It was also a realization on the part of the University Child Study Center that many of the children being seen for mental health referrals didn’t really have mental health problems, that they had school problems. They were failing in school, but that failure in school was going to lead to failure in life. And the question is, “What can you do for those children?”

And that led to our work in schools as a kind of preventive psychiatry program to provide the children. And it was a question also, would it be too late for those children? Could you make a difference at that point? And I think our program demonstrated that you could make a difference. You could make a difference academically.

But what we’ve demonstrated that keeps getting ignored, that’s very frustrating, is that there are across-the-board developmental experiences that are as necessary, perhaps more necessary, to be successful in life and in school, than academic learning. Personal development, your social interactions, psycho- emotional development, moral-ethical, linguistic, intellectual cognitive, are all tied together. And so a developmental perspective is needed; that’s what we learned.

And our frustration at the moment is that, that’s a minority viewpoint, and that everybody is still focused on curriculum instruction assessment, not everybody, but too many people. So much so that policy pushes us in that direction, rather than in looking at the overall development of young people in the preparation of life, not only for low-income kids but for all kids.

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