Cash in the Classroom: How Schools Benefit from Psychological Labels

How Schools May Create the Problems They Later Diagnose

By Richard P. Weigand

American education is failing to produce acceptable results.

Reading and mathematics scores have declined. Large numbers of students leave school without mastering basic subjects. Discipline has deteriorated, teachers are leaving, and parents increasingly question what schools are doing.

Yet the system rarely concludes that its own methods have failed.

Instead, the child is examined, evaluated, classified, and diagnosed.

A student who cannot read may have a learning disability. A restless child may have ADHD. A troubled adolescent may be diagnosed with anxiety, depression, or a gender-related condition.

Some children likely need specialized help. That is not in dispute.  Each child is different and learns at different speeds, and knows different things.

The question is what happens when a failing institution gains money, protection, and an explanation for failure by classifying more of the children it has failed to educate.

I have not personally investigated every funding formula, school district, or individual diagnosis. Nor have I found statistics proving that schools deliberately misdiagnose children to obtain money or protect their performance records.

What follows is my opinion, formed through 75 years of experience with schools, teachers, parents, and students.

The problem begins much earlier than diagnosis.

It begins when schools fail to discover and address the individual purposes of the child.

The Problem Schools May Be Creating

The central problem is simple to state, although not easy to correct:

Schools rarely discover what an individual child wants to learn, become, create, or accomplish.

Instead, the institution decides what every child should know, when it should be learned, how it should be taught, and how the child must demonstrate mastery.

The purpose of the child is incidental to the system.

Anyone reading this has had a similar experience. Think of something you were repeatedly made to do but had no interest in doing.

You delayed.

You became distracted.

You resisted.

You performed badly.

You did the minimum necessary to get through it.

Now imagine that happening five days a week for twelve or more years of your life.  Just because it has been that way forever doesn’t make it right!

Would boredom be surprising?

Would difficulty concentrating be?

Would resistance, anxiety, anger, withdrawal, or rebellion?

The surprising result would be continued enthusiasm.

Yet when children respond in these predictable ways, the institution may interpret the behavior as evidence of a condition located within the child.

The school rarely asks whether the child’s resistance might be a response to an educational process that has never connected learning with any purpose the child considers meaningful.

I believe it is obvious that schools are creating many of the problems they later diagnose.

What Education Could Be

Imagine a different approach.

A child enters school and is helped to discover areas of genuine interest.

What does this child want to understand?

What does the child naturally attempt to build, explore, repair, write, organize, draw, or improve?

What questions hold the child’s attention?

What kind of future can the child imagine?

Reading, mathematics, science, history, discipline, and practical skills could then be connected to those purposes.

The student who wants to build machines discovers why mathematics matters.

A child interested in animals discovers biology.

The student drawn to stories develops an interest in language and history.

A child who wants to run a business learns the importance of arithmetic, communication, planning, and responsibility.

The fundamentals are still taught. Education does not become an exercise in allowing children to do only what feels pleasant.

The difference is that learning serves a purpose the student can understand.

When purpose is present, attention has somewhere to go.

Interest manifests.

Discipline has a reason to develop.

Demanding work becomes tolerable because the student can see where it leads.

Education ceases to be something done to the child.

It becomes something the child is actively doing.

Before diagnosing a child for failing to conform to education, we should ask whether education has made any serious attempt to engage the purposes of that child.

Otherwise, the institution may be diagnosing the resistance it created.

When Educational Failure Becomes Diagnosis

Children have always developed unevenly.

Some mature slowly. Some are restless. Some resist authority. Some struggle because they missed an earlier educational basic. Others are affected by family conflict, poor sleep, bad nutrition, fear, bullying, excessive screen use, or classrooms that fail to hold their interest.

These are real problems.

They are not automatically medical or psychological disorders.

Modern psychology and psychiatry have expanded the range of ordinary human difficulties and is interpreting them as diagnosable conditions. The boundary separating disorder from distress, immaturity, individual variation, or reaction to the environment has become increasingly uncertain.

This allows a convenient institutional reversal.

Instead of asking:

“Why are we failing to educate this child?”

the system asks:

“What is wrong with this child?”

That change transfers attention from the institution’s performance to the student’s condition.

A school that has failed to teach a child must explain its failure.

A school managing a psychologically troubled or disabled child appears to be providing a service.

That is a profound difference.

How the Classification Pipeline Works

The process usually begins with genuine difficulty.

A child cannot concentrate, behaves badly, falls behind, refuses school, becomes anxious, or fails to complete assignments.

The school responds.

It could examine the curriculum, classroom, teaching method, discipline, home environment, nutrition, sleep, technology use, social pressures, or the child’s understanding of earlier material.

Increasingly, however, the institutional path leads toward evaluation and classification.

The sequence may look like this:

1. The child experiences difficulty.
2. The difficulty interferes with classroom performance.
3. Teachers document the behavior.
4. Specialists become involved.
5. Psychological or clinical language is introduced.
6. The child is evaluated for a recognized ‘condition or disability’.
7. Classification opens access to programs, accommodations, personnel, and funding.
8. The child’s performance is interpreted through the classification.

At the end of this process, the school has an explanation, an administrative category, and a program through which it can manage the problem.

The child has a label.

How Classification Benefits the Institution

Special-education funding is complicated. There is no single national rule under which every diagnosis produces a fixed payment to a school.

A medical diagnosis also does not automatically produce an Individualized Education Program, or IEP. Educational eligibility is determined through a separate evaluation process.

Nevertheless, classification is significant.

Once a student qualifies, the school may gain access to funding, personnel, services, accommodation, and programs that would otherwise be unavailable.

Classification unlocks resources.

It can also provide an accepted explanation for why a student is not performing at grade level.

Schools face pressure from standardized tests, graduation requirements, accountability systems, state agencies, parents, public ratings, and federal rules.

Test scores do not directly determine every dollar a school receives. But poor results can bring intervention, scrutiny, corrective demands, reputational harm, and sometimes financial consequences.

A classified student remains part of the school’s overall results. But disability status can affect subgroup reporting, testing accommodations, educational goals, alternate assessments, and whether progress is emphasized over grade-level proficiency.

None of this proves that a particular student was dishonestly classified.

It demonstrates that classification may serve two purposes simultaneously:

It may aid the child.

It may also provide resources, administrative protection, and an explanation to the institution.

That is a conflict of interest. It should not be ignored merely because the system describes its purpose as compassionate.

How Incentives Shape Behavior

Accusing every teacher, psychologist, or administrator of bad intent would miss the point.

Many are undoubtedly trying to help children within the system they have been given.

But institutions do not require malicious people in order to produce bad results.

They require incentives.

When an unclassified child struggles, the school has a problem.

When the child is classified, the school has a recognized condition, an established procedure, possible additional resources, and a documented response.

The child has not necessarily changed.

The institutional meaning of the child has changed.

Over time, the route that produces services, documentation, funding, and protection will naturally be used more often than the route that forces the institution to examine its own methods.

Good intentions do not eliminate that influence.

How Several Systems Converge

Schools do not operate in isolation.

They stand at the intersection of several powerful institutions:

• Federal and state education agencies
• Psychology and psychiatry
• Medical associations
• Professional licensing bodies
• Advocacy organizations
• Civil-rights regulations
• School counselors and social workers
• Pharmaceutical and healthcare systems

Each claims to address a different aspect of the child’s welfare. In practice, their standards and policies can reinforce one another.

Gender-related distress provides a particularly serious example.

WPATH’s Standards of Care, Version 8, commonly called SOC-8, is not itself a school law. Its ideas can nevertheless enter schools through professional training, clinical practice, counselors, advocacy organizations, referral networks, and school policies.

Title IX interpretations and state or local regulations can then give some of these ideas administrative or legal force within education.

The pathway is not as simple as saying that SOC-8 becomes school law.

It works through institutional corridors:

Professional doctrine influences clinicians and advocacy groups.

Clinicians and advocates influence policy.

Policy influences professional training and school procedures.

School personnel identify and refer children.

The medical system receives those referrals.

The resulting diagnosis returns to the school carrying professional authority.

Once this corridor has been created, a confused or troubled child can move through it with little opportunity for anyone to question the assumptions underlying the process.

Similar patterns can operate with ADHD, anxiety, depression, learning disabilities, and behavioral conditions.

A child’s difficulty enters one end.

A clinical explanation emerges from the other.

Good Intentions Are Not Enough

It will be said that teachers, counselors, and psychologists are trying to help.

Many are.

But good intentions do not prove that a method works.

They do not correct faulty assumptions, remove conflicts of interest, or guarantee beneficial results.

A system should be judged by what it produces.

If American education were consistently producing literate, capable, emotionally stable, and self-directed young adults, its explanations would deserve greater confidence.

But when educational results remain poor while diagnoses and special programs expand, the public is entitled to ask whether classification has become a substitute for correction.

Perhaps the child needs treatment.

Perhaps the school needs to learn how to educate the child.

Both possibilities must remain open.

At present, the institutional machinery is far better equipped to examine the child than to examine itself.

What the Label Does to the Child

A label can bring relief. It may explain genuine disability and secure valuable assistance.

It can also narrow a child’s future.

Once classified, a student may:

• Be treated as less capable
• Encounter lower expectations
• Move into a modified academic track
• Interpret ordinary difficulties as symptoms
• Become dependent on accommodations
• Enter long-term psychological or medical management
• Build an identity around the diagnosis

None of these consequences is inevitable.

But the danger is real, particularly during childhood, when personality, confidence, judgment, sexuality, ability, and self-understanding are still forming.

A temporary difficulty can become a permanent identity.

“I am having trouble concentrating” becomes “I am ADHD.”

“I have not learned to read” becomes “I am learning disabled.”

“I am uncomfortable with my developing body” becomes a declaration about permanent identity.

Language intended to describe a problem begins to define the person.

Institutions are skilled at adding classifications. They appear far less organized around removing them.

What Should Be Investigated First

Parents do not have to reject every evaluation or deny children needed assistance.

They should insist that classification remain one explanation rather than becoming the automatic conclusion.

Before placing a psychological or medical label on a child, parents and schools should ask:

• What does this child want to learn, create, or accomplish?
• Has anyone connected the required material with that purpose?
• Can the child read and understand the material being assigned?
• Were important foundational skills missed?
• Does the problem occur everywhere or only in a particular classroom?
• Is the child sleeping adequately?
• Could diet, medication, illness, or excessive screen use contribute?
• Is there conflict, disorder, or instability at home?
• Is the child being bullied or socially excluded?
• Are expectations clear and consistently enforced?
• Is the work too difficult, too easy, or meaningless to the student?
• What changed immediately before the difficulty appeared?
• Which educational remedies were attempted before clinical classification?
• What evidence contradicts the proposed diagnosis?
• What does the school gain when the child qualifies?
• How will the classification be reviewed and, when appropriate, removed?

These questions do not deny genuine disabilities.

They protect children from having every difficulty interpreted through the explanation most convenient to the institution.

Follow the Benefit

A conflict of interest does not prove misconduct.

It does require disclosure and scrutiny.

If classification provides additional resources to a school, parents should be told.

If it affects how the child’s performance is tested, reported, or interpreted, parents should understand exactly how.

If an evaluator follows a professional standard, parents should know what the standard says, who developed it, and what evidence supports it.

If an advocacy organization helped shape school policy or staff training, that influence should be visible.

If the institution benefits from maintaining a classification, there should be an independent process for deciding whether the classification remains justified.

The guiding rule should be simple:

A child should never be labeled merely because the institution functions more easily after the label is applied.

The Larger Failure

The central fact remains unavoidable.

Our educational system is not producing the results it promises.

Yet its response is rarely to reconsider its underlying ideas about education, discipline, childhood, or human nature.

Instead, it creates more programs.

It hires more specialists.

It adopts more psychological language.

It separates children into more categories.

It requests more money to manage the problems produced under its care.

At some point, managing failure becomes a means of preserving the system that failed.

The deepest correction will not come from inventing a better label.

It will begin when education recognizes that the child is not merely a container into which approved information must be forced.

The child is a person with purposes.

Discover those purposes. Help the child develop them. Connect the necessary knowledge and discipline to something the child wants to accomplish.

Then observe what happens to attention, effort, behavior, and willingness to learn.

The Question That Remains

Some children genuinely need specialized assistance. A serious criticism of the system must acknowledge that.

Acknowledgment does not require surrendering judgment.

We are entitled to ask whether the expanding classification of children serves the child first or the institutions surrounding the child.

When a label:

• Unlocks resources
• Provides an explanation for poor results
• Moves attention away from teaching
• Supports an expanding professional system
• And may remain with the child for years

we should not accept it merely because it arrives in clinical language.

We should ask:

What happened to this child?

What does this child want to accomplish?

What has the school failed to do?

What other explanations were investigated?

Who benefits from the diagnosis?

What happens if the professionals are wrong?

Until those questions are answered, a label should not be treated as the end of the investigation.

It should be treated as the beginning.

References

• Individuals with Disabilities Education Act — Federal requirements governing special-education eligibility and services
• Every Student Succeeds Act — Federal framework governing assessment, accountability, and subgroup reporting
• U.S. Department of Education — Guidance concerning accountability systems, subgroup performance, and alternate assessments
• National Center for Education Statistics — Data concerning students with disabilities and educational outcomes
• Education Commission of the States — State accountability systems and minimum subgroup-size requirements
• World Professional Association for Transgender Health — Standards of Care for the Health of Transgender and Gender Diverse People, Version 8

 

Related Reading

• Structure Before Freedom: Why Children Need Boundaries First
• What Is Education—Really?
• The Discipline Crisis: Why Modern Culture Avoids Self-Control
• Truth vs. Narrative: What’s the Difference?