Keywords

Introduction

A senior female student recently shared with me, the all-too-familiar story of her childhood that shaped the person she is today, preparing to graduate from high school. Reading her college biographical essay, which she proudly offered up to me, replete with violence and sadness, prompted the conversation. Her essay, written in the first person, screamed out and off the page, of a young girl struggling to make sense of her social world of drugs, molestation, and suicide through the lens of accommodationism, assuming personal responsibility, almost self-blame, for a poorly developed strength or lack of resilience able to overcome her situation. The passages of most significance:

  • ‘able to accept the past and learn from it’

  • ‘come out stronger’

  • ‘not let it destroy who I am’

  • ‘getting high to feel temporary relief’

  • ‘wasn’t strong enough’

  • ‘use drugs to cope with stress’

  • ‘overwhelmed, sad, depressed, feeling useless’

  • ‘learning to cope’

  • ‘clearly I was wrong’

Her story epitomizes the current behavioral health diagnosis and treatment paradigm that acknowledges the impact of socio-economic life situations on adolescents, and yet, individualizes responsibility for social problems onto families, schools, and students themselves. The broad contention of this paradigm assumes that poor behavioral health is a character flaw, best corrected through the school system and education reform.

This chapter will first review recent statistics of social-emotional wellness indicators of Massachusetts youth used to establish an empirical argument of a behavioral health crisis in our youth. Several sections that follow will construct the epidemiology of behavioral health in a neoliberal context of education reform. Lastly, I will illustrate how isolation and alienation in the context of the precariat youth impact a student’s educational experience by sharing the story of Adam, a 19-year-old, encumbered by poverty, disability, and class position, has struggled to attain a high school diploma and the roles and responsibilities the school assumes in this case.

The Empirical Argument

Since 2005 thousands of Massachusetts middle and high school students participate in two coordinated surveys every two years: The Massachusetts Youth Risk Behavior Survey and the Massachusetts Youth Health Survey. The survey is a joint partnership between the MA DESE and the Massachusetts Department of Public Health (2014). The published results have become an integral part of the efforts of school administrators to identify and address behaviors and conditions that may compromise the health and safety of adolescents. The report summarizes tobacco, alcohol and drug use, dietary habits, sexual activity, and mental health status of Massachusetts youth. In addition to these specific survey results which, as a school administrator, I have access to for my own students as well as the state, the Injury Surveillance Program, Massachusetts Department of Public Health publishes annual Data Briefs that also reflect behaviors and conditions that are of concern. In the 2015–2016 Data Brief a few relevant and alarming statistics are:

  • The homicide rate for youth aged 15–24 has increased 71% between 2000 and 2005.

  • Suicide rates increased an average of 4.2% per year between 2003 and 2012. There were 42% more suicides in 2012 than in 2003. Forty-seven percent of suicide victims had a documented mental health problem such as depression. Twenty-five percent had an alcohol or other substance use problem. Sixteen percent had a job problem.

  • Five percent of high school students are considered homeless.

  • Thirty-two percent of low-income communities were considered food-insecure in 2005, up 13% since 2003.

  • Unintentional opioid-related overdoses/deaths increased by 251% between 2000 and 2014 at a rate of 5.3% increase per year.

In 2008 the Governor’s Adolescent Health Council and the Massachusetts Department of Public Health published the 140-page comprehensive report; A Shared Vision for Massachusetts Youth and Young Adults: Summary Data on Youth Development and Health in Relation to Key Strategic Goals. The five strategic goals intended to support the stated vision that All Massachusetts youth grow up to be healthy, caring, and economically self-sufficient adults are:

  1. 1.

    All youth have access to resources that promote optimal physical and mental health.

  2. 2.

    All youth have nurturing relationships with adults and positive relationships with peers.

  3. 3.

    All youth have access to safe places for living, learning, and working.

  4. 4.

    All youth have access to educational and economic opportunities.

  5. 5.

    All youth have access to structured activities and opportunities for community service and civic participation.

The status of significant indicators related to hunger, drug and alcohol use, suicide and depression of Massachusetts youth is published to support the recommended actions to accomplish the stated goals. The summary suggests that “there continue to be youth who are falling behind; youth who continue to engage in risky behaviors, are not receiving basic health care services, or are not attaining the education levels of their peers and large numbers of Massachusetts youth continue to face challenges, including engaging in risky behaviors that can have serious health consequences, as well as substantial personal and monetary costs” (Governor’s Adolescent Health Council and Massachusetts Department of Public Health, 2008, p. 8).

Absent from both of these touted reports commonly referenced in district and school-wide improvement plans is the discourse that addresses the institutional and structural forces that create the conditions that produce poverty, oppression, alienation, and precarity: the socio-economic-political forces that normalize both the behaviors and the promoted strategies of reform. Although the Comprehensive Mental Health Action Plan 2013–2020 created by the Sixty-Sixth World Health Assembly acknowledged that an economic crisis could have created new vulnerable groups such as unemployed youth and increased marginalization and impoverishment, domestic violence, abuse, overwork, and stress, the plan’s objectives fail to address how social disinvestment and austerity politics feed the current socio-economic crisis. Further, the Assembly’s report conceptualizes mental health as a “state of well-being in which the individual realizes his or her own abilities, can cope with the normal stresses of life, can work productively and fruitfully, and is able to make a contribution to his or her community” (2013, p. 3) and essentially ignores the responsibility to call for societal changes in political and economic policy necessary to impose social protections, address working conditions, lack of public housing, access to medical care, and poverty. Instead, with respect to children, the Assembly focuses on individualized development factors such as having a positive identity, the ability to manage and self-regulate one’s thoughts and emotions, to build healthy relationships, and to learn and ultimately to fully participate in society. The section that follows will outline how individualizing responsibility for development factors is an important element in the construction of behavioral health in a neoliberal education reform ethos.

The Epidemiology of Behavioral Health

The current trend in the epidemiology of behavioral health as a scientific cognitive apparatus translates to a form of social control having its origins in the Enlightenment (Davies, 2016). If reason and logic—science—liberate us from the oppressive powers surrounded in the mysteries previously only known to those in power and institutions of power, primarily religious clerics and church, then an enlightened individual will be able to construct her own knowledge and thus, free herself from domination by “the other”. Horkheimer and Adorno (2002) contest the instrumental reasoning central to the Enlightenment, claiming that it is in the very nature of defending social and political institutions with science, logic, and rationality that we elevate all that can be measured and only that which can be measured, to rightness. “For enlightenment, anything which does not conform to the standard of calculability and utility must be viewed with suspicion. Once the movement is able to develop unhampered by external oppression, there is no holding it back” (p. 3). To that end, we see a management of human reasoning—a bureaucracy over knowledge construction: “On their way toward modern science, human beings have discarded meaning. The concept is replaced by the formula, the cause by rules and probability” (Horkheimer & Adorno, 2002, p. 3) . The tests become the learning, authority becomes the truth, rational science affords man freedom from authoritarianism, enabling him to construct and claim knowledge through scientific reason on his own. They argue that the science of instrumental reason and logic did not provide a liberating of thought but instead granted cultural weight to the political thoughts already dominating society.

The recent ascendancy of positive psychology, life-coaching, the industry of happiness and optimism, and psychopharmacology is associated with the rise of Martin Seligman to the presidency of the American Psychological Association (APA) in 1997 (Ehrenreich, 2009). Seligman’s work centered on a problematic formula for happiness, where the weights of each component are variable, particularly related to life circumstances. Ehrenreich (p. 172) challenged the APA’s position because

If circumstances only play a small role – even 25 percent – in human happiness, then policy is a marginal exercise. Why advocate for better jobs and schools, safer neighborhoods, universal health insurance, or any other liberal desideratum if these measures will do little to make people happy? Social reformers, political activists, and change-oriented elected officials can all take a much needed rest.

For Seligman , the answer lies with the optimistic thinking that the new popularized paradigm for behavioral health treatment adopted by the APA and trickled down to schools.

In The Selfish Capitalist, Oliver James (2008) challenges the assumptions that behaviors related to emotional distress are genetically inherited and instead builds a case for society as the cause of distress by analyzing levels of distress between nations. His fundamental theory claims the growth of selfish capitalism in English-speaking countries since the 1970s has dramatically increased the level of emotional distress unlike those countries who did not adopt an extreme materialistic political economy. Davies (2016) further claims that the fundamental flaw of the science of happiness is that it diverts our attention inward for solutions rather than confronting critical political-economic questions.

Similarly, Canadian physician, Gabor Mate , also contrary to the assumptions of mainstream medicine, asserts that mind and body are not separate in real life, and thus health and illness in a person reflect social and economic realities more than personal predispositions. In a 2012 speech at the Bioneers Conference, he claims that most human ailments are not individual problems, but reflections of a person’s relationship with the physical, emotional, and social environment. Bioneers are social and scientific innovators considered leaders in social and scientific vision. Mate’s biopsychosocial perspective maintains that disease is a reflection of one’s life circumstances, culture, and environment (Mate, 2012). At the risk of overemphasizing the cultural and environmental factors of disease, Mate’s position is important because it reminds us that to remove social circumstance from health is also flawed as broadly reductionist.

Medicalizing Behavior

“Controlling the body for the sake of the mind” is the theme that dominates the education professional trade journals and workshops. Student behavioral health/emotional wellness is the foremost context in Massachusetts educational leadership circles. Schools and districts are seeking and partnering with the medical community for insight and training that will assist educators in supporting student wellness. The field is flooded with two predominant medical approaches: cognitive therapeutic and psychopharmacology. The cognitive approaches are taken up in Chap. 4 as schools are increasingly adopting broad behavioral practices in response to legislative mandates.

Framing the diagnosis and treatment ontology of behavioral health is biological reductionism: a theoretical approach, which explains social or cultural phenomena in biological terms. Biological reductionism denies a social construction to mental health and emotional wellness and instead reduces behavior to genetics, brain function, brain chemistry, physiology, and neuroscience and naturally constructs a treatment model entrenched in pharmacology and behaviorism. “There has been a two- to three-fold increase in psychiatric medicines prescribed to children since the 1980s” (James, 2008, p. 176). In a recent blog post, the Director of the National Institute of Mental Health (Insel, 2014) highlights some revealing statistics, gleaned from the National Center for Health Statistics and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which concludes there has been a significant increase in the number of children medicated with either psychostimulants or antidepressants in the last decade. Insel suggests that, although tempting to blame drug companies for over marketing and over selling, or busy, weak parenting, or schools for failing to understand “fidgety boys”, we must consider the possibility that this may not be a result of over diagnosis and overmedication, but in fact, an actual increase in disease. Does this not reflect more families are in crisis and more children in distress?

Medicalization describes a process by which nonmedical problems become defined and treated as medical problems, usually in terms of illnesses or disorder (Conrad, 1992) . Conrad offers examples of medicalized deviance as madness, alcoholism, homosexuality, opiate addiction, hyperactivity, and learning disabilities in children, eating problems from overeating (obesity) to undereating (anorexia), child abuse, compulsive gambling, infertility, and transsexualism (p. 213). In the context of medicalizing deviance, Conrad distinguished three types of medical social control: medical ideology, collaboration, and technology. He believes that medical ideology imposes a medical model primarily because of accrued social and ideological benefits; in medical collaboration doctors assist (usually in an organizational context) as information providers, gatekeepers, institutional agents, and technicians; medical technology suggests the use for social control of medical technological means, especially drugs, surgery, and genetic or other types of screening. While these are overlapping categories, they do allow us to characterize types of medical social control. Perhaps the most common form is still “medical excusing” (Halleck, 1971), ranging from doctor’s notes for missing school to disability benefits, to eligibility to the insanity defense. To these categories we can add a fourth-medical surveillance. Based on the work of Foucault , this form of medical social control suggests that certain conditions or behaviors become perceived through a “medical gaze” and that physicians may legitimately lay claim to all activities concerning the condition.

Health Is Wealth: Behavioral Health Construction

In the current political economy construct, health is wealth, or a healthy citizenry makes for strong human capital. The future of capitalism depends on our ability to combat stress, depression, and anxiety that threatens productivity and is a costly toll on public funds and institutions. Lost wages for illness and health care costs in the workplace have brought attention to employee nutrition, exercise, obesity, engagement/disengagement, boredom, fatigue, and absenteeism. How these things are manifested in the work setting threatens productivity, decreases output, and costs money. Ultimately, the attention to “well-being’, “emotional health’, “behavioral health’ creates a whole new realm of need and opportunity for intervention in a neoliberal education reform agenda that increasingly treats public schooling as a business entity, as if it has no other function than to serve economic ends (Saltman, 2012).

Saltman (2016) asserts that central to neoliberal education reform is the promotion of corporeal control over students and teachers and the pushing of social-emotional learning schemes such as grit and mindfulness as the answer to poverty. Public schools are being redefined in neoliberal terms of opportunity for students to compete in the global capitalist economy toward the goals of work and consumerism that support a corporate knowledge production that favors the economic, political, and cultural elites at the expense of the interests and needs of the poor and historically oppressed people. Students need to be managed and learn self-regulation to be trained to take their prescribed places in the workforce in the face of economic and social precarity, declining incomes and social disinvestment. The value that schools place on the externally prescribed skill set and curriculum deliberately aligned with employee/labor productivity and efficiency frames the policies and practices they adopt and implement.

The broad brush of the policy movement in education reform encompassing behavioral health is bound in biopolitics and a social control theory that elevates individual responsibility for normed behavior over structural issues. Although all human behavior is affected by both agency and structure, the current climate is heavily slanted toward individual free will or agency as the predictor of student achievement. Weitz (2017) names this emphasis of agency or life choices over life chances as the Health Belief Model, which deemphasizes the role of structural limitations. “Recent years have seen an increasing tendency to blame individuals for their own health problems” (Weitz, 2017, p. 45). The individuation of responsibility for emotional wellness has created the space to legislate cognitive behavioral approaches in schools that looks like character and civic education fixed on maintaining a class dominance through social control.

The substantial emphasis on individualized responsibility and looking inward versus shared responsibility and looking outward as it relates to behavioral health of adolescents thwarts efforts of transformational reform. For example, rather than impose legislation that would ban tobacco growers or limit alcohol distributors, the free market, tobacco growers, alcohol distributors, and politicians, alike, become complicit in promoting the conditions that create predispositions to illness. Peggy Thoits explains that “individuals with lower incomes and education levels experience more stress overall than do more affluent, better educated individuals”, just as “individuals are far more susceptible to infection if age, malnutrition, poor housing, insufficient clothing or other difficulties weaken their bodies” (Weitz, 2017, pp. 37, 44). What are the short- and long-term behavioral results, for example, of the conditions of longer work days and weeks and two income earner homes that naturally impact fatigue, nutrition, exercise, and family time? In other words, has the development of self-regulation in children been impacted by the longer work hours of their parents, the absence of parents, the fatigue of parents, and the subsequent take-out, fast food meal dynamic?

Massachusetts behavioral health legislation that increases school responsibility for student emotional health is grounded in the socio-political presupposition that student achievement scores will improve with improved emotional health. Recent pertinent regulations such as An Act Relative to Student Access to Educational Services and Exclusion from School, 2012, An Act Relative to the Reduction of Gun Violence, 2014, and An Act Relative to Substance Use, Treatment, Education and Prevention, 2016, illustrate the numerous bureaucratic responsibilities pushed onto schools rooted in an agenda of accommodationism. Saltman (2014) defines accommodationism as a perspective that presumes that schooling ought to accommodate the student to the existing social order, political system, economic structure, and dominant culture. Here legislation will individualize responsibility for normed behavior onto students, families, and schools and push an agenda of positivity forward through behavioral health curricula and accountability mandates, renorming schools as the answer to mitigate behaviors stemming from structural issues such as poverty, violence, and trauma.

Children who experience stress, trauma, or violence are more likely to lack impulse control and, in turn, exhibit behaviors outside the expected norms that are often medicalized or diagnosed as conduct disorder, oppositional defiant disorder, attachment disorder, depression, and anxiety. Stress refers to situations that make individuals feel anxious and out of balance, the emotions that result from exposure to these situations and the bodily changes that occur in response to exposure to these situations and emotions (Weitz, 2017, p. 43) . It can be acute or chronic (such as long-term loneliness or financial difficulties resulting from loss of a spouse). Thoits claims that a cumulative stress burden as the sum of acute and chronic stress that one has experienced is a powerful predictor of ill health (Weitz, 2017). She claims that minorities have higher cumulative stress burdens and, in turn, greater ill health as a result of discrimination and prejudice which also increases the odds that such individuals will be poor and will live in neighborhoods characterized by poverty, neglect, crime, and safety risks related to poor housing (lack of heat, hot water, broken steps, lead paint, etc.).

Rose Weitz (2017) argues that psychological distress is less common among those with more social capital—the resources available to individuals through their social network. Rates of both diagnosable mental illness and psychological distress increase as social class decreases. “The sociological model of mental illness argues that definitions of mental illness reflect subjective social judgments regarding whether behaviors are acceptable and understandable. Behaviors are labeled mental illness when they contravene cognitive norms, performance norms, or feeling norms” (Weitz, 2017, p. 172). Teaching and imposing vocationally suitable norms such as obedience to authority, self-regulation, competitiveness, and individualization of personal weakness increasingly become the domain of the schools through the social-emotional learning umbrella as recently legislated.

Weitz (2017) claims that in order to improve the public health we must look beyond individual behavior and personal troubles to structural issues. The next section will explore how the structural issues inherent in a neoliberal capitalist society experiencing significant social disinvestment and economic insecurity impact the construction of behavioral health in the context of education reform.

Pushing Positivity

William Davies (2016) studies social epidemiology to criticize the science of happiness as a twenty-first-century neoliberal form of social control. He claims that unhappiness and depression are concentrated in highly unequal societies, with strongly materialist, competitive values. “More equal societies, such as Scandinavian nations, record lower levels of depression and higher levels of well-being overall, while depression is most common in highly unequal societies such as the United States and United Kingdom. The statistics also confirm that relative poverty- being poor in comparison to others can cause as much misery as absolute poverty, suggesting that it is the sense of inferiority and status anxiety that triggers depression, in addition to the stress of worrying about money” (p. 142). As we become more and more obsessed with money and material acquisitions, we put our social relationships in jeopardy and thus our own human fulfillment. Davies believes that in this way capitalism spreads a plague of materialism, which undermines our connectedness, leaving many of us isolated and lonely (p. 211).

“Today, around a third of adults in the United States and close to half in the UK believe that they occasionally suffer from depression, although the diagnosis rates are lower than that” (Davies, 2016, p. 143) . Davies evaluates specifically how a capitalist system built around an ethos of competition, winners and losers, may increase the likelihood of developing poor emotional health such as depression. A culture based on measuring our self-worth relative to others is positioned for some to feel of less value as we attribute every failure to individual ability and effort. Spring (2014) also claims that extreme inequalities in wealth and the stress of competition contribute to stress, unhappiness, and longevity of life. “Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that a society such as America’s which privileges a competitive individual mindset at every moment in life, has been so thoroughly permeated by depressive disorders and demand for antidepressants” (Davies, 2016, p. 143).

Massachusetts education reform since 1993 has been framed in a competitive paradigm replete with annual accountability “report cards” that compare districts and schools across the state using student performance indicators such as student achievement test scores (MCAS ), graduation rates, and test participation rates. Student performance data is disaggregated by race, gender, low income, English language learners, and Special Education students. The ethos of competition is driving a perpetual state of data analysis between districts and schools in the state. Even schools and principals within districts strive to outscore each other and then spend a budget cycle adamantly vying for available resources based on performance results, measuring our self-worth relative to each other. The ensuing distress for educational leaders permeates the school climate as curriculum leaders and administrators scheme to develop new ways to improve student test performance.

There are two different ways to eradicate distress: alter the context (work, poverty) or alter the way you experience the distress (Davies, 2016). Altering the contexts of poverty, for example, would require significant conceptual challenges to neoliberal capitalism. Altering the way in which we experience distress is the mode imposed through recent education reform legislation that holds schools accountable through curriculum and school climate for student emotional health. These are most visible with the implementation of character education programs, mindfulness training, drug screenings, suicide awareness trainings, and school discipline policies and practices.

Beren Aldridge (Davies, 2016) offered the following insight: treating the mind as some form of decontextualized, independent entity that breaks down of its own accord, requiring monitoring and fixing by experts, is a symptom of the very culture that produces a great deal of unhappiness today. Aldridge’s claims are based on his Growing Well Farm developed in 2004 to support people with mental and emotional difficulties. The farm operated as a co-op democratic business, empowering all, with all having a sense of voice, equal participation, agency, and collective power for the good of all. Outside of the farm setting, typically, disempowerment is an integral part of how depression, stress, and anxiety arise. And despite the best efforts of positive psychologists, disempowerment occurs as an effect of social, political, and economic institutions and strategies, not of neural and behavioral errors (Davies, 2016, p. 250).

The disempowerment of students is inherent in a transmission style or, as Paulo Freire refers to it, banking style of depositing and consuming learning that characterizes the prescribed topics of study as outlined in the 1993 MERA , which gave us Massachusetts Curriculum Frameworks, performance testing in the MCAS , surveillance in the form of compliance monitoring and behavioral control and competitive market ideals. Surreptitiously embedded in the ideology of education reform is the naming of teachers, parents, and students themselves as responsible for test performance—achievement gap, declining achievement, or even failure to measure up on a world scale. The single focus on test performance denies the student as producer of knowledge, as critical thinker, and as agent of democracy. Education has become the accumulation of knowledge versus thinking, delinked from humanity and the social implications inherent in an education reform that oppresses creativity, thinking, and contestation. Saltman (2017) explains the model of student as consumer of units of knowledge as a pedogogical delivery that shuts down debate, dialogue, curiosity, and creativity. The disempowerment is embedded in the institution itself, the climate, and the pedagogical practices leaving students restless, anxious, and bored.

Despite that, worldwide, the most routine obstacle to human happiness is poverty (Ehrenreich, 2009, p. 205). Davies recognizes that happiness is captured and conceived as an individual responsibility making unhappiness a voluntary condition. This approach conveniently denies a structural correlation to happiness, stress, anxiety, and depression, such as the conditions of poverty, violence, and trauma and instead blames the victim themselves for their weakened emotional state. This approach to studying human behavior that emphasizes an individual role in behavior, looking inward at brain, feelings, and behavior, diverts attention from the structural socio-political-economic issues.

The psychology of motivation blends into the physiology of health, drawing occasionally on insights from sports coaches and nutritionists, to which is added a cocktail of neuroscientific rumors and Buddhist meditation practices. Various notions of ‘fitness’, ‘happiness’, ‘positivity’, and ‘success’ bleed into one another, with little explanation of how or why. The idea which accompanies all of this is that there is one ideal form of human existence: hardworking, happy, healthy and, above all, rich. A science of elite perfectibility is built on the back of this heroic capitalist vision . (Davies, 2016, p. 212)

The Precariat Youth: Insecurity, Isolation, Alienation, and Distress

British author, Guy Standing (2014), develops the concept of economic and social precarity as it applies to youth and the implications of the precariat state of being on their behavioral health and ultimately the “rise of the new dangerous class”. Generally, the precariat class can be characterized as short-term laborers, holding a series of temporary, part-time jobs and, most often, work beneath their level of education and skill. The precariat class has evolved as a result of a new global market economy, which has produced billions of extra laborers upending the distribution of income, and creating a new class as the proletariat (stable, skilled labor) shrinks. The work itself has no inherent personal meaning and fails to provide a sense of purpose or occupational identity of value for the individual, which results in a distressing sense of alienation and potentially a life of unsustainable debt.

Standing (2014) describes a precariat existence as living in the immediacy of the present, having a distinctive social income which imparts a vulnerability and class characteristics such as minimal trust relationships with capital or the state and no sense of a social contract relationship or a secure identity or sense of development achieved through work and lifestyle. He offers Walmart as an example of a labor model whose part-time, flexible scheduling prohibits employees from paid vacations, health insurance, and pension benefits. Standing argues that the lack of community support and public benefits in times of need contribute to this sense of isolation and anxiety. He claims that youth are a large segment of the precariat class navigating through life, often encumbered by increasingly insurmountable debt, lacking the social and economic security necessary to thrive.

Standing claims that the precariat life of substantial economic and social insecurity produces a class of people experiencing the four A’s: anger, anomie, anxiety, and alienation. The anger stems from frustration at what feels like blocked avenues for advancing a meaningful life and from a sense of relative deprivation with no ladders of opportunity for career or economic growth or mobility. The anomie is understood as a feeling of passivity born of despair and intensified from artless, career-less jobs, and sustained defeat. The anxiety is a result of chronic insecurity associated with teetering on the edge, constant stress and pressure to succeed, lack of employment security, and fear of losing what they have. And the alienation arises from knowing that what one is doing is not for one’s own purpose or self-respect but to only to pay the bills. The work is unlikely associated with one’s ambitions and dreams, leaving the precariat emotionally detached from their work.

Mark Fisher (2009, p. 34) explains that, in post Fordist life, “work and life became inseparable. Capital follows you when you dream. Time ceases to be linear, becomes chaotic, broken down into punctiform divisions. As production and distribution are restructured, so are nervous systems. To function effectively as a component of just-in-time production you must develop a capacity to respond to unforeseen events, you must learn to live in conditions of total instability, or precarity”. He believes that the capitalist system reproduces the chaotic, abandoned, and precarious disposition of the population resulting in a plague of psychiatric and affective disorders. This can be seen in the growing number of adolescents presenting with behaviors associated with depression, anxiety, and bipolar disorder.

Alex Means (2013) connects the relationship to gang membership for some adolescents as a way to secure a sense of self, safety, and belonging. William Robinson (2014) also would claim that the sense of insecurity, isolation, loss of meaning, increased surveillance, criminalization of the poor, and the disconnection from place results in increased anxiety. The contributions of both Means and Robinson bring important attention to the psychological pathology that results from absent or weak physiological conditions. Means describes the fragmentation of human security as a result of cuts to social programs and education, leaving schools as the last safety net. Robinson suggests that conditions exist for a twenty-first-century fascism to emerge similar to Erich Fromm’s claim in Escape from Freedom (1969), in which Fromm describes how the breakup of the medieval world and the loss of a settled social structure and a religious worldview resulted in Europeans losing a sense of identity and meaning, creating widespread anxiety that in turn made the rise of fascism possible.

Similarly, Oliver James (2008) claims that industrialization and urbanization are the fundamental causes of high rates of emotional distress and that education reform has failed to critically address how a society entrenched in a political economy of materialism, inequity, and austerity has created these conditions. Conversely, current discourse individualizes distress as a personal weakness. “Individualism replaces collectivism so that identity is achieved through performance at school and career, rather than conferred by social class, background, family roles and gender” (p. 37). He attributes the loss of social cohesion, social isolation, fractured family and neighborhood relationships, and the decline in church ethos resulting from industrialization and urbanization as increasing the likelihood of family distress.

Karl Marx (1964) claims that man’s relationship to labor is estranged and alienating. This dynamic can be applied to the twenty-first-century student experiencing a complete disconnect from the curriculum and pedagogical practices currently in place, and thus leaving the students feeling alienated from their work, their studies, and their labor. Critical sociologists, including Erich Fromm , have pointed out how capitalist alienation expands throughout social life to multiple social relations. With a neoliberal agenda driving education reform, the student becomes a consumer of knowledge, framed as a collection of facts to be acquired within a business and vocational culture supported by testing, curricular standardization, and accountability (Saltman, 2016). I argue that Saltman’s conceptualization of these anti-critical approaches that delink knowledge from subjective experiences and the broader social forces that give knowledge meaning causes a significant amount of estrangement and alienation in our students, making them ripe for poor emotional health.

One Particular Precariat Youth

The role of the school and that of the principal in supporting student achievement is often a relentless pursuit of paths and alternatives to the mainstream and conventional. In what follows, I will illustrate how school administration works tirelessly and often unsuccessfully, to mitigate the socio-economic obstacles for one student significantly impaired by structural issues. Adam’s story is a case study which demonstrates how accommodationist ideology inherent in a neoliberal education agenda has augmented the educationalization of behavioral health and broader social service provisions in an era characterized by social disinvestment and vast income inequality.

Adam is a 19-year-old Hispanic non-graduate I met as a 14-year-old freshman student. His path to a high school diploma is more and more common as families are faced with similar circumstances and structures in a neoliberal environment of pubic disinvestment producing increasing precarity. Adam’s impediments to a diploma began at birth; he was born into a family of little means and low socio-economic status. Adam is the youngest of five children. When I met Adam, his father was a laborer, working construction for a city housing authority. His mother was a part-time school custodian in my building.

In the span of Adam’s high school years, he struggled academically and socially. His grades were always below average and often failing. He began his education as a kindergartner in the district in which I am employed as high school principal, so I am familiar with his early and elementary school records. He was referred for a special education evaluation in first grade by his classroom teacher. Adam’s testing through grade seven revealed significant weaknesses in the areas of reading, mathematics, writing, speech and language, and auditory processing. His individual education plan provided Adam with reading services, speech and language services, Academic Support, and small group instruction. His report cards in the elementary years are replete with teacher comments about Adam’s kindness and engagement with his teachers; he was always interested in being a teacher helper. His attendance was stellar and his grades average or below average. The only repeated teacher comments of concern were related to incomplete homework assignments.

In seventh grade, Adam’s records began to include conduct referrals and suspensions from school. Adam’s parents were now separated and he remained in the district and living with his father. He had such a difficult year socially and academically that his parents withdrew him from his very small suburban home district and moved him into large, urban Chelsea Public Schools and to live with his mother for grade eight. The records from Chelsea indicate that Adam did not have any conduct referrals from his teachers. However, his grades were failing and his attendance poor.

In the summer between grade eight and nine, Adam’s mother moved from Chelsea to Fall River. His parents heeded his pleas to return to his home district and to live with his father for grade nine. Adam’s struggles in high school ran the gamut from academic failure, drug use, poor attendance, consistent tardiness, and conduct that resulted in numerous suspensions from school, either in school or out of school. Adam’s conduct and attendance began to decline rapidly. He became addicted to nicotine and desperately needed smoke breaks, which led him to cut class, smoke in the boys’ room, or leave the building and not return. The pattern of suspension took shape rather quickly in grade nine. Suspension from school for a student on an Individual Education Plan required numerous parent meetings, all of which interfered with both parents’ work, and missed work created real fear of job loss. By March of his freshman year, his parents opted to move him back with his mother who was now living in Fall River. This would be the fourth school change for Adam in three typically difficult middle school years, grades 7–9.

Adam failed his freshman year, earning only ten credits between the two schools he attended. His grades and attendance were atrocious. Summer school was an option to recover credits in English and Math, but summer school costs $200.00 per course, not an avenue available to Adam’s family. Transportation would also be an obstacle to accessing summer school because the district does not provide buses in the summer and dad works long hours.

Adam returned to the district and living with his father in September of his sophomore year. His attendance improved dramatically because dad drove him and his two older brothers to school every day on his way to work. Dad had to be in the city on a job site so the boys would be dropped off to a nearly empty building almost an hour before school started. However, his sophomore year was plagued with conduct referrals for minor infractions, broadly related to not wanting to be in school. Adam was attending several classes with students a year behind him and facing a mounting obstacle to graduating with his class due to a failed freshman year. Catching up to his peers would be even more difficult for Adam due to his significant learning needs that would take him out of regular classes in order to provide supports such as reading, speech, organizational skills, and math tutoring.

By the end of his sophomore year, we had a total of 15 documented meetings with one or both parents working toward improving Adam’s “motivation and attitude’. Both parents recognized the school number and expected my voice on the other end of the phone. His supports and services were thoughtfully created and managed to include psychological services, behavior contracts, reward systems, reduced days, and online learning opportunities. It was clear that Adam was a student at risk to drop out of school. His demeanor appeared increasingly defeatist. He was leaving school more often and missing many classes. His special education supports and services continued to expand to include organizational skills and 1:1 support, in order to attempt to close gaps created from moving to different schools, missing significant instruction, and to provide in school time and support with homework that Adam was unable or unwilling to complete at home. His “behavior” dominated the discussions with dad and with his IEP team. “If only Adam would…behave in class, stay in school, stay awake in class, do his homework, make up missed work, engage in the lesson, etc.”.

As Adam grew older, the expectations for age appropriate “normal behavior”, for compliance and for independent responsibility for his behavior also increased, both from his parents and from the school. His non-compliance with rules of behavior and the expected role of a student coupled with continued academic failure flawlessly fit the “at-risk’ student profile. When he turned 17, Adam’s parents’ exasperation with constant school engagement with limited success and an arrest for a minor in possession of alcohol pushed them to disengage with the school. Adam’s patterns of poor attendance and poor grades appeared to be a direct result of unyielding obstinate behavior, refusal to conform to the rituals, policies, and practices imposed on students. The school’s relationship with Adam actually improved as he shared his cell phone number and email address with staff who continued to reach out to support him. The relationship forged was a direct result of conscious decisions to circumvent the rules and practices that were an obstacle to Adam’s school participation. If Adam was not in school by 8 a.m. administration would call him. Typically, he overslept or went back to bed after his father left for work and then was without a ride to school. If he answered the call, an administrator would offer him a ride and breakfast. Occasionally he would take us up on it, giving both him and the school renewed hope.

The efforts made by administration and support staff sent a strong message to Adam that he was important to us and we would work to mitigate the structural obstacle of poverty and class that impeded his success. It was never enough. We could take turns calling him to be his alarm clock and jumping in our cars to go pick him up. We could give him enough cash from our pockets for breakfast and lunch. We could look the other way when he was late to school and be excited that he showed up at all. We could offer tutoring and modify his schedule and assignments. We offered alternative programming in the evening and transportation. We paid for and scheduled a HiSet test (formerly GED) but he never made it to the off campus test site for the second day.

Neither the school, administrators, teachers, and support personnel nor any amount of district resources could navigate his social world and the structural forces that influenced and impacted him greater than school. At 18 with only sophomore credits Adam was years older than most of his peers. His social group was outside of school and was mostly former students who had dropped out of school. Adam was isolated and disconnected from a peer group of classmates. His state of precarity and alienation from school life posed obstacles that school resources alone could not overcome. The patterns of response behavior of Adam and the persistent structural barriers hindering his school performance provided the framework for the review and analysis of student records explained in the next section.

Student Records Review

The purpose of this study includes the examination of how the basic tenets of Massachusetts education reform have contributed to the psycho-social-emotional conditions for learning and the behavioral health of students. The student record review hopes to correlate specific emotional behaviors typically seen in adolescents with life conditions that might disadvantage a student and pose complex obstacles to achievement, and also demonstrate the types of behaviors that schools are working to mitigate as a result of socio-economic structural conditions. Indicators selected as a data set for this research were chosen based on a review of the literature, education reform principles, and doctrine derived from the research of William Davies, Alex Means , Guy Standing , William Robinson , Mark Fisher , and Kenneth Saltman as explicated throughout Chap. 4.

Twelve student records were purposefully selected from a master list maintained by the School Psychologist as Chair of the SST. The SST meets weekly to review pertinent information for students identified as being at risk. In addition to the School Psychologist the SST is made up of three Guidance Counselors, the School Nurse, the SROs, the Special Education Team Chair, Assistant Principal, and Principal. Each member of the team keeps their own case notes which creates several records/files for cross reference. Data collection entailed a thorough reading of the files maintained by Administration, Guidance Counselors, and School Psychologist. The value of reading several separate files supported a triangulation analysis in order to map behavioral indicators occurring more than once for the same student.

Throughout the first reading, the researcher kept notes and highlighted key words associated with stressful life circumstances or conditions in yellow, and key words associated with behaviors related to experiencing stressful conditions in green. The color-coding of key terms and a review of notes led to thematic patterns used to develop a bilateral chart of 12 rows for students and 15 columns for each highlighted life condition and behavioral characteristic. The second reading of files was intended to purposely look for supporting information or additional indicators that would substantiate behavioral codes applied to each student. The researcher also met with student guidance counselors and school psychologist to share the initial findings and solicit corroborating evidence or evidence that would discount initial findings.

The initial charting of information sought to correlate any of seven stressful life circumstances with any of seven student behavioral characteristics either observed or reported. Life circumstances drawn from the records included death of a parent or guardian, divorce of parents, a residential move in childhood, mental illness of a parent or guardian, poverty, substance abuse of a parent or guardian, and a violent or traumatic experience in childhood. Behavioral characteristics pulled from the records included alienation, anger, despair, detached/depressed, distress/anxiety, insecurity/precarity, and isolation. This initial analysis showed that 12 students had a combined total of 58 stressful life conditions identified and a combined total of 56 behavioral characteristics studied.

Deeper analysis was necessary in order to correlate specific behaviors with specific life conditions. By breaking out each variable and developing a scatter chart of X variables (life circumstances) and Y variables (behaviors), more explicit conclusions could be drawn about the collected data. Summary findings indicate that as below:

  • 100% of students demonstrated insecurity /precarity

  • 75% of students demonstrated five or more behavioral characteristics

  • 83% of students demonstrated either despair, depression, or detachment

  • 92% of students experienced poverty

  • 67% of students experienced four or more adverse life circumstances

  • 67% students had a parent or guardian with a substance abuse problem

  • 75% of males demonstrated anger versus 25% of females

The student record review and analysis undertaken as one prong of the qualitative critical situational analysis expected to produce findings not arrived at by means of statistical procedures or other means of quantification (Clarke, 2005). Since the data set of student records were purposefully selected as students identified as at risk and tracked by the school SST, some of the findings were of no surprise. Expected results were broadly supported and that students who are demonstrating one or more behavioral characteristics of anxiety, depression, despair, detachment, insecurity, isolation, and alienation have also experienced adverse life circumstances such as death, substance abuse, or mental illness of a parent, poverty, residential move in childhood, or other violence or trauma. Notable secondary findings not anticipated prior to conducting the study but emerged throughout the data analysis (Mayan, 2009) included the ability to disaggregate that poverty was the highest occurring adverse condition experienced by 92% of the selected students, and the highest occurring behavioral characteristic manifested by 100% of selected students was that of insecurity/precarity. Unexpected findings include that the number of males who demonstrate anger is three times that of females and that the mental illness of a parent correlated with the fewest number of observable behavioral characteristics studied.

Conclusion

The research conducted and analyzed in this chapter as a review of a purposeful selection of at-risk student records intended to illuminate the social-emotional behaviors most often observable in schools and correlate adverse life circumstances to behavioral health of students. The role of schools situated as increasingly assuming responsibilities for student emotional wellness can be understood by scrutinizing individual student records. Schools operate within these subjective realities of students. Resolving the complexities of student emotional health and wellness cannot be accomplished by individualizing these experiences and responsibilities or by legislating those problems onto schools. Despite this reality, recent Massachusetts education reform has propelled the responsibilities of student emotional health onto schools through legislation to be taken up in the next chapter.