This development has produced urgent calls for compilations and registries of evidence-based, proven interventions that can impact the mental health and social behavioral problems of today s student population. It is of critical importance that we identify intervention approaches, specific programs, and supports that will help these students acquire the skills necessary to cope with their lives and to experience school success. These authors have reviewed the broad landscape of available programs, numbering in the thousands, that purport to address the mental health problems of today s students. It is instructive that they found a total of only 34 that met reasonable standards of efficacy and can also make a difference in the lives of participating students, teachers, parents, and schools. There is a real difference between program interventions that merely address mental health problems and those that actually impact them in a positive way.
Educators are notorious for embracing programs that look good but do no actual good.
In their defense, the school personnel who are gatekeepers of school-based interventions are typically overwhelmed with claims of effectiveness for them by program developers and their advocates. As a result, educators have a very difficult time separating effective, proven interventions from those that are weak, have no impact, or produce deleterious effects. In that regard, the compilation report of Greenberg et al. Greenberg et al. Although I do not see the report as having any substantive weaknesses, there are some areas of concern that it did not address, which, in my view, can impact the delivery and achieved outcomes of even the most effective, proven interventions.