How traumatized children perform in educational settings and why

Trauma and learning in school do not mix well together. This is not to say that trauma does not result in significant learning for the child. The child learns not to trust, learns to be anxious around adults, and learns to be vigilant of the motivations of others. What a child learns from trauma negatively impacts learning in an academic setting. If the goal is for a child to come into an academic setting ready to learn, ready to emotionally experience the enjoyment and excitement of discovery, then the effects of traumatic experience will hinder learning in a variety of ways.
Many traumatized children fail in school, and failure can take many forms. Children can externalize their difficulties in emotions/behaviors and find themselves in constant trouble and the subject of behavioral restrictions. Extreme examples of this are children who attempt to get expelled from school thus eliminating the problem of having to face the many challenges of going to school. Some children sit quietly and can dissociate (day dream) in the classroom and not learn. An extreme example of the internalizing child is the one who pretends to be ill, doesn’t come to school, or when they are old enough drops out of school altogether. There are many impacts of trauma that often block a child’s ability to learn in the classroom.
Trauma produces hypervigilence in children. This is a survival skill to the child in a setting where basic needs are not provided, but it is not a functional skill in school. Hypervigilence is often viewed as distractibility. In part this is due to the child focusing on aspects of the environment that are not part of the learning plan. The child in science class who is watching the non-verbal messages of a larger boy, wondering about safety during the coming recess break, is not hearing the science lesson.
Trauma produces serious self-regulation deficiencies. Often viewed as the most pervasive result of trauma, the lack of self-regulation causes these children not to have the inner understanding, inner strength, or desire to monitor emotional and behavior reactivity to events around them. This is often observed as intense emotional expression due to challenges in the classroom.

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