Education Week

Excessive squirming and fidgeting. Difficulty paying attention. A tendency to act impulsively and make careless mistakes. Trouble acting cooperatively. These hallmark symptoms of childhood ADHD run counter to behavior that teachers welcome in their classrooms. It’s perhaps unsurprising, then, that the estimated 11% of the nation’s children who have the common developmental disorder tend to get punished far more than their classmates. High school students with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder are twice as likely to get suspended, and five times as likely to be expelled from school, compared to their classmates without ADHD, according to a study of students from nine high schools. Younger students with ADHD feel the effects of school discipline disproportionately, too. One national survey of parents whose children had ADHD, conducted in 2014, found that nearly 6% of boys and 1.5% of girls with the disorder were expelled from preschool. A lack of training for teachers on the best practices for classroom management for students with ADHD is partly to blame, say experts.