An expansive report on the impacts of trauma and poverty on early childhood development has been making the rounds in some of my circles this weekend. Although originally written in 2000, there have been some updates made to the conclusions and recommendations.

This thing is massive and you can download it for free. The introduction is at minimum well worth a read, and I’m trying right now to pick my way through this roughly 400 page document.

The science in this report is very clear: education for students in high-poverty communities must be part of a much larger and more comprehensive suite of services to overcome the deleterious effects of epigenetic influences on brain development. Students enter our classrooms in high poverty districts hard wired against most of the educational interventions we as teachers are mandated to provided.

The solutions we as teachers are able to provide for intractable problems unrelated to the classroom are limited by restrictive policies and rules implemented by top-down management of the rank-and-file employees of school systems. In order to cut costs, educators are limited to a small set of solutions to very complicated problems. Through teacher evaluation and other high-stakes measures, teachers are policed by leadership to stick closely to interventions that, in many cases, do not respect the complexity of the problems at hand. Furthermore, interventions are limited to academic only outcomes and equal priority is rarely given to social and emotional development.

If children are not safe and calm and loved, they will not learn.

That is the truth.