This article -- The Education Practice That is Costing Taxpayers Billions of Dollars -- is about what may happen to students who are suspended from school. While not everything bad happens to all students who are suspended, there are enough of them to have a societal impact. The problem is that the societal impact is far enough into the future that it becomes disconnected from the event that might cause it. Or maybe there are a lot of events that might lead to the result, but we aren't aware of the connections. I often talk about the "unintended consequences" of our actions.
In his article, The Origins of Addiction: Evidence from the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study, Dr. Vincent Felitti, co-principle investigator of the ground-breaking CDC-Kaiser Permanente Adverse Childhood Experiences Study, says: "Our findings indicate that the major factor underlying addiction is adverse childhood experiences that have not healed with time and that are overwhelmingly concealed from awareness by shame, secrecy, and social taboo."
Addiction is an unintended consequence of ACEs. We don't intend for addiction to occur, and we had no idea that it was related to childhood inflicted trauma until the ACE Study.
So why am I writing about unintended consequences? When we make decisions, we often base them on "conventional wisdom," "best practices," "gut instinct," or a host of other inaccurate assumptions that we make about the reasons for our decisions. Then we fail to monitor results, or measure performance about our actions. Without thinking about unintended consequences, we don't even know they are occurring. That's one point from this article, and the hidden costs discussed are probably just a small part of the total cost to society.
So I encourage you to engage in honest conversations about whether the decisions you are making will produce the intended results, or will have unintended consequences that might produce a more negative result than you expect.
Comments (0)