From Classrooms to Clinics: The Hidden Agenda Behind Behavioral Education and Mental Health Profiteering
The Psychological Toll of Common Core-Aligned Standards: Exposing the Federal Mandate Behind the Mental Health Crisis in Schools
First, do no harm
By incorporating the important work of psychologist Lucy Foulkes alongside damning public testimony, this article reveals the systemic damage inflicted on America’s children through the Common Core-aligned College and Career Readiness Standards (CCRS) embedded in state and federal law. These policies have deliberately shifted the mission of education from academics to affective behavioral conditioning under the guise of mental health, readiness, and equity.
The Manufactured Crisis and Captive Market
Lucy Foulkes, a psychologist now based at Oxford University, has issued a powerful warning: the universal push for mental health awareness in schools, especially through classroom-wide interventions, may be doing more harm than good. In her research and public talks, Foulkes explains how awareness campaigns and interventions may cause mental health problems by overly pathologizing normal emotional development, inadvertently teaching children to label discomfort as disorder.
This aligns chillingly with testimony from educators, parents, and psychologists across the country. Dr. Gary Thompson, a clinical psychologist from Utah, has testified that Common Core-aligned CCRS assessments are not only developmentally inappropriate for many children—including minority, autistic, gifted, and emotionally challenged students—but are also being administered without informed consent. This lack of ethical oversight would be considered malpractice in any other psychological context.
The government, through mandates embedded in federal laws like:
Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), 20 U.S.C. § 6311(b)(1)(B) and § 6364
Strengthening Career and Technical Education for the 21st Century Act (Perkins V)
Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA), 29 U.S.C. § 3101 et seq.
And FERPA’s 2012 regulatory amendments, 34 CFR Part 99
...has facilitated widespread psychological data collection via online adaptive assessments, competency-based education models, and social-emotional learning (SEL) frameworks that track attitudes, values, and beliefs rather than academics.
In Texas, this shift is codified through laws such as:
HB 5 (2013): Established CCMR (College, Career, and Military Readiness) indicators that include behavioral traits
HB 3 (2019): Required school districts to adopt "local accountability systems" that go beyond academic metrics
HB 4 (2025): Replaced STAAR with adaptive assessment like the NWEA’s MAP,
which measures student growth in real-time using online behavioral data collection
SB 123 (2021): Mandated K-12 instruction in Social and Emotional Learning
Together, these laws redefine education as a system of behavioral compliance, not academic excellence.
And the shift is not optional. All 50 states are implementing these behavioral standards because compliance is tied to federal dollars. Even if the U.S. Department of Education were abolished, it would not matter. Funding now flows through multiple federal agencies—Health and Human Services (HHS), the Department of Labor, and the Department of Defense, as authorized under WIOA. The system is locked in place through what is now known as the P-20W pipeline—Preschool through Workforce.
From Knowledge to Compliance: The Behavioral Takeover
Where public schools once measured reading, writing, and arithmetic, they now enforce emotional self-regulation, attitude shifts, and worldview conditioning. In testimony before state legislators, numerous experts expressed grave concerns:
"Young children cannot engage in the type of critical thinking that Common Core-aligned CCRS calls for. That would require a fully developed prefrontal cortex." — Child psychologist testimony
"We ask children to write persuasively using emotionally charged language, but they do so from their limbic system—not from reason. We're teaching aggression, not empathy." — Educator testimony
Such standards, like asking third graders to distinguish "shades of meaning among related words that describe states of mind or degrees of certainty," are absurdly abstract for developing minds. Yet these are embedded in the Common Core-aligned English Language Arts Standards, which nearly every state—including Texas, under the name "Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills" (TEKS)—has adopted in alignment with federal mandates.
The Shift Is Not Political—It’s Structural
“If you ever need an example that facts don't speak for themselves, this is it. Bill and Melinda Gates paid a former McKinsey consultant to write education standards. Early childhood researchers and educators yelled as loudly as they could that the early grade standards were developmentally inappropriate.” — Dr. Nicholas Tampio
This is not a battle of left vs. right. This is not simply bad policy—it is a deliberate shift in the structure of education:
The role of the state is to provide a general diffusion of knowledge—meaning reading, writing, math, and history. Instead, we now have affective, behavioral standards governing the classroom.
Common Core-aligned CCRS mandates require that education be measured through SEL competencies, groupthink collaboration, and abstract reasoning in elementary grades. And the same federal government that mandates these standards has loosened privacy protections so that vendors—public-private partners—can harvest the resulting behavioral data.
A Captive Market for the Mental Health Industry
By shifting the standard from academics to mental health, federal and state governments have created a psychological crisis in students, which in turn fuels demand for interventions—paid for by taxpayer-funded grants.
Dr. Gary Thompson summarizes this dangerous cycle:
"Not one of the Common Core-aligned testing consortia funded by the U.S. Department of Education and the Gates Foundation (SBAC, PARCC, AIR) has published independently reviewed validity data for any students. Yet they are used to drive high-stakes decisions for children across the country."
What better captive market for the booming SEL and youth psychology industry than a nation of children trained to believe they are broken?
The Psychological Weaponization of Support Systems
What many parents do not realize is that psychological interventions are already hardwired into federal education law. Techniques such as Positive Behavior Intervention and Supports (PBIS), Multi-Tiered System of Supports (MTSS), Response to Intervention (RTI), Specialized Instructional Support Services (SISS), and Early Intervening Services (EIS) are all embedded in the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) and its associated regulatory framework. These psychological conditioning mechanisms are applied to all children—without parental knowledge or consent.
These soft-skill outcomes may sound positive—honesty, integrity, grit, interpersonal skills—but such attributes cannot be objectively tested or remediated without the use of psychological or psychiatric interventions. Worse, the definition of “healthy” is now prescribed by the government. A child’s inner life—his or her thoughts, beliefs, feelings, behaviors—is judged against vague “minimum positive attitudes.”
These interventions are derived from Benjamin Bloom’s “whole child” education theory, which focuses on what a child thinks, feels, and does. These theories are reflected in federal mandates under the name Universal Design for Learning (UDL). According to the Department of Labor’s SCANS Report:
“The common image of the learner is that of the blank slate. However, the more appropriate image of learning is replacing what is already on the slate.”
In short, federal education policy openly advocates for replacing parental instruction with state-sanctioned belief systems.
Through values clarification techniques and repeated, stress-inducing cognitive dissonance activities, students are conditioned to abandon pre-existing moral, religious, and cultural values. This process is not education—it is indoctrination.
These manipulations can cause real harm. Emotional distress, depression, anxiety, and social alienation are all unintended (or perhaps intended) consequences. This is psychological experimentation on a captive population—and it must be stopped.
Conclusion: A Call for Accountability
The federal government, enabled by corporate philanthropy and enacted by state legislatures, has rewritten the purpose of education without public understanding or informed consent. Children are no longer being taught—they are being conditioned, surveilled, and sorted for workforce pipelines.
To parents, teachers, and legislators: the question is not whether students are meeting standards, but whose standards are being met—and at what cost.
We must demand a return to knowledge-based academic instruction. We must call for the repeal of laws that enforce behavioral data collection and mandate SEL. We must reject federal and corporate control over childhood development.
Because children are not data points. And education is not a psychological experiment.
Citations:
ESSA, 20 U.S.C. § 6311(b)(1)(B); § 6364 – SEL & well-rounded education grants
WIOA, 29 U.S.C. § 3101 et seq. – Aligns education with workforce development
FERPA Amendments, 34 CFR Part 99 – Expanded access to student data for vendors
Texas HB 3 (2019); HB 4 (2025); HB 5 (2013); SB 123 (2021) – Affective standard mandates
Dr. Gary Thompson, White Paper on the Psychological Impacts of Common Core Testing, 2015
Nicholas Tampio, Fordham Institute, 2017
Perkins V, 20 U.S.C. § 2301 et seq. – Career readiness and behavioral metrics