Anne Lutz Fernandez
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lutzfernandez.bsky.social
Anne Lutz Fernandez
@lutzfernandez.bsky.social
9.7K followers 2.1K following 10K posts
Ex-banker, marketer, & English teacher: pick your ad hominem. Co-author of nonfiction books Carjacked & Schooled. Cranky in the AM.
Newsletter: https://nobody-wants-this.ghost.io/
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lutzfernandez.bsky.social
Meanwhile, what we should probably really be worrying and writing about at this very minute
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has threatened to gut the Department of Education’s civil rights division, which enforces the federal law guaranteeing that children with disabilities receive a free public education.
November 24, 2025 at 3:17 PM
lutzfernandez.bsky.social
Agree. Everyone is trying to make a bad, underfunded system work. But we're not going to talk about funding here, just bad
Some of the support being requested — for instance, being allowed to move more, rather than sitting so long — would likely benefit all children. Instead, school districts try to mash individual needs into a system antithetical to them. The sheer cost and logistics of this are unsustainable. Many students who are legally entitled to support do not receive them.
November 24, 2025 at 3:17 PM
lutzfernandez.bsky.social
Yes, many schools demand conformity and top-down policy-making helps ensure this.

It's not either/or. We should understood students as individuals as both patient and teacher.
November 24, 2025 at 3:17 PM
lutzfernandez.bsky.social
Unfortunately, it's because the agenda is to blame schools for a mental health crisis and the response to it. Oh yeah, and blame parents for overtreating their children in pursuit of academic success. Nice
“Overall, students see school as a place where they experience negative emotions,” explained Marc Brackett, a co-author of the report when it was released. The Children Who Don’t Fit In the face of an unyielding education system, more parents are discovering that their children simply don’t fit, a terrifying possibility when achievement in school can determine achievement in life. At that point, the best thing to do is to prove that your child has a mental disorder. With a doctor’s diagnosis, at least, adaptations are possible.
November 24, 2025 at 3:02 PM
lutzfernandez.bsky.social
Hard agree with most of this large chunk--why isn't this what the article is about, I plead.
“We’re not aligning the developmental needs of kids with the policies and practices that go on daily with schools,” said Denise Pope, senior lecturer at Stanford University and co-founder of Challenge Success, a nonprofit group that works with schools to improve student well-being. The pressure to learn more led to a restructuring of the school day itself. Before the 1980s, American children usually had recess breaks throughout the day. By 2016, only eight states required daily recess in elementary schools. And when researchers studied what had become of lunchtime, they learned that children often had just 20 minutes to not only eat but stop to use the bathroom after class, walk to the cafeteria and wait in line for food. Pope pointed to the bizarrely packed schedules for middle and high schoolers. “You’ve got seven different homework assignments that you’ve got to remember each night. Think of the cognitive load of a sixth-grade boy,” she said. “I challenge many adults to do this.” “We’re not aligning the developmental needs of kids with the policies and practices that go on daily with schools,” said Denise Pope, senior lecturer at Stanford University and co-founder of Challenge Success, a nonprofit group that works with schools to improve student well-being. The pressure to learn more led to a restructuring of the school day itself. Before the 1980s, American children usually had recess breaks throughout the day. By 2016, only eight states required daily recess in elementary schools. And when researchers studied what had become of lunchtime, they learned that children often had just 20 minutes to not only eat but stop to use the bathroom after class, walk to the cafeteria and wait in line for food. Pope pointed to the bizarrely packed schedules for middle and high schoolers. “You’ve got seven different homework assignments that you’ve got to remember each night. Think of the cognitive load of a sixth-grade boy,” she said. “I challenge many adults to do this.”
November 24, 2025 at 3:00 PM
lutzfernandez.bsky.social
Mostly yes here--except for the fact that Common Core was not focused on rote learning. Again, belongs in that other imagined article.
The demands on performance in higher grades trickled down into younger and younger ages. In 2009, the Obama administration offered greater funding to schools that adopted new national learning standards called the Common Core. These included an emphasis on reading by the end of kindergarten, even though many early childhood experts believe that not all children are developmentally ready to read at that age. With each new wave of reforms, the tenor of kindergarten changed. Rote lessons in math and reading crept into classrooms, even though experts say young children learn best through play. Researchers discovered that in the span of about a decade, kindergarten had suddenly become more like first grade. Preschool was not far behind, as even toddlers were expected to stay still for longer stretches of time to imbibe academic lessons. This again defied the consensus among early childhood experts. Children, parents and teachers struggle through this mismatch daily. In 2005, a study showed that preschoolers were frequently being expelled for misbehavior, and at rates more than three times that of school-age children.
November 24, 2025 at 2:57 PM
lutzfernandez.bsky.social
"Either way" when the way would seem to matter quite a bit. Last sentence belongs in a different article with the parts I cheered earlier. But that article would have to admit that the testing structure and culture of NCLB lives on.
The added metrics may well have compelled more children to receive the support they needed. Either way, educational policymaking yielded a change in diagnoses. In states that added new accountability standards, researchers found a clear rise in A.D.H.D. According to one analysis, the rate of A.D.H.D. diagnoses among children ages 8 to 13 in low-income homes went from 10 percent to 15 percent after the arrival of No Child Left Behind. The impact of the law on autism diagnoses has been less documented. But there is a great deal of overlap among these disorders. Anywhere from 30 to 80 percent of children diagnosed with autism also have A.D.H.D. Experts have also pointed out that the rise in autism has largely taken place on the more subtle end of the spectrum, where psychiatrists expanded the diagnosis. Students with this profile often need educators who can be eminently flexible in their approach, a tough task when an entire classroom has to focus on narrowly mastering certain testable skills.
November 24, 2025 at 2:52 PM
lutzfernandez.bsky.social
This insidious sentence suggests a conspiracy between school counselors, teachers, and administrators to boost test scores by getting kids diagnosed when they shouldn't have been.

It costs $$ to provide extra services. The only pressure I saw in 20+ years of teaching was to defer or deny.
Getting a child treated, potentially with medication, could help an entire classroom achieve higher scores, especially if the child’s behavior was disruptive to others.
November 24, 2025 at 2:49 PM
lutzfernandez.bsky.social
And now the leap back to over-diagnosing claims--w/o a meaningful, helpful discussion of how treating schools like businesses, teachers like floor supervisors, and students like little workers with narrow, specific "outcomes" to reach no mater what is contributing to the youth mental health crisis.
With school funding now on the line, there were unmistakable incentives for children to be diagnosed. Starting in the 1990s, students with autism or A.D.H.D. become newly eligible for added support in the classroom. Getting a child treated, potentially with medication, could help an entire classroom achieve higher scores, especially if the child’s behavior was disruptive to others. And in some parts of the country, children with disabilities were not counted toward a school’s overall marks, a carve-out that could boost scores.
November 24, 2025 at 2:41 PM
lutzfernandez.bsky.social
A chunk where I'm hard agreeing. Pols brought competition into the schools, decided they should compete with each other, and set teachers and students to the task of cutthroat competition.
During an era of global competition, the country’s leaders also began to see school as a potential venue for national glory, or shame. In 1983, a commission created by Ronald Reagan’s secretary of education, Terrel H. Bell, released a dire report on the state of American schools called “A Nation at Risk.” It warned that “if an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.” Over the next decade, Democratic and Republican governors such as Bill Clinton in Arkansas and Lamar Alexander in Tennessee began molding their states’ schools with new standards of testing and accountability. Schools were treated more like publicly traded companies, with test scores as proxies for profits. Before long, schools had public ratings, so ubiquitous they now appear on real estate listings. The pressure kept rising. By 2001, 30 states had laws that imposed a system of punishments and rewards for schools based on their test scores. The next year, President George W. Bush’s signature education reform law, No Child Left Behind, made the effort national.
November 24, 2025 at 2:33 PM
lutzfernandez.bsky.social
Then we shift to a para on history. Here's a historian:
School was not always so central to American childhood. In 1950, less than half of all children attended kindergarten. Only about 50 percent graduated from high school, and without much professional penalty. A person spent fewer years of their life in school, and fewer hours in the day furiously trying to learn. However bored a child might become sitting behind a desk, freedom awaited after the final bell rang, with hours after school to play without the direction of adults.
November 24, 2025 at 2:30 PM
lutzfernandez.bsky.social
The source of the thesis, it appears:
“What’s happening is, instead of saying, ‘We need to fix the schools,’ the message is, ‘We need to fix the kids,’” said Peter Gray, a research professor at Boston College and the author of “Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life.” “The track has become narrower and narrower, so a greater range of people don’t fit that track anymore,” he said. “And the result is, we want to call it a disorder.”
November 24, 2025 at 2:28 PM
lutzfernandez.bsky.social
WHAT

Beyond both-sidesing, now we're pretending that much of the legacy of NCLB and RTTT does not live on. The last part is the thesis, which is v confusing at this point.
This era of policymaking has largely ebbed, with disappointing results. Math and reading levels are at their lowest in decades. The rules put in place by both political parties were well-meaning, but in trying to make more children successful, they also circumscribed more tightly who could be served by school at all.
November 24, 2025 at 2:23 PM
lutzfernandez.bsky.social
Yes, please, absolutely.
The experience of school has changed rapidly in recent generations. Starting in the 1980s, a metrics-obsessed regime took over American education and profoundly altered the expectations placed on children, up and down the class ladder. In fact, it has altered the experience of childhood itself.
November 24, 2025 at 2:23 PM
lutzfernandez.bsky.social
I cheered at the first sentence and a half here...then groaned. So diagnosing disorders is bad? Yup. It's RFK Jr. time (and more generally the Trumpian if-we-don't count-it-it-don't count).
There is growing evidence that school itself is essential to understanding why so many children seem to be struggling. It can be a cause of stress that exacerbates anxiety or depression; but just as importantly and less frequently acknowledged, it is often where disorder presents, leading many children — and their parents — down the path toward a diagnosis.
November 24, 2025 at 2:18 PM
lutzfernandez.bsky.social
A quick disclaimer that sets aside two of countless causes of the child mental health crisis, only one relatively new. So much ignored. The second para is in conflict with the first, because there is a national conversation re the effect of screen time in schools (though admittedly, quite late).
No doubt the causes of the mental health crisis are multifaceted. Some disorders tend to run in families. Screens have thoroughly invaded childhood, supplanting the sleep, exercise and socializing in person that can ward off depression and anxiety. And yet no one in political leadership — or our broader national conversation about mental health — seems to be asking about the environment where children spend most of their waking hours: school.
November 24, 2025 at 2:18 PM
lutzfernandez.bsky.social
Here RFK Jr.'s dreadful conspiracies are set neatly against a Dem governor's approach, equating them.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. released a strategy report in September entitled “Make Our Children Healthy Again,” with ideas on how to improve the mental health of children with better diets, less screen time and fewer medications. Illinois’s governor, the Trump antagonist JB Pritzker, recently made his state the first in the nation to require schools to do universal mental health screenings.
November 24, 2025 at 2:05 PM
lutzfernandez.bsky.social
Next comes the paragraph that says The NYTimes thinks it's found a new spot of potential bi-partisan agreement that facilitates both-sidesism and that will allow them to bash Dems. This will prove out later.
So perhaps it should be little surprise that even among our deeply polarized political leaders, there is broad agreement that America’s children are not well.
November 24, 2025 at 2:02 PM
lutzfernandez.bsky.social
Next few paragraphs include some data but also lots of hyperbole and a shockingly dismissive tone that suggests lots of kids are suffering from made-up conditions.
A diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is practically a rite of passage in American boyhood, with nearly one in four 17-year-old boys bearing the diagnosis. The numbers have only gone up, and vertiginously: One million more children were diagnosed with A.D.H.D. in 2022 than in 2016. The numbers on autism are so shocking that they are worth repeating. In the early 1980s, one in 2,500 children had an autism diagnosis. That figure is now one in 31. Nearly 32 percent of adolescents have been diagnosed at some point with anxiety; the median age of “onset” is 6 years old. More than one in 10 adolescents have experienced a major depressive disorder, according to some estimates. New categories materialize. There is now oppositional defiant disorder, in addition to pathological demand avoidance.
November 24, 2025 at 1:58 PM
lutzfernandez.bsky.social
Okay, the first paragraph: no.

None of what follows supports the contention of either "likely" or "never."

Also the passive voice here contradicts later statements about parents pushing for diagnoses.
One of the more bewildering aspects of the already high-stress endeavor of 21st-century American parenting is that at some point your child is likely to be identified with a psychiatric diagnosis of one kind or another. Many exist in a gray zone that previous generations of parents never encountered.
November 24, 2025 at 1:55 PM
lutzfernandez.bsky.social
New CBS poll out since we wrote our piece: 70% of Americans oppose military action in Venezuela.

www.cbsnews.com/news/poll-ve...
Chart showing 70% would oppose and 30% would favor
November 23, 2025 at 9:34 PM
lutzfernandez.bsky.social
The Trump Admin showing the logical "outcome" of decades of applying the business logic of "outcomes" to education: the DoEd head being willing to break norms, violate laws, ignore public opinion.
In a meeting with staffers Tuesday afternoon, Education Secretary Linda McMahon described the changes as a piecemeal way to move toward the Trump administration's ultimate goal of urging Congress to eliminate her department wholesale. There isn't enough support at this time on Capitol Hill to do that, but McMahon said she was committed to assessing how the reorganization works. "I'm all about outcomes," the former wrestling industry executive told employees, according to a summary of her remarks. "It will take a lot of work."
November 23, 2025 at 1:07 PM
lutzfernandez.bsky.social
But especially here:
So, again, the argument that new technologies will disproportionately benefit students furthest from opportunity is now over a century old. When radio was first introduced, it was argued that, with radio, the underprivileged school would become the privileged one, that elite lectures could be broadcast into the homes of lower-income students. And radio did not bring equality. Personal computers did not bring equality. The Web didn't bring equality. New technologies typically disproportionately benefit the affluent. They benefit people with the financial, social, and technical capital to take advantage of new innovations. So it is certainly admirable to try to use these new technologies to close equity gaps. But, over and over again, what we see with many generations of new technologies and education systems is that they really more accelerate opportunities for the affluent than they create opportunities for low-income students. What makes more equitable educational environments are social movements that provide more resources to families, to students, to teachers, to schools, so that they can do a better job and have more resources to educate young people furthest from opportunity.
November 22, 2025 at 1:04 PM
lutzfernandez.bsky.social
I don't always agree with Reich, but I cheered here:
And I think most teachers looking back on the Scantron machine would not say, wow, multiple choice items have saved us so much time. So sometimes, when we aim for efficiency, we don't necessarily get efficiency. We actually get a system that is targeted at something different. So I think we should be very cautious about that risk. There are more contemporary examples too.
November 22, 2025 at 1:03 PM
lutzfernandez.bsky.social
Talking dispassionately as though human beings' lives, health, and livelihoods--huge numbers of them--and the stability of entire nations aren't on the line.

"This is how it works."
Asked whether Google would be immune to the impact of an AI bubble bursting, Pichai said: “I think no company is going to be immune, including us.” He added: “We can look back at the internet right now. There was clearly a lot of excess investment, but none of us would question whether the internet was profound. I expect AI to be the same. So I think it’s both rational and there are elements of irrationality through a moment like this.”
November 18, 2025 at 12:02 PM