An approach to assessing ‘accountability’ in implementing the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child: Implications for School Psychology

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (Convention) was designed to be both an ‘aspirational’ document (in the sense that it asserts an idealized conception of the human rights of children) and a legally binding mandate (in the sense that every five years signatories are required to report on the status of their efforts to implement it). The task of evaluating signatory implementation is assigned to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child. The National Association of School Psychologists’ (NASP) Principles for Professional Ethics (2010a) (first published in 1974 and then revised in 1984, 1992, 1997, 2000, and 2010) also serves as an ‘aspirational’ document for school psychologists in the sense that it is part of an attempt to define ideal North American school psychology practices by NASP. However, in the USA it also serves as a nationally accepted guideline for school psychologists’ professional behavior.

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and NASP’s Principles for Professional Ethics (2010a) can support each other. Both documents place a child’s right to healthy development as the ultimate priority, regardless of the child’s circumstances. Article 3 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child states: ‘Those responsible for children must make the best interests of the child a primary consideration.’ Similarly, NASP’s Principles for Professional Ethics states, ‘School psychologists consider the interests and rights of children and youth to be their highest priority in decision making, and act as advocates for all students’ (p. 2). School psychologists can abide by their professional code and further the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child by helping schools, communities, states, and the nation assess how well schools are upholding children’s best interests. Assessment could then inform action, progress could be evaluated, and so on. According to professional guidelines, school psychologists are tasked with and competent in using data in this manner (NASP, 2010b).

One of the fundamental principles underlying the Convention is the belief that quality of life outcomes for children should be uncorrelated with parental income and functioning. Similarly, NASP’s Principles for Professional Ethics states, ‘School psychologists are committed to the application of their professional expertise for the purpose of promoting improvement in the quality of life for students, families, and school communities’ (p. 2). Therefore, school psychologists must help ensure children access educational opportunities that allow them, and by association their families and communities, the option of attaining a positive quality of life. In order to ensure children access equitable opportunities, a valid assessment of their access to such opportunities is necessary. What follows outlines how school psychologists can assess and support progress towards the aspiration that children have equitable access to services that promote healthy development regardless of parental limitations.

One form of assessment involves ‘counting’. School psychologists could ‘count’ outcomes that indicate their school is supporting the Convention. For example, they could examine achievement rates, the number of behavioral infractions, attendance rates, and so on. These rates could be compared to state and national standards. Indeed, it is important to know these rates and determine if they indicate the school as a whole is supporting at least satisfactory child development. However, such an enumeration approach is insufficient because a school could appear as if it is achieving desirable outcomes overall but have a subgroup of students that fall significantly below the school’s overall level of achievement. Moreover, this subgroup of students could qualify for free and reduced lunch, thereby associating their achievement with parental limitations. If the goal is a positive quality of life for all students regardless of parental limitations, then an empirical approach that goes beyond enumeration is necessary.

An empirical approach would augment ‘counting’ approaches by determining how close a school has come to reducing to zero the correlation between family/parental financial resources and child opportunities. School systems and policies would aspire to reduce the correlation to zero and be evaluated based on their progress towards this aspiration. Reducing the correlation to zero is an aspiration because it is likely impossible to reduce the correlation to zero in practice. This derives in part from interaction of genetic factors and environmental factors that predispose some children to educational, health, and economic success. For example, for families living near or below the poverty level, variance in IQ is largely attributable to the environment, whereas in affluent families, variance in IQ is largely attributable to genes (Turkheimer, Haley, Waldron, D’Onofrio, & Gottesman, 2003). IQ, in turn, can contribute to differences in educational, health, and economic success (Firkowska-Mankiewicz, 2011). While there is hope for intervention in that the environment can be somewhat malleable and school systems can offer interventions to offset the negative impact of an impoverished environment (e.g. Headstart), the reality is that school systems and educational policies cannot control larger societal forces that perpetuate poverty. The degree to which children succeed--in the domains of health, education, economics, and overall ‘quality of life’--is always and everywhere related to some mix of the heritability of individual traits (that thus cohere in families) and the impact of poverty (because of its impact on developmental psychology and educational opportunities). What differs from society to society is the strength of this correlation (not its existence or direction).

Furthermore, ‘quality of life’ is transmissible by ‘privilege’. Children born to parents with resources have access to pathways to success (Clare, 2013). Parents with resources can hire tutors, seek diagnoses via a private evaluation and subsequently advocate for their children to receive support at school and apply for accommodations (e.g. extended time) on standardized tests used as part of the university application process, and/or provide their children with the financial resources that enable them to participate in higher education. Moreover, they likely have cultural capital–the knowledge and skills necessary for success–to transmit to their children (Bourdieu, 1986). They can guide their children through education, university, and the economic market. Privilege, or lack thereof, can contribute to the fact that in the United States, students of lower socioeconomic status are more likely to delay enrollment in university (Wells & Lynch, 2012) and thus less likely to attain a college degree (Bozick & DeLuca, 2005).

School psychologists can support children’s right to healthy development despite parental resources by first examining the correlation between parental resources and indicators of children’s well-being. That being said, schools may not have access to data regarding parental resources or children’s outcomes that enable a correlation to be computed. However, a comparison between parental resources and children’s well-being is still possible. A common metric of the financial health of a family that is readily available in most school databases is whether or not a child qualifies for free or reduced lunch—an accepted indicator in the USA of poverty. A school psychologist could compare and contrast the outcomes of the students who qualify for free and reduced lunch with those who do not. The outcomes examined depend upon the wealth of data collected by the school, but at a minimum, attendance, behavior, and academic achievement should be examined. If available, social-emotional screening data would also provide valuable information as to children’s well-being.

In examining data, school psychologists should collaborate with others. Just as outcome data examined alone may not tell an accurate picture of a school’s success, the examination of data alone will likely be fruitless. A key person with whom to collaborate is the school’s administrator. If the data are going to inform change, an administrator needs to buy into the questions being asked with the data and its use in informing action. School psychologists should also collaborate with representatives of different school stakeholder groups, as their insight into patterns observed and potential interventions may differ depending upon their role.

Since a zero correlation between parental resources and children’s healthy development is an aspiration, data will likely depict a relationship between family resources and outcome data. The question school psychologists will need to ask in collaboration with school stakeholders is if the relationship is acceptable to their community, and if not, what can be done to address the issue. Some schools may already have systems in place that aim to prevent gaps in healthy development and intervene when they occur, such as positive behavioral interventions and supports (PBIS; visit http://www.pbis.org for more information), response to intervention (RtI; visit http://www.rti4success.org for more information), and school-wide social-emotional curricula (SEL; visit http://casel.org for more information). If these systems are in place, school psychologists might work with others to evaluate how the school might refine or augment them in order to reduce the observed relationship between family and child success. If prevention and early intervention systems are not in place, school psychologists might consider their development and implementation or other research-based interventions that might target the observed concerns (see http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/ for a comprehensive list of research-based interventions).. Indeed, research-based interventions will likely be necessary in the interim given that developing and implementing systems in schools can take years (Adelman & Taylor, 2007).

Another framework for thinking about prevention and intervention is the 40 developmental assets outlined by the Search Institute (see http://www.search-institute.org/developmental-assets). A school could influence several assets, including: Positive and supportive relationships with adults, a caring, safe, and predictable school environment, parental involvement in schooling, engagement in community service, and involvement in extracurricular activities. Increasing the number of developmental assets can improve children’s academic achievement and quality of life, despite parental income (Scales, Benson, Leffert, & Blyth, 2000). Such efforts are possible in a high poverty setting. For example, a high school in the rural, southeastern United States where 70% of the student population qualifies for free or reduced lunch is addressing some of these developmental assets by connecting students whose attendance, behavior, and academic data suggest they are at-risk for dropping out of school to adult mentors, requiring teachers to check in with parents in the first period class once per week, and implementing PBIS. The school’s test scores are increasing, as it has gone from the 15th percentile to the 67th percentile in the state according to a variety of indicators (e.g. standardized test scores, attendance, and graduation rate).

However, it is also possible for a school to discern a minimal relationship between parental resources and school success simply because the majority of families who send their children to the school are impoverished and the majority of children are struggling academically, behaviorally, socially, and emotionally. Such a situation is rooted in a larger societal violation of children’s rights, in which public education is equally available but inequitable. Public education is available to all, but is inequitable when schools’ funding is based in the economic health of its community. When such funding structures are in place, the resources of the school relate to the resources of the neighboring families, thereby connecting the educational resources children can access to parental resources. Further enhancing the correlation between parental resources and children’s healthy development when such funding structures exist is the fact that children whose parents have fewer resources often need access to more school-based resources in order to thrive.

Along with the reality that schools nested in communities with fewer resources often have fewer resources to offer their children is the reality that the employees of these schools have fewer resources. As a former special education teacher in such a setting, the second author barely saw the school’s school psychologist because the school psychologist was so busy meeting her legal obligations (i.e. testing in order determine eligibility for special education and associated documentation) in the four schools she served. She could barely meet her legal obligations, let along concern herself with collaborating with others around school-wide data and research-based interventions.

In situations such as this, it is the responsibility of the school psychology community, organized by state and national school psychological associations, to advocate for reform in collaboration with those who make the laws the policies. The school psychologist in this setting needs allies in order to transcend the system that is producing and reproducing inequity. School psychological organizations should recognize this need, and should be responsive to school psychologists who seek their alliance. For example, in the USA, a state association, the Illinois School Psychologist Association (ISPA) employs a lobbyist with the expressed purpose of collaborating with lawmakers in order to support school psychologists in having the capacity to use their expertise to promote student well-being. At the national level in the USA, NASP advocates for the capacity of the profession to uphold children’s rights and for educational reform that will promote children’s well-being (see: http://www.nasponline.org/advocacy/index.aspx).

That being said, school psychologists and their colleagues who are working in settings with limited resources are not helpless. They can do seemingly small things that may increase the number of developmental assets students experience, thereby increasing the chance that these students can be resilient when confronted with adversity (Scales et al., 2000). For example, a school psychologist could work to build positive, supportive relationship with the students and families s/he encounters. If the school psychologist only has time for meeting his/her legal obligation through testing, then the school psychologist can use his/her evaluations as a stepping stone to advocate for the interventions and resources the child needs. The school psychologist could collaborate with parents and teachers to ensure they understand the implications of the evaluation and next steps, such as how to implement research-based interventions that address the students’ needs and what community agencies could open the door to additional services and supports given the evaluation report. The main idea is that equitable access to a positive quality of life through education is an aspiration. Critically evaluating the equity of access and doing what is within one’s capacity and control to offer equitable access is the important stepping stone towards this aspiration.

In conclusion, the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child and USA’s NASP present similar aspirations for school psychology practice. School psychologists’ responsibility is to critically assess progress towards these aspirations and work to improve progress in a contextually appropriate way. None of the ideas presented in this article are revolutionary. Rather, these ideas are meant to outline a framework for thinking about the aspirations of the field of school psychology within the context of education, how school psychologists might approach these aspirations within their varied contexts, and how school psychologists can measure progress towards these aspirations.