Theory that informs practice. Research that advances institutional change

Making visible what institutions have yet to measure

The American K–12 Parasitic Syndrome (APS) framework began as dissertation research, but it was never intended to remain confined to the dissertation. APS is a lens for identifying institutional extraction: the subtle, patterned ways systems draw labor, energy, care, and capacity from the very people they are designed to serve.

If you lead people, teach people, advocate for people, or build systems that people rely on, APS offers language for dynamics you may have already recognized but struggled to name. It helps make visible the patterns that are often normalized, individualized, or dismissed, and gives us a framework for analyzing what those systems are actually asking people to absorb.

Where APS Shows Up

Institutional extraction is not unique to K–12 education. The architecture may shift across industries, but the underlying pattern is often remarkably consistent. APS offers a way to examine how organizations and systems extract labor, time, emotional capacity, expertise, care, and well-being from the people they depend on, often while treating those demands as normal, necessary, or simply part of the job.

Across sectors, those patterns can look different:

Education: overwork, surveillance, emotional labor, staffing shortages, and the normalization of burnout
Healthcare: chronic understaffing, productivity pressure, emotional exhaustion, and care work stretched beyond sustainable limits
Higher Education: invisible labor, contingent work, service burdens, publishing pressure, and underrecognized contributions
Corporate Workplaces: constant availability, performance pressure, restructuring, surveillance, and productivity expectations that exceed human capacity
Nonprofits and Advocacy: mission-driven overextension, emotional labor, limited resources, and the expectation that commitment should compensate for inadequate support
Government and Public Service: bureaucratic strain, staffing gaps, public-facing emotional labor, policy constraints, and responsibility without sufficient institutional resources
Creative Industries: unstable labor, uncompensated visibility work, blurred personal and professional boundaries, and pressure to continuously produce
Entrepreneurship: hyper-productivity, financial precarity, self-extraction, and the erosion of boundaries between work and rest

APS is designed to help people identify these patterns, name what is being extracted, and analyze the systems making that extraction possible.