Is sending children to public school a form of abuse?

It is not uncommon to find on right-leaning news sites only half-joking references to sending one's child to public school being a form of child-abuse or parental neglect.  And given the antics of the education establishment, teacher unions and a surprising number of school boards, there are an astonishing number of incidents and stories which support the accusations.  

Given that there are nearly 100,000 public schools in the nation, there are obviously going to be some with some strange outlier practices and policies, whether it is drag queen reading sessions or after school teacher parties to falsify exams in order to reflect better scores than actually earned.  

So while there is a residual concern that there is indeed something rotten in the state of public education, it is easy to set it aside and assume that it most likely isn't as bad as it might seem.  

But then you see something like this: New Study Shows the Striking Correlation Between School Attendance and Youth Suicides by Kerry McDonald.  The subheading is What if schools are the major source of the youth mental crisis? 

A new study, published this month by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), finds a striking correlation between attendance in school and incidences of youth suicides. Analyzing several pre- and post-pandemic data sets, the researchers conclude “that youth suicides are closely tied with in-person school attendance.” According to the paper’s authors, youth suicides fall during the summer months and rise again when school begins. Notably, they found that in areas of the US where school begins in August, youth suicide rates also increase in August, while in areas that begin school in September, the youth suicide rate doesn’t increase until then. 

This new study echoes earlier findings from Vanderbilt University researchers who discovered a similar link between school attendance and youth suicidal ideation and attempts. That research, published in the journal Pediatrics in 2018, looked at hospital emergency room and inpatient data between 2008 and 2015. “The lowest frequency of encounters occurred during summer months,” the Vanderbilt authors concluded. “Peaks were highest in fall and spring. October accounted for nearly twice as many encounters as reported in July,” they found.

Interestingly, both the 2018 Vanderbilt researchers and the NBER study authors explain that the seasonal youth suicide pattern is different from that of adults. The NBER researchers did not find the same school-suicide link for young adults ages 19 to 25, while the lead author on the Vanderbilt study told The New York Times that summertime is the peak period for adult suicidal tendencies, but is the lowest period for youth suicidal tendencies.

The research she is referencing is In-Person Schooling and Youth Suicide:  Evidence from School Calendars and Pandemic School Closures by Benjamin Hansen, Joseph J. Sabia, and Jessamyn Schaller.  The Abstract is:

This study explores the effect of in-person schooling on youth suicide. We document three key findings. First, using data from the National Vital Statistics System from 1990-2019, we document the historical association between teen suicides and the school calendar. We show that suicides among 12-to-18-year-olds are highest during months of the school year and lowest during summer months (June through August) and also establish that areas with schools starting in early August experience increases in teen suicides in August, while areas with schools starting in September don’t see youth suicides rise until September. Second, we show that this seasonal pattern dramatically changed in 2020. Teen suicides plummeted in March 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic began in the U.S. and remained low throughout the summer before rising in Fall 2020 when many K-12 schools returned to in-person instruction. Third, using county-level variation in school reopenings in Fall 2020 and Spring 2021—proxied by anonymized SafeGraph smartphone data on elementary and secondary school foot traffic—we find that returning from online to in-person schooling was associated with a 12-to-18 percent increase teen suicides. This result is robust to controls for seasonal effects and general lockdown effects (proxied by restaurant and bar foot traffic), and survives falsification tests using suicides among young adults ages 19-to-25. Auxiliary analyses using Google Trends queries and the Youth Risk Behavior Survey suggests that bullying victimization may be an important mechanism.

As always, correlation is not causation.  But . . . 

I could make an argument that perhaps this is unavoidable.  Yes, school can be stressful and therefore you would expect that the suicide rate would correlate with the degree to which one is in school.  Yes, we want all schools to be better, but is there a real version of school which is not stressful?  Indeed, isn't learning to deal with stress (and its many sources ranging from bullying, social ostracism, unfair workloads, bad teachers, etc.) one of the elemental lessons of school?

So the correlation between youth suicide and school is perhaps not an inherent indictment of the badness of public schools.

Unless the suicide rate among youth is rising.  McDonald does not make a big deal about it but does allude to and link to research about suicide rates.  And actually that is far more damning from my perspective.  

From State Suicide Rates Among Adolescents and Young Adults Aged 10–24: United States, 2000–2018 by Sally C. Curtin, M.A. 

After a period of stability from 2000 to 2007 as shown previously (1), the suicide rate among adolescents and young adults aged 10–24 in the United States increased 57.4% from 6.8 per 100,000 in 2007 to 10.7 in 2018 (Table). When examining the change in rates between 3-year averages of the periods 2007–2009 (7.0) and 2016–2018 (10.3), the national percentage increase was 47.1%. From 2007–2009 to 2016–2018, suicide rates increased significantly in 42 states. Nonsignificant increases occurred in 8 states. Due to small numbers, trends were not possible to assess in the District of Columbia. Significant increases ranged from 21.7% in Maryland (from 6.0 in 2007–2009 to 7.3 in 2016–2018) to a more than doubling of the rate in New Hampshire (from 7.0 to 14.7) (Figure 1). The majority of states, 32 in total, had significant increases of between 30%–60%. 

A sixty percent increase in youth suicide rate in the past decade?  Now there's a crisis worth focusing on.  The absolute numbers might be low but that increase is a marked signal that there is either a crisis among youth and/or that there is a crisis in schooling.  That public schools are not mitigating the crisis and may indeed be exacerbating it.  

Maybe public schools are indeed either creating or exacerbating a mental health crisis among youth.  Seems like something we should be investigating.