Schools Matter: Got Poverty? Call a Positive Psychologist

Schools Matter: Got Poverty? Call a Positive Psychologist:

Got Poverty? Call a Positive Psychologist

As the educational profiteers and snake oil salesmen dig into the text of ESSA to find problems that their phony solutions can be retrofitted to "fix," we are sure to see some real doozies coming down the line. 

Seems the "fix the child, not the problem" school of educational thought disorder is already testing out worn-out ideas in West Virginia, where poverty and hopelessness are being treated with 19th Century conditioning and more jobs for positive psychologists.

If Martin Seligman's mind fixes cannot be shown to have any positive effect on GIs suffering from PTSD in Iraq and Afghanistan, maybe they will work on unemployed coal miners' children.  There's plenty of money provided by ESSA to find out how to make poor children immune to economic disability while ignoring poverty for another generation.  

As noted below by the psychologist, Paul Baker, children need to learn "you can shake off what's going on" outside school.  It's all a part of Baker's "multi-tiered" behavioral intervention system that would be entirely appropriate if children were rats.

The Martin County school district, in eastern Kentucky near the West Virginia border, wrestles with poverty and high unemployment rates with the decline of the coal-mining industry. The county is losing population, and 75 percent of its 2,000 students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunches.

In 2014, the county was awarded a $310,000 federal school-climate-improvement grants, which Schools Matter: Got Poverty? Call a Positive Psychologist: