Trauma by Numbers: Warnings Against the Use of ACE Scores in Trauma-Informed Schools

Over the last ten years, the original Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) study (Felitti et al., 1998) has informed education policy and has influenced and justified the need for “trauma-informed” (TI) frameworks in schools across the nation. The ACE study and related research on “toxic stress” from the Harvard Center on the Developing Child (Shonkoff & Garner, 2012) has justified and underpinned the demand for trauma- informed professional education and frameworks and has enabled new ways for school professionals to conceptualize students’ lives and behaviors. Over the decade or more since TI schools were first advocated for and developed (Oehlberg, 2008; Ko et al., 2008), they have frequently been described as a “paradigm shift” in school approaches and cultures.

ACE and TI frameworks often seem to validate the struggles that many teachers witness in the lives of their students. There are elements that can hardly be argued with: TI frameworks recognize that students face significant hardships during childhood. They institutionally validate kindness, compassion, and flexible responses to student behaviors. They also establish a unifying message of hope and offer strategies to building student “resilience.” These elements appear positive and aligned with social justice goals and ideologies, but there are also elements of TI frameworks that warrant critical consideration. There are, for instance, ethical concerns relating to requests for ACE disclosures from students, developing school ACE screening practices, or attaching individual ACE scores that have been reported to schools from an outside agency or clinic.