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Womansplaining with Julie Barrett
Julie Barrett, Founder of Conservative Ladies of America, covers today's trending hot topic with a Christian world view.
Womansplaining with Julie Barrett
From Pupils to Patients: The Troubling Shift in America's Classrooms
Join Julie Barrett for an exclusive interview with Chris Evans (@ALegalProcess on X), a political refugee from Seattle, a Scottsdale-based corporate lawyer and education reform advocate, as we dive into the mental health crisis gripping public schools. Known for his fierce defense of parental rights and vocational training, Chris has become a prominent voice on X and Substack, challenging activist-driven school policies and championing practical, instruction-focused education over therapeutic approaches. With a track record of influencing Arizona’s education laws, including the passage of SB1437, he brings sharp insights and bold perspectives to the table. Tune in to hear his take on addressing the mental health challenges facing students today!
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Conservative Podcast | Julie Barrett Womansplaining
In recent years, we have seen a huge rise in mental health services and programs in America's public schools. However, we're not seeing that these services are doing anything to improve student academic achievement. In fact, we're seeing quite the opposite and we have a youth mental health crisis on our hands in America. Today I sit down with Chris Evans, who is a fellow citizen activist who has just gotten involved in a fight because of how these things were impacting his own family and what he was seeing at a local level, and he's going to share a lot of wisdom with us today about the mental health programs that are going into America's public schools and how it's impacting our students, and you're going to learn a lot of things that maybe you didn't even know. Welcome everyone. You're listening to the Woman's Planning Podcast and I am your host, julie Barrett.
Speaker 1:This conversation that I had with Chris Evans is something that we recorded on video and is published to our Conservative Ladies of America YouTube channel, and I've got a link for that down in the podcast description for you below if you would like to go view the video version of this conversation. But I wanted to bring this to you in audio format as well, because it is a long-form interview and I wanted to bring this to you in audio format as well, because it is a long form interview and I wanted to make it available in audio because I know for many people that can be an easier way to listen to content like this. This is such a critical conversation for not just parents but citizens all across the country, so that we can really have an understanding of the mental health agenda that's being pushed into the public school system. That is making patients out of our pupils, and that is not what the education system was designed for. We are seeing academic success rates plummet and we really need to be aware of what's going on and get engaged.
Speaker 1:I hope that you will enjoy this conversation with Chris Evans and me. Make sure you go give him a follow on his Substack and on his X account. So, without further ado, let's dive in. Hey, chris, thank you so much for taking the time to join me today. I have been following you on X for some time. You're kind of my personal resident expert on mental health in public schools and you, like me, are a blue state refugee, formerly living in Washington, so can you talk about first I'd like to hear kind of what you saw in Washington that made you decide to get out and go to Arizona.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you, but first I should say thank you for bringing me on. I'm really honored. Your followers have just flooded my sub stack and I'm really appreciative of it.
Speaker 1:That's awesome.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's been really nice. Yeah, I'm part of the dysphoria right out of Washington. We were in Bellevue. I spent over 20 years in Bellevue Married, started raising my children in Bellevue and went to Bellevue schools Right, I mean, you know nationally acclaimed Bellevue schools that were supposed to be great and a model for other districts around the country. But something happened around 2016, almost immediately after the election, where suddenly, you know, teachers were holding, you know Black Lives Matter every Monday, wearing t-shirts with political messaging on their shirts, and my son, who was just then going into middle school, comes home and says Dad teacher said I can't study any of these white authors, that I have to pick a woman or a person of color, and I was confused by that. So, first of all, you should understand my son, who himself is biracial, his mother is Persian and he's fairly dark skinned. He had never thought about his kind of ethnicity or his racial composition.
Speaker 2:And I didn't want to have to have that conversation at 12 because it wasn't important, right. But suddenly he was coming home saying no, this is important and they want me to avoid white people. You're white, right, dad right. That was alarming and that was just indicative of some of the other things. I mean, there were you, you know, the student body in middle school started separating by race, right, and my son's, particularly gifted in mathematics, and suddenly the asian groups didn't want him to be part of his group because they told him to his face no, you know, you're, you're just a white american, you're, you're, you're. You know you're not a white American, you're, you're, you're. You know you're not going to be good, you're going to slow us down, right, and those kinds of things. And and and suddenly I'm having to field these types of questions and I thought this is ridiculous.
Speaker 2:I looked at my wife and I said you know it's hard enough dealing with you know the eight months of darkness and the moss growing between our feet. You know toes and the moss growing between our toes. Let's think about moving. And so we did. We'd been coming to Arizona for baseball tournaments and I loved the sun. I liked the desert. There's something really special about the desert and I have a legal practice that I could basically move wherever I was, as long as I was on the West Coast, that I had the same time zones with my clients in California and overseas, that I'd be fine. And so I, you know, I just tell my wife let's pack up, let's go Arizona.
Speaker 2:And have you never really thought about schools until then. And you know you, just, you just pick a nice neighborhood that you think is going to have great school districts, right, you know the good sports teams and you know the the, the nice facilities and such, and I thought that was. That was about the extent of I ever thought about.
Speaker 1:Well, and you know, anybody that has lived in Washington for any length of time knows that Bellevue is a was a nice area, and if you were able to afford to live in Bellevue and send your children to Bellevue public schools, you were pretty assured that your children were getting some of the best education available in the state. And that's just not the case anymore. And you know, bellevue is just as woke as Seattle. Yes, you know, we were just north of you in Bothell in the North Shore School District, and so you know we experience similar things as what you're describing now.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know it infects and I'm sure if it takes off in Bellevue it trickles down into other districts, right?
Speaker 1:And if it's permitted in Bellevue, it must be good for the other school districts as well, because that's an affluent school district. So you think if Bellevue is doing it, it must be good education.
Speaker 2:That's right. That's right. All the administrators of Bellevue school district you know they have PhDs, right, they're very small, they're smart. They went to great schools. Yeah, there are trendsetters, and that was true in 2016. And then, by 2017, we moved and had a brief reprisal before COVID hit in 2019 and schools closed. And that's how I got interested in actually following what goes on at schools is because I realized I better start watching these school board meetings. They're streaming on YouTube to find out if they're going to mask the kids or if they're going to close schools or when they're going to open schools, and that's when I started following along with board meetings. I had never considered a school board meeting before. I don't know if you did.
Speaker 1:No, well, not until, not until you know, 2020, I think really changed things for a lot of us, and that's one that's another reason why I wanted to talk to you, and I like to talk to people like you parents, just regular citizens who something triggered us to go down a rabbit hole and it's become sort of a passion point that we can't let go of, and I know that's the case for you with with the mental health stuff. Um, so you start watching school board meetings online during COVID and what were you seeing?
Speaker 2:And this is Arizona right district, very- influential among states, although it's, you know, it's only maybe 20,000 students, so it's not a large district, but it's fairly influential. And I just saw, you know, I just happened to tune in and see parents really upset and holding signs and protesting not just over masks but over these curriculum adoptions that I, you know, I'd never thought about, like how curriculums are adopted, you know, and what the role of the school board is, or anything like that. And they're holding signs of the protesting and the school board president just called the meeting, said okay, everybody out, he gets the police to push them out of the room. And I'm in shock watching this, thinking, oh my gosh, you know, I mean you. You think school boards is these democratic right, the lowest level democratic institution, uh, responsive to parents, that's what they're there for, the parents elect them, uh.
Speaker 2:And then they kicked him out of the board meeting and the next day the superintendent, who had been hired from Michigan, ann Arbor, michigan, to come and was new, was sitting and holding a press conference the next day, sitting next to a police officer in full body armor, armed right and bulletproof vest and things, and they're sitting in front of all these reporters with their six feet spacing and the police officer says this amazing thing, julie, I will never forget. I mean, it's what triggered me, like at a visceral level. The police officer said you know, parents, we have an intelligence unit down at the department headquarters where we monitor social media and look for parents who are critical of the school district. And when I'm just going to tell you I'm paraphrasing if you don't like what the school board's telling you, and you're going to come here to the meetings and just beat them over the head with your opinions you're not welcome.
Speaker 2:And I thought to myself what is this? And I thought to myself what?
Speaker 1:is this.
Speaker 2:This was astonishing to me. Yeah, that that was the attitude that we're just going to accept what the experts tell us. Right, they're the experts. And that really set me off. You know, kind of at a teenager level I'm Gen X, I was into punk and it just set me off. I was like, yes, give me some sex pistols, turn it up, I'm going to go after these guys because that's not right. Right, that's not right. And so I decided to do what corporate lawyers do? You know? We invented due diligence. We look under the hood. We go through, you know all the little hidden spaces, and we have to, because our clients want us. Before they buy a company, they want to know what's under the hood.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And I started looking at things and realizing these curriculum adoptions and things and how are they, how are they approved and what's the what's the legal process to do it. And that's when I set up my Twitter as a legal process, because I wanted to emphasize that the schools were not following the right process to adopt curriculums. And I ended up doing an extensive open meeting law complaint, filed it with the attorney general and two years later came out and said yeah, he's basically right, you've been doing it. Wrong school district in Scottsdale and that had some. That was that had some impact in Arizona because once Scottsdale got, you know, slapped by the attorney general for not holding open meetings to adopt these curriculums, they were doing it all behind closed doors right.
Speaker 2:Where no one would have input with pre-selected members of the community and pre-selected staff, because they know better. Right, right, right, right, you know. So once the IG slapped them for that and said yes, you know, these are meetings that should have been held in public, by law, by statute. You didn't follow the right process and that had influence in the state, and other districts have now followed suit. And so my emphasis has always been on the process, julie, because you can get down on the political, you know rabbit holes and go one side us versus them all the time. But my treasure, my talent, that if I was going to get involved in this, I wanted to use what skills I bring to the table. You know, anyone can have a political opinion, but not everybody can dig into the details and find out what really is the legal process and what I discovered along the way.
Speaker 2:Many things. One, school districts in general have very poor quality legal counsel, as just a generalization. That's why they're constantly getting in trouble. The big firms are not doing education law. The top lawyers going into big firms are not deciding hey, I want to go to school board meetings and advise school districts, no, right, not how it works. So you're, you're getting. You know. Second, third tier firms that do education law for the most part.
Speaker 1:They're going to hate me for saying that, but well that makes sense right, because that's probably not like the area that lawyers want to get involved in.
Speaker 2:No no, not at all. You know, like me, I do acquisitions, I do venture capital. You know these are much bigger, more substantive transactions that are a lot more complicated, and you know I don't have to deal with parents or education majors and administrators. But you know so, you discover that and then so there's lots of problems at the school districts and eventually I just reached a point. You know, I thought well, you know, I started looking at proficiency scores and I thought these state proficiency exams every state has them, and they're horrible. They're terrible. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It're horrible.
Speaker 2:They're terrible, horrible, atrocious. What is this?
Speaker 1:Across the country.
Speaker 2:Across the country. Yes, I mean undeniably there is a proficiency plunge across the country and it's incontrovertible. Whatever they're doing is wrong. And I might be biased because I spent the first six years of my professional life in Tokyo working at a law firm international cross-border transactions and things in Tokyo, and then the next 25 years with my practice dealing in Asia. So I've got exposure to China and Korea and Taiwan, singapore and Japan and how they do schooling.
Speaker 2:I didn't have kids at the time I lived there, but I saw kids going to school on Saturdays, kids going to school after school for private tutoring. They take education very seriously and so I'm a little bit biased. And come back to the US and I see there's so much more emphasis on extracurricular activities or sports or whatever. And then, as I have kids of my own, that and then I see behavioral problems you know this indulgence of bad behavior, yes, and where does that come from? And and a lack of standards and almost like they're teaching to the bottom instead of teaching to the top, and I, you know, throw that the proficiency scores in there and I'm like I asked myself how did we get here? What is going on, really going on? When I grew up, I never heard anything called social emotional learning, right? What is that?
Speaker 1:We never had that.
Speaker 2:No, you didn't have it, and you also had guidance counselors.
Speaker 2:You didn't have school counselors social workers, right, right, I thought what happened, let me. Let me dig into this, because I'm looking across the country and and every one of these stories I go to the, the court, the lawsuits, complaints and filings about these parents who are complaining the school districts are counseling their kids behind their back, without their knowledge, and they won't stop right. And then it comes up right in the transient cases where schools are implementing psychosocial treatments right without a medical provider's advice, without parental consent. They're implementing, you know, very complicated, you know changing, it's not just changing, changing it.
Speaker 2:It's not just changing a pronoun, it's changing a child's identity and then matching their social environment to match the gender that they're identifying with.
Speaker 2:That is a major psychological right treatment that should be done under medical guidance at a minimum right, but with parental consent mandatory, and that wasn't happening.
Speaker 2:And so you go to the lawsuits, you go to the complaints and, almost without fail, uh, you would see, it's a school counselor that is tasked with that job. It's a school counselor and I'm still thinking guidance counselor, like how to get into college or where to go to trade school or whatever and that set off a chain reaction for me to dig into that on the rabbit hole and say you know, how are these school counselors doing this and how do they have a right? I'm a lawyer. I can't practice in Arizona because I'm licensed in Washington. Right, my practice is in Washington. I don't have Arizona clients. I'm very mindful of the fact that I cannot engage in the practice of law in Arizona. So how is it that these counselors who is counselors, you think is a regulated health profession how are they able to do this in schools, under whatever certification or licensing they have? And it turns out they don't. They're not licensed by any professional regulatory board.
Speaker 1:And they don't have to be correct. They don't have to be. Yeah, that's crazy.
Speaker 2:Most cases they do not have to be Depends on the state. But you're absolutely right, they don't have to be. They're just certified by departments of education on the basis of a master's degree in school counseling for social work. Wow, so once you dive into that and realize you know they've got all the trappings of a mental health profession. They've got the title of counselor, social worker, they're part of a mental health program in schools, and so that creates the impression among the consumer, right, that they are qualified to provide mental health advice. But they're not and there's no scope of like, unlike their licensed counterparts over at the Board of Behavioral Health. You know they don't have ethical requirements that are enforceable by law. By law they don't have a professional board where you could go and file complaints and say that they have violated ethical duties or their scope of practice limitations. Right, if you're in addiction counseling, you can't do family counseling. Right, there's limitations on what they can do and they also, if you're licensed, must obtain the consent of a parent when you're treating a minor. You actually have to sign an informed consent, julie, not a check the box I approve to meet this counselor, but a check the box that I am giving my consent for you to evaluate my child for these specific identified behavioral concerns and you will develop a treatment plan over which I will approve. The parent is involved by law has to be involved, but not at school. So what I learned, what they're doing in schools would literally be illegal if they were to put up a shingle across the street from the campus, sure, they couldn't do it because they're not licensed. And I realized something's definitely wrong.
Speaker 2:Now in Arizona, I was able to find that our Board of Behavioral Health, when they moved to a mandatory licensure system in 2003, it was well over 20 years ago they adopted a policy to basically, carte blanche, exclude school counselors. And I looked at the policy and I dug into the history and I found that the reason is legislature at the time. They believed and they told the legislature at the time in 2003, well, they're just, they're guidance counselors, they're vocational counselors, they're not doing anything, so we don't need to regulate them. And so this policy in 2003 gave the, you know, essentially a blind eye to whatever school counseling was doing. And I was able to file an administrative petition. Anybody could do it, you don't have to be a lawyer, but I filed a petition with the Board of Behavioral Health. It's a complaint that you know. They didn't have statutory authority to create a new class of excluded. You know people that from your licensing and governance and your jurisdiction and you know. Eventually it was successful. I went and they had a hearing and the attorney general that serves that agency reviewed the complaint and they all agreed unanimously.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's probably something going on in schools that we don't really know about, but we know they're doing things that they shouldn't. It's so old and so they got rid of the policy and now what that has meant is that, although school counselors in Arizona and social workers, if they stayed within their narrow scope, they're not going to be required to be licensed engaging in behavioral health at a professional level. You can go to the Board of Behavioral Health and file a complaint, and the unauthorized practice of behavioral health is a felony. It's a felony in most states. It's a serious matter. So that was an opportunity for me to really dive in and dive in on how this has evolved. There's a whole history here of over 20 years where they adopted this policy in 2003, because they were still guidance counselors at the time. What happened? And this is why I said I asked myself how did we get here in that 20-year period of time?
Speaker 2:And it turns out, you know, from the late 90, 90s, early 2000, the, the research literature starts discussing and exploring the social emotional learning and how the. I guess the idea is and you could correct me if I'm wrong, because I know this is a topic that you know quite a bit about but the basic idea is that children come into the classroom with, you know, a history, psychological barriers or blockages caused by trauma or their family relationship or socioeconomic status that prevents, essentially prevents them from learning academic material, and the goal of schools should be to clear the blockages away, to open up their minds so that they can acquire academic. You know subject matter. You know that that if the kid is socially emotionally stunted, blocked, they're not going to learn academically, and that research literature starts developing early in the 2000 by 2011. I I'm sure you know casel, yeah, um, right, so casel is from the university of illinois. University, illinois sponsored a study by a professor durlach. It is the most cited story of research study on social emotional learning. They still cite it today and and and the claim was social emotional learning right will increase academic performance by 11 percent, 11 percent, right, according to this professor, and that's been considered the landmark study for to justify social emotional learning. That's in 2011, where we still had, at the federal level, no child left behind act. Right, there's an emphasis on testing. We're going to get tough on schools, right, don't give me any excuses. You're going to, you're going to test and if you fail, you're going to lose money. Well, of course, the left doesn't like that. So they take the durlach study, right, and they say social emotional learning by 2015,.
Speaker 2:Obama's in office, and then the Congress approved Every Student Succeeds Act. That replaced, in the language of the statutes, core academic studies. Academic research was changed to well-rounded students, where now the emphasis was not going to be purely on academics and academic performance but on the whole child, right, right, academic wellness was a new term that they invented academic wellness, where we part of education now, from that time on, became social emotional learning. We're going to block, we're going to get rid of all the blockages so that they can learn. And so the claim was.
Speaker 2:The claim was one social emotional learning will improve academic performance. Two, it will improve pro-social behavior. And then they used counselors, who were already there, right? Um, they used counselors, transformed them into a school counselor and threw them into the mental health. So it's kind of shoehorning the mental health programs into schools to treat the whole child. And what have we seen in the 15 years since then, or the 10 years since then? Proficiency plunges right. Exactly. You have to be an idiot to not know anything that's going on in schools right now to not realize teachers are quitting over behavioral issues. This is the number one issue. Teachers are quitting because kids are out of control.
Speaker 1:We hear that all the time, I'm sure you do, right, everybody does.
Speaker 2:So it's not working at the behavioral level. They're not suddenly adopting through magic this pro-social behavior in schools, right, because now they have school counselors and social workers. And then obviously it's not working academically either, because you're indulging, you're psychologizing the educational experience. You're psychologizing the educational experience and instead of treating children all the same with the standard and high standards of academic content, school's core mission now is a whole child approach. The whole child must be cared for, right?
Speaker 2:Breakfast, lunch, afterschool programs, all of these things that are transforming the fundamental mission of education in schools or public schools into something that no longer resemble the classroom where academic excellence is rewarded and achieved, and that's the core focus. It's now, now you know these, these pseudo scientific theories about learning that say you know, we let's not put so much emphasis on academics because there's emotional and social issues which are basically psychology, right, right, right, all these school counselors have the same behavioral health science degree as their licensed counterparts. They just don't have the licensure and experience. Now they're using the same things. They're engaging in one-on-one counseling and group counseling, using theoretical orientations to implement whatever counseling programs to do, whether it's mindfulness or cognitive behavioral therapy.
Speaker 1:You know all of these therapeutic approaches to education right, and I don't think I don't think parents are aware of that because, like you mentioned earlier, you had the guidance counselor which, when you and I hear the word counselor in a school, our mind goes to guidance counselors. And I think that's the case with most parents, most citizens. They don't think when they hear counselor, they don't think psychologist, but that is what these counselors are doing now in the school system.
Speaker 2:That's right. The number one thing that your viewers should walk away with today is one your school counselor is not a guidance counselor, for sure, but two your school believes that their role is to provide more of a therapeutic educational model than an academic one, than an academic one where you sink or swim right, and that therapeutic model of education is what's failing the US? Okay, it's failing our children. They're not getting smarter. Right the wasted talent.
Speaker 2:We're talking generational damage at this point, because it's been so long that these really crackpot theories. They're crackpot, they need to be called out. Behind me, you see my expert.
Speaker 1:Yes, clown.
Speaker 2:OK, this is my AI generated expert clown. It's kind of my little logo that I put in my sub stacks and on X we have, we have. We have witnessed a colossal, epic failure of our elites in education. They are not. They. They're like, you know, japanese world war ii, japanese soldiers off on an island. They're like the war is not over yet and 30 years go by. They are not going to give up on this theory that social emotional learning improves academic performance and improves behavior, despite the evidence to the contrary, because it's a pseudo intellectual and they're wedded to it and there's so much money as your Substack article you shared with me shows because they've been able to hoodwink.
Speaker 2:Conservatives and Republicans on both sides of the aisle are guilty of this. Right, they're primarily driven by the left, and the Republicans decide well, oh gosh, gosh, I got to help kids. Yep, heartless, not to help kids, exactly, they need our help Now. What happened to the old, traditional standards of discipline? A kid's acting up and he's removed from the class right?
Speaker 1:That is a controversial statement now it is well now with restorative justice. The kid stays in the class and the poor victim has to.
Speaker 2:You know, they have their little circle and restorative circles yes yes, restorative circles yes, iowa just recently developed these therapeutic rooms where they put them in therapeutic rooms. Wow.
Speaker 1:Iowa.
Speaker 2:Yes, Iowa Crazy.
Speaker 1:So, as we've watched, the SEL the mental health in schools, you know keep climbing up every year, with more funding and schools getting more funding and we've seen the test scores drop. And schools getting more funding and we've seen the test scores drop, and we've also seen the youth mental health crisis continue to skyrocket that's right, that's right.
Speaker 2:Um, lots of things going on there. I think abigail schreier is spot on. Yeah, there is bad therapy sometimes when you tell any parent knows this, you know you have kids, if you, if you give the kids an excuse like a diagnosis, well, yeah, you're always late for school because, oh, you're just like me. Um, you know, you, you, you, you, you. This is just the way you were born, right. Then they latch on to that and say, yeah, I'm always late, right, right they. They suddenly have something to latch on to and explain bad behavior, explain, explain away whatever good behavior, bad behavior, whatever it is. But once you've labeled something and then kids go after it now, now we've reached, you know, a kind of at the cultural level, you know, more of a therapy oriented culture that we are not prepared. So I go back to the Asian experience that I have. We are not prepared for the level of competition coming out of Asia right now.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean you can see it. I mean, you've got the tariff war, You've got the, so suddenly we're being exposed that we've completely de-industrialized our country and it's gone to hardworking people around the rest of the world who still value hard work, discipline. And school is not a place to go to feel good. It's a place to be educated.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And, unlike the US, in most Asian countries they compel kids as early as middle school to choose a trade track or academic track.
Speaker 2:You're going into the trades or you're going into college, and that becomes the two-track system anyway. So they prepare differently, but it's a different mindset because they're not looking at schools as a therapeutic institution, primarily as the mechanism to pull yourself out of poverty and get into the middle class right and contribute to the national wealth and the health healthiness of your society. So, uh, that's what's going on. And then I think, if you look at what's happening, going back to this kind of evolution, this history, the money right, you know why? Why do we have more of this? Is because of the money.
Speaker 2:Yeah, huge money, huge amounts of money in this by the administration was putting in billions, yeah, set aside for mental health programs at schools, and that's also attracted these kind of these, these mental health clinics, who now want to partner with schools, right? So now, now you're no longer you know, you talk about unregulated behavioral health in schools. Right, because school boards don't regulate it, administrators don't regulate whatever the school counselors do. Now you're going to bring in under contract, you know, actual licensed professionals to come in and roam the hallways and look for patients and they can bill.
Speaker 2:Medicaid for it so they're guaranteed, and this is why mental health professionals are just enamored with this idea of getting into schools, because it's a captive audience. The number one driver is why kids aren't. They believe that families aren't taking their kids to get mental health resources because the lack of access right, you're in school all day, you know your parents are working, you're not able to take them to see a professional, but here they can come to you and so that's just. You know ignited a race by behavioral health agencies to set up these partnerships with schools, and I mean that's also problematic, even if they're licensed. You know it's problematic that we look at schools as a place to go for healing and therapy Instead of absolutely. And what we found? If you, if you dive into the numbers at the school district level, I'll tell you there's, there's, there's, there's a way of analyzing school district finance and it's very complicated because it's government funding.
Speaker 2:There's lots of different buckets of of funds that they do that on purpose you think. You know, I thought it was on purpose, but no, now, most of the time, when you're talking about education, it's it's more about incompetence yeah yeah, I think. I think there's some corruption, but it's also incompetent yeah it's a spectrum of right.
Speaker 2:It's a corruption, but um student support services. So you can track how much your district is spending on student support services. Every school district around the country has adopted these common set of definitions for accounting purposes of what constitutes classroom spending. It's a phrase you probably heard about, right? Well, not all classroom spending is the same. Instruction, right. There's different categories of classroom instruction. Instruction is like teacher salary, textbooks, curricular activities, clubs, athletics, all the kind of the traditional expenditures that you would associate with schools that we grew up with right your experience in the educational.
Speaker 2:You know athletics and clubs are part of the educational experience. Support services is also considered classroom. The support services is what they label, what they pay school counselors and social workers, but also nurses and speech therapists and audiologists. So basically the therapeutic social services go into support services. Now that number in the last 20 years has gone up 52% nationwide. Wow, schools are spending more money on the support services than they are going into instruction and if you dive into it there's almost, you can almost say with certainty there's an inverse ratio element here.
Speaker 2:The more money you put into support services, the less you're putting into instruction. This is not in teachers interest to be seeing their the limited public funding going away from them and to counselors and social workers. But the more that goes into support services, less into instruction and the proficiencies go down. Yep, you read I write about this in my sub-step quite a bit on X, because it only makes sense, right? I mean, you get what you're spending your money on. There's more therapy and less learning. Yeah, it's really tragic that we're spending In Arizona. In the last 25 years the amount on support services has doubled, doubled, wow.
Speaker 1:And the amount on support services has doubled, doubled, wow. And the amount of instruction. Everybody, you know, thinks Arizona is like the you know education, you know gold standard for education.
Speaker 2:Well, only with respect to choice, and there's a reason, because we can get into that sub topic. But the point is that we're not trying to make is that the support services continue to suck up money away from instruction.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:And and, and they don't produce what they claim, which is improved academic performance, improved pro-social behavior, well-adjusted kids, Right.
Speaker 2:Right, does it does neither one of those things and it's taking more and more money. Arizona is actually in the one of the one of the billionaires club, what I call the billionaires club. There's 15 states that spend a billion dollars on support services. Okay, arizona is number 15 with with only this little tiny education budget compared to new york, or even compared to washington washington's in club, I bet when they're spending a billion dollars in Arizona on these support services, with a fraction of the total education budget of these other larger states, and like New York and Massachusetts. And that's so problematic. It shows a misplaced priority on where the money is going. Now, to be fair, I should disclose that support services also include a portion of special ed, but it's not a majority of special ed services.
Speaker 1:Well and even like, as like I had, we had three kids with varying levels of special ed supports in Washington public schools and even a lot of what they get in there is mental health support. It's not academic support, and what they needed was the academic because we were handling the mental health support outside of school.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah. So special education is the only area in most states. I think some states, like in Washington and Texas, actually require schools to provide mental health services to everybody, right, universal school-based mental health programs. But, yeah, special education is one of the few areas because by federal law they have to provide these related services, these psychological counseling services. But for most other states, applying that same level of psychology services to general ed and this is where we get into their service delivery model of multi-tiered systems of support, are you familiar with?
Speaker 1:that.
Speaker 2:Do you know where that comes from? That comes from public health models developed in the 70s and 80s to go into urban cities and allocate public funding to help urban cities with their medical service how to deliver medical service and they've adopted that model into education to identify, at the lower level, right, every child this is why it's called universal school-based mental health. Every child, regardless of need, receives some mental health education, right About learning about mental health, literacy or what have you. But at that bottom tier, if we imagine a pyramid of three tiers, at the bottom tier, at the universal level, you've got counselors and social workers and teachers looking to identify kids who need tier two support to go up the pyramid, Right right.
Speaker 2:We get a targeted intervention by a social worker or counselor, which could consist of one-on-one counseling or group counseling, where they're starting to really intensify the support services around that child, remove the blockages so that they can learn or at least not act up in school, and then, if it's really bad, pick them up to the top tier of the pyramid where they're sending out to an external referral. That model is basically a public health model that was developed the pyramid where they're sending out to an external referral.
Speaker 2:Referral uh, that's that model is is basically a public health model that was developed a long time ago and and what it essentially is doing, julie, is it's applying special education right, theories of providing special education to all, education to all general ed. And I sometimes joke tongue in cheek that we're all in special ed. Now, all kids are in special ed because of that mentality. The way that they're using mental health services is very much just like they do with special ed and I think parents probably don't realize that.
Speaker 1:Oh, I know.
Speaker 2:And schools aren't forthcoming. And schools aren't forthcoming, yeah Right.
Speaker 1:So how do? Like? I'm just thinking of parents who might be watching this and they're mortified because maybe they don't realize how these mental health services are being implemented through the public education system. What kind of advice do you give to a parent? Um, I mean, we tell people, you know, homeschool your kids. If you want to get them away from this stuff, you need to homeschool. But let's say that, um, I and I do still think that, even if you do pull your kids out, my, my line is pull your kids, but stay in the fight, whether that's run for school board or just attend the school board meetings. Um, as you saw in that video I sent you, that was me at the sarasota school board meeting. I don't have kids.
Speaker 2:Not everybody's going to be a warrior like you, julie, that's I mean. That takes a lot and it takes a lot of courage.
Speaker 1:It does yeah, and not everybody needs to speak up. But what can a parent do? How do they find, find out what's going on in their school? Should they just assume what's going on in their school? And, of course, I've got your sub stack linked below this video so people can go subscribe and read your sub stacks. It's very, very informative, thank you. What can people do?
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, first you got to know about the problem to do anything about it and the first first is to recognize that schools are looking to provide mental health to kids.
Speaker 2:They are looking to justify whatever grant money they've got by building a caseload at school. So I would encourage first of all, be involved with your children's lives, right? Know that there are counselors and social workers and teachers that are looking to identify any types of problems at home or mental behavioral issues at school and then take them aside behind closed doors. Closed doors, and they're going to talk to them and nine times out of ten they're not going to ask for your consent. Um, so you need to teach your kids come to me first, you know. Have that relationship with your child that they can come to you first. Be a parent, you know, sometimes teachers in schools will blame parents for not parenting right, and that's why they're having to do this. Well, there's some truth to that right. Yeah, we're all busy, but no, know your kids and let them, you know, be that person that they come to to talk about. Look for changes in their behavior.
Speaker 1:Uh, monitor social media um, that's a tough one, but it's so important it really is, and and because there is another aspect to this.
Speaker 2:Julie, if you have just a little bit of time, there's a darker side to seeing the whole child and psychologizing children like this, right, and and one of my sayings is that you know they're pupils, not patients right, because when you look at it a child as a patient right, you're looking to understand their psychology and their makeup and they're actually told, build a relationship with the child, right.
Speaker 1:Teachers are told social workers are told.
Speaker 2:Build that relationship, break down barriers, get close and personal, build trust. What does that do? Right? That breaks down that traditional formal barrier that we used to have right in education. Yeah, and creates. But we're human, we're human beings, we're good and evil and, and for some people, building that personal relationship with the child triggers them right in into right something disordered right. 99% of the time that's never going to happen. But we have to be cognizant of the fact that, for example, in Arizona, 40% of all teacher misconduct actions, year after year for 20 years, involve sexual interest in children 40% of all misconduct right, this happens and you're probably seeing it lives a talk tiktok always has been showing some of these, you know, these are good.
Speaker 2:This happens every day yeah, every day. It's a huge problem yeah, where teachers are developing relationships and they're getting on social media and friending kids, right, or the gaming sites and friendly kids and you know, maybe it didn't start out that way. A lot of of these you know teachers are married married women in fact go after it.
Speaker 2:It's on both sexes men and female, homosexual as well as heterosexual interest in children. It just happens. So you know, as a parent, there's really no reason why a teacher should be taking too much of an interest in your child. You don't want them to take too much of an interest in your child. You want them to assign homework, answer questions, but you don't want them to take a personal interest in your child.
Speaker 1:No.
Speaker 2:That is a red flag, sorry, I know the coach is really cool, he's really nice, kid likes him, but you're not hanging out after after class or after practice.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's just one of those healthy boundaries and if people haven't read it, I recommend the book boundaries by Henry cloud.
Speaker 2:I don't know that, no no, it's it really.
Speaker 1:It really changed my life. But you know, I think, what the the point you're bringing up here about these relationships that school not just teachers but school staff are building with students. And you know, as, as you noted, it's so inappropriate in many cases and we're seeing a lot of.
Speaker 1:You know, all of this sexual stuff that's going on with the SEL stuff is is grooming that is how you groom kids and break down their barriers, and so we really need to teach kids how to have healthy boundaries. And you know, we never, when you and I were in school, we didn't know about our teachers' personal lives. We didn't know about their political beliefs or if they went to church.
Speaker 2:usually, if they went, you didn't know if they went to church on sunday, unless you were at a private school I was pretty sure mrs cowan in third grade, like lived in a in a in a like a box in the back of the classroom yeah, it just was emerged in the morning and I did like to do a porn class and then we'd go back at the end of the day.
Speaker 2:No clue about her. But she was more. You know, she taught me more than anything. I still remember. I'm 56 years old. I still remember, mrs Cowan. No, we didn't know, and this is a relatively new phenomena.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Right, yeah, and it's part of the seeing the whole child. And I don't want to say we should be careful. You know, this is this. They're not all. They're not all grooming. But what it does is that these social, emotional learning, theories of learning and these theories of providing educational services are laying the conditions in which grooming can occur more easily.
Speaker 1:Yes, and not all teachers are doing it and there are still teachers in the education system who want to educate students and they don't want to be part of this, this new system of stuff that's been going on for the last couple of decades. My, my mom is a retired high school teacher. My, a lot of her siblings and my cousins and stuff are all in education and so I've grown up around that and my mom says you know, she, she uh, retired in 2006. She says I don't even recognize. Yeah, no, she she wouldn't.
Speaker 1:If she't even recognize. Yeah, no, she wouldn't anyone. She was out of 2006, she wouldn't recognize it no, no, and did you have?
Speaker 2:do you have a scary vice principal like you could? If I said scary vice principal.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, you can imagine somebody right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, right so me too, you know, and it's, he was smoking, always in the back, right, you know it was mean, it was.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you did not yeah, and here's what's funny. I what's funny, I went to a private. I went to a private school in kindergarten. It was called Liberty Christian and it was in Linwood Washington.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:And when we had our assemblies, the principal had a wood paddleboard that was up in the front row sitting next to him, and so you just had like the fear of God in you that if you acted out, you are going to get the principles wood paddle on your butt.
Speaker 2:That's right. That's right. Talk about installing boundaries.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:That was, that was an expectation on your behavior. What? What constitutes reasonable human behavior in your situation? Child is this, and if you cross it, here's the wooden bat.
Speaker 1:Exactly, and so you know this. And if you cross it, here's the wooden bat. Exactly, and so you know, as you would predict, we had pretty well-behaved students at the assemblies.
Speaker 2:Right, right, well, for your mom to get out in 2006, I mean, she really did. She grew up in a different era or served in a different era, and I would say and now the vice president?
Speaker 1:I wasn't political until like 2016 and then really got activated in 2021.
Speaker 2:Oh, you're activated for sure.
Speaker 1:Oh, yes, my firstborn child I had in 1996. And I think it was 97 or 98 that Hillary Clinton wrote the book it takes a village Right. And I read the book and I just thought that you know, it's such a great idea. I mean, I hear it was. I was a young mom, I was a single mom and so this whole idea of people helping me and coming alongside me, that sounded so great. And as I look back now it was like that is really the point in time. That whole it takes a village concept yeah is what's been just?
Speaker 1:they've just been inching their way along, but it sounds so nice, it does sound so nice and so helpful.
Speaker 2:We all interested in the the right development of your child. Yes, we all benefit from it. It's like like public roads, right?
Speaker 1:yes, it's a benefit for everyone oh, so it's easy to change your heart that was your evolution, right oh?
Speaker 1:yeah, yeah okay but I didn't see it as I read it. I didn't think of it so much as what it really is. I was thinking of it as you know my family and my neighbors, and you know I didn't see it as I. You know my family and my neighbors, and you know I didn't see it as I'm going to send my child to kindergarten and they're going to have all their meals provided and clothing provided. You know I didn't see it as the. You know you've referenced a number of times today the whole child, which is the CDC model of whole school, whole child, whole community, really making I call it one-stop shopping education. The school is one-stop shopping for not just the child but the whole community.
Speaker 2:That's right, that's right. And so where schools are transformed into like classrooms with clinics attached, right, and that's crazy, well, you know, that may have worked. And the Laura Ingalls, you know, era a little house on the prairie or something where we had a community of shared values, shared languages, shared history. That is not the world now, and so I've been attacking and I encourage other people to consider this approach when I go after mental health and programs and school, I'm not attacking it at the cultural level because there are issues there, because you originally had these theories that were introduced in school and then you had a George Floyd era were introduced in school and then you had a george floyd era, right, then you. So now you have, you know, kind of ethnic studies and grievances, uh, plus sexualized identity issues. You know, you add the political issues there on top of these mental health programs and it becomes a whole nother ball of wax, right, yeah, so I I try not to go to the political side, because the easiest or the weakest point in the left's and the Democrats' arguments on these mental health programs, the weakest point is that scientifically they cannot support the claim that these programs improve academic performance or improve behavior. They can't prove it.
Speaker 2:There are studies after studies outside the US that demonstrate these mental health programs, these US style mental health programs, are ineffective and often as much as 85% of the studies that are looked at in the US are of poor quality. So particularly in Australia, in UK, at Oxford, cambridge, there's a growing body of research literature that has said we looked at the US model and the social emotional learnings and these mental health programs. They don't work and that's bad science. And they're calling to abandon this right Cutting edge research, are saying now it was all wrong and unfortunately you have to go outside of the US to read these research studies where the Europeans are like the US say that this will improve academics, let's try to bring it, we'll bring it into Europe, but they can't validate the claims.
Speaker 2:So that's because it's the weakest point. So I go after them at kind of the scientific level. The claims they are making, the truth claims they are making, are not valid. They're not true. Layer all the political issues, right, uh, and then they're just going to get triggered, right, if you come in and talk about school counselors, transing people or something like right, they get triggered and cognitively shut down and you can't have a debate or discussion, so I try to focus on a more neutral ground.
Speaker 1:That's really great advice because I think that we are side to the right of far left, wherever that may be for you. I think it's very important for us to be strategic in our arguments. To be strategic in our arguments and, like you said, when you attack the cultural, political pieces of it, you just trigger them and you can't really have the argument. That's really the root, the core root of the issue. So I love that you said that and I hope that people who are watching this will consider that when having discussions with people or bringing this up at a school board meeting or wherever you're engaging in this debate, uh, really attack it from that scientific level of mental health does not improve academic performance and there's science behind it and that's all you have all this. You break this down on your sub stack, correct? Yes?
Speaker 2:That's right. Yeah, article after article of Cambridge studies, oxford studies, university of Bristol, university of Milan. There are studies after studies because, because they wanted in on this, the Europeans wanted in on these programs that the Americans were saying were so great, uh, and they just can't make it work because it doesn't work yeah and a lot of the research in the us. You know, it's just we say biased it's junk, it's bunk, right um, but for whatever reason, there's all kinds of reasons why there would be yeah studies would be considered invalid or incomplete, uh, or biased, not just because they're politically biased, but they actually because they're not doing good science.
Speaker 2:They're not structuring the studies properly, right? Or they only want to promote certain little things, right, like the durlach study in 2011 that said, mental health programs or social emotional learning improves academic performance by 11. Well, he actually didn't even look at high schoolers. He only looked at, like, grade school, wow, and then a small number, sample size. Well, that's not good science. Come on, so attack them on the ideas, not their values.
Speaker 2:Now, we can disagree about values, but we have to engage, and this is where I've kind of reached this point where I want a truce in the culture war. Right, can we just have a truce and talk about what works, what doesn't, and what's important to us and what's not? And if you disagree with me politically or religiously I mean I'm a conservative Catholic that's fine, you can disagree with me but we need to be able to engage on whether, when it comes to education, is this improving academic performance? And it's not? We're running out of time. The world's changing, right? I mean, we all feel it. Something's changed. We've come out of the Cold War and we've kind of lost our way. And now, now we got trump in here throwing tariffs everywhere and the kind of a multipolar war uh world, and we don't know where kids are going to get jobs in the future and we don't have enough people that could work the trades.
Speaker 2:Uh, but we have too many people in finance and software, uh and, and not enough people with jobs, the middle, middle class. I'm from middle class and you see some of these small towns in Washington, the logging industry gone. I'm sure you see in Florida too. It's just, we need to do something with this country and it starts with education. It is your ability to move out of whatever condition you're in child. You can improve yourself with the right education. It is your ability to move out of whatever condition you're in child. You can improve yourself with the right education.
Speaker 2:And that's the message they need to hear, not excuses and diagnoses about why you are psychologically impaired.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that's why 100% yeah. Wow, we could tell you and I could talk all day, because this is such a big issue, it's such a complex issue and I think you really nailed it right there when you you know we need to fix this education system because our, our society depends on it and we've got to educate kids so that they're able to be productive members of our society. And you know, for their own, their own wellbeing, a well-educated person is generally social, socially and emotionally more balanced.
Speaker 2:That's right. You're healthy. Right, Be healthy yeah.
Speaker 1:So I I so appreciate your time today and I hope that maybe you'll consider coming back again in the future because I think there are some side issues to this that we could really go down. I think it'd be fun to break apart the whole school, whole child thing from the CDC and some of that that we could, and the whole community-based health centers that are in schools. I mean we could go down so many different rabbit holes.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean the CDC. They give that scientific veneer right To what educators already want to do. Right, and it's just bunk, yep. Well, thank you, joe.
Speaker 1:I would love to talk to you more, and we'll definitely do it and for everybody that's watching, I've got links down below for Chris's Substack and if you want to follow him on X, which is where I found Chris and he pushes out a lot of good content on X and you can message him and he'll, at least for me. He answers me when I have questions and it's fun.
Speaker 2:A legal process.
Speaker 1:What's that A?
Speaker 2:legal process.
Speaker 1:Yep, and I've got all that linked below, so I hope you guys will go check him out and we will definitely do this again in the future. Today, I hope you enjoyed this discussion. Please make sure that you are following Chris on Substack and on his ex account, which I've got linked in the podcast description. Please make sure you share this far and wide and I look forward to chatting with you again next time.