major private funder of SEL.

Gorman is quite right: the federal government shouldn’t allocate funds specifically tied to new measures that would bring more therapy-adjacent interventions into schools. But parents and lawmakers should not think that killing this spending bill will do much to slow down the juggernaut of couches and treatment plans aimed straight at our kids during the middle of their math lessons.

READ MORE: 

UC Berkeley Joins Forces With Nancy Pelosi

Academic Freedom and Public Accountability at Rutgers

American Education Is in Almost Irredeemable Decline

Suzannah Alexander is the External Affairs Coordinator for the National Association of Scholars. She came to this work after blowing the whistle on ideological indoctrination in the Clinical Mental Health Counseling Master’s program at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.