Failing grade: New study promotes ADHD meds as grade-boosting drugs
In case you haven’t been paying attention, a new government study claims that kids taking pharmaceuticals to treat attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) score higher on math and reading tests at the elementary school level. The study is thought to validate all of the claims that drugs like Ritalin and Adderall are reigning in and focusing the minds of the younger generation.
I’m sorry, but I’m still not buying it.
I’ve long been critical of the very concept of ADHD. I believe that it is, for the most part, a made up disease that capitalizes on typical childhood behavior – or behavior that’s the result of too much sugar and too little discipline. I also think that it’s the most egregious example out there of a “malady” that’s being promoted by drug companies in order to expand the market for their poisons.
This latest study was federally funded, which is supposed to remove the potential whiff of impropriety that may have arisen had this research been paid for with Big Pharma money. Unfortunately, the results are based on the standardized test, which is, in itself, an ineffective method of measuring academic achievement.
The research examined nearly 600 kids who had been diagnosed with ADHD, and rated their performance on standardized tests. Kids taking some form of ADHD medication scored 2.9 points higher in math and 5.4 points higher in reading than the kids not taking medication for their condition.
According to Richard Scheffler, one of the researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, where the study was conducted, the study “found that children with ADHD who used the medication were several months ahead of their non-medicated peers in reading and math, which is significant because early progress in school is critical to ongoing academic success.”
Is it me, or does it sound like Scheffler’s not exactly making an apples-to-apples comparison? How, exactly, does an AVERAGE test score 2.9 points to 5.4 points higher equate to being “several months ahead” of other students?
ADHD pharmaceuticals are designed specifically to focus the mind, and the fact that kids on these drugs scored better doesn’t mean that they were “ahead” of anyone. It only means that they were more focused to perform at the time of the test.
Scheffler is implying that the medicated students were actually made more academically advanced by the drugs, which is nonsense.
Sheffler asserts that his study found “medication does improve standardized math and reading scores in the long term.” But so what? This is no mystery. I’ve written to you before that college age kids are using ADHD drugs such as Adderal in increasing numbers in order help them to tune everything else out and focus on reading, studying, or paper-writing. It also helps them to stay awake for those all-nighters.
The study author, Stephen P. Hinshaw, chair of Berkeley’s psychology department, claims that the study’s results “on an objective, rigorously-designed standardized test of reading and math ability, we have evidence there are ‘real world’ gains in achievement” with the drugs.
But standardized tests are designed as a measure of schools at teaching curricula more than a child’s achievement. They’re a poor measure of a student’s ability to learn. This is the worst possible combination of Big Pharma propaganda and Big Government bureaucratic butt covering you’re ever going to see.
