Pioneer of Education Reform to Present Distinguished Psychiatrist Lecture

“For years we have known that principles of child development are critical to everything that individuals, families, and communities need to thrive,” said psychiatrist James Comer, M.D., M.P.H., in an interview with Psychiatric News. “We know it, but we don’t teach it, and we don’t use those principles to create schools that promote healthy development.”

Yale University

Comer, possibly the most influential figure today in educational reform, will elaborate on his impatience for school reform in a Distinguished Psychiatrist Lecture at this year’s Annual Meeting in San Francisco, titled, “Why Are We Still Waiting? Resistance to Prevention and Promotion With Mental Health Issues.”

Comer is the Maurice Falk Professor of Child Psychiatry at the Yale University Child Study Center. In 1968, he founded the Comer School Development Program (SDP), an innovative school reform initiative that integrates the principles of child and adolescent development with academic learning. The program has improved the educational environment in more than 1,000 schools throughout the country. In 2014 President Barack Obama appointed Comer to his Advisory Commission on Educational Excellence.

The Comer SDP does not impose an intervention on a pilot school but rather relies on the stakeholders within the school—parents, children, teachers, and administration—to develop an organic model of change that facilitates student engagement, development, and learning.

According to the website of the Yale Child Study Center, the Comer Process is not a project or add on, but rather an operating system—a way of managing, organizing, coordinating, and integrating programs and activities.

“Three teams—the School Planning and Management Team (SPMT), the Student and Staff Support Team (SSST), and the Parent Team—work together to create a Comprehensive School Plan (CSP); to design and conduct staff development aligned with the goals of the Comprehensive School Plan; and to assess and modify the plan as necessary using a wide range of student- and school-level data to ensure that the school is continuously improving,” according to the website. “The teams are guided by three principles: decision making by consensus, no-fault problem solving, and collaboration. The process fosters positive school and classroom climate and creates optimal conditions for teaching and learning, and emphasizes the alignment of curriculum, instruction, and assessment.”

In comments to Psychiatric News, Comer said that most schools focus only on the mechanical aspects of learning—memorize and regurgitate—while disregarding the social, emotional, and relational aspects of education.

“The problem is that we have ignored the environment and the dynamics of child development,” he said. “What we have done [with SDP] is to focus on creating an environment that, to the extent possible, focuses not on what is wrong with kids, but what they need to function well in society.”

When asked why there is such resistance to change, Comer replied: “The privileged don’t want to change, and that’s built into the system. It’s not a matter of taking from the privileged but creating a balance that works for most of the people most of the time.”

Comer recalled that he started out training to be a generalist. But so many of the problems he saw afflicting patients lay outside the purview of standard clinical care—they were social and environmental in nature.

This realization is what led him to psychiatry, then to child psychiatry, the Yale Child Study Center, and public health. Comer said he is pleased that APA is making that same realization about the social determinants of public health problems, as reflected in many of the sessions planned for this year’s Annual Meeting. ■