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This report and accompanying policy brief show that there is good reason to pursue the measurement of social-emotional learning (SEL) and school culture/climate (CC) as a way to better understand student and school performance. Using data from California's CORE districts, we show that SEL and CC measures demonstrate reliability and validity, distinguish between schools, are related to other academic and non-academic measures, and also illuminate dimensions of student achievement that go...

Students stressed out over impending college acceptance and rejection letters drop by a teacher’s class to spend time brushing the therapy dog in her class just to calm their nerves. At another campus, a first grader practices reading aloud while absentmindedly playing with the ears of a therapy dog that visits his class once a week. Man’s best friend is playing an increasingly important role in maintaining student mental health as more becomes required of students to succeed academically.

It turns out that Making America Great Again involves rolling back drug policy and enforcement to the 1960s. The first step in such a reversal involves denying science. The second step involves ginning up the racism. The final step involves reviving mass incarceration. Attorney General Jeff Sessions made it clear in a speech in Richmond, Va on March 15, that enforcement is now the primary tool in responding to drug abuse, and, apparently, casual use. I realize this may be an unfashionable...

“An experience makes its appearance only when it is being said,” wrote Hannah Arendt in reflecting on how language confers reality upon existence . “And unless it is said it is, so to speak, non-existent.” But if an experience is spoken yet unheard, half of its reality is severed and a certain essential harmony is breached. The great physicist David Bohm knew this: “If we are to live in harmony with ourselves and with nature,” he wrote in his excellent and timely treatise on the paradox of...

There was a lot of interest in the impact of the Compton lawsuit on trauma-informed education. Given so many requests for the PowerPoint, I thought it would be better if I just attached the presentation to this blog. I love a bunch of eyes looking at things before I deliver them so I would appreciate it if you could give me some feedback on the material. In addition, as mentioned previously, PESI is sponsoring the delivery of a full days worth of trauma-informed training through a video tape...

As you know, April is National Child Abuse Prevention Month. On April 6, I was a keynote speaker at a fundraiser for a Children’s Advocacy Center in Oregon. This was the second time I‘d been asked to speak at a fundraiser for a Children’s Advocacy Center, and I was truly honored to help in this way. They expected 400 people, and I talked about my sexually abusive childhood and the evolution of my healing journey. I never appreciated the role of a Children’s Advocacy Center, until I worked as...

Statement from Governor Andrew M. Cuomo: "For too long, draconian punishments for youthful mistakes have ruined the lives of countless young New Yorkers. By coming together, we reversed this injustice and raised the age of criminal responsibility once and for all so that 16- and 17-year-olds are no longer automatically processed as adults." Statement from Assembly Speaker Carl E. Heastie: "This conference is proud that our years-long goal to end the unjust treatment of young offenders in the...

[Photo by David Goehring] Do you come home from a stressful day at work and reach for a bag of chips, a pint of ice cream or a handful of cookies? If that's the case, you may be "eating emotionally." This is often referred to by psychologists as counter-productive coping. It helps you manage stress in the short run, but in the long run it can lead to weight gain and possible health problems. [For more of this story, written by James Porter, go to ...

Data from growing research have stormed into the juvenile justice and child welfare fields over the past two decades, providing more raw material to help troubled teens than ever before. But turning that information wave into better outcomes for children — and convincing practitioners within established systems to adopt new approaches — still requires some prodding and commitment to adopting these findings, according to judges, case workers, academics and advocates for children. A two-day...

What is right will always overcome wrong, even when what is wrong is believed to be right. It may take years or even centuries, but in time we eventually get it right. And that has been our journey in juvenile justice, on a road still under construction, trying to get it right. Consider the wrongness of slavery despite the many who believed it just and moral. It almost kept us from uniting 13 colonies to forge “a more perfect union.” We created a union, but only “more perfect” if you were...

We are trying to scoop water out of a boat which has gaping trauma-holes in the bottom.

A scan done in March by the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) through StateNet of bills introduced in 2017 that specifically include adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) in the text produced a surprising volume of bills (close to 40) in a large number of states (18). A scan done a year ago produced less than a handful. NCSL is a bipartisan organization that serves both state legislators and their staffs. The shear volume of bills in so many states represents a promising...