Social and emotional learning (SEL) looms large in schooling. Just last week, an analysis of how the nation’s largest 100 school systems are spending their federal COVID-19 relief dollars showed that 88 percent are spending funds on “social-emotional support”, making it the second most popular option after facilities upgrades.
At the same time, SEL continues to be hugely controversial. Earlier this week, a National Public Radio story focused on the heated ideological debates that have suffused SEL. Earlier this year, the Washington Post proclaimed SEL a “new target” on the right and Salon deemed it “the right’s new CRT panic.” Last spring, SEL played a major role in Florida’s recent decision to reject dozens of textbooks, and it’s garnered lots of airtime in angry school board meetings.
If SEL means that teachers are making a concerted effort to promote tolerance, cultivate ... [+]
What should parents and educators make of all this? Should schools be spending heavily in SEL? Are there valid concerns, or is this all just politics?
Let’s try to sort some of this out. And a good place to start is by getting a little clearer on just what SEL actually is or isn’t. The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL), perhaps the nation’s go-to authority on SEL, says that SEL is about mastering “the knowledge, skills, and attitudes to develop healthy identities, manage emotions and achieve personal and collective goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain supportive relationships, and make responsible and caring decisions.” In short, SEL covers a lot of ground. That’s one reason for some of the attendant conflict.
After all, there’s much about SEL that appeals. It’s stuff that good educators have always done, and it’s been a healthy course correction for schools that got test-obsessed in recent decades while giving short shrift to character development and civic formation. As CASEL board chair Tim Shriver and I noted a few years ago, “Since the dawn of the republic, teachers and schools have been tasked with teaching content and modeling character.” SEL can help with all of that.
In fact, while SEL can seem like a new idea, it’s more of a variation on a historical theme—that educators cannot focus only on academic mastery but must also develop the “whole child.” This is an impulse that can be traced way back, to John Dewey, Rousseau’s Emile, and even Plato’s Republic. Given all this, SEL’s popularity is no great surprise—especially after the dislocations of the pandemic.
But as with so many well-meaning education reforms, SEL has a Jekyll-and-Hyde aspect. SEL can be reasonably described both as a sensible, innocuous attempt to tackle a real challenge and, too often, an excuse for a bubbled industry of education funders, advocates, professors, and trainers to promote faddish nonsense and ideological agendas. This is why SEL serves as a commonsensical encouragement to make kids feel safe and to promote good habits, and also as a justification for doing away with traditional grading, eliminating advanced math, subjecting students and staff to “privilege walks,” or teaching first-graders about gender identity.
School safety illustrates the fine line that SEL seeks to walk. It’s a truism that kids who are relaxed, comfortable in their own skin, and able to get along with peers are less likely to disrupt classrooms or bully other kids. So, it’s easy to argue that promoting SEL can make schools safer. However, SEL proponents also tend to favor “restorative justice” as the preferred approach to accomplishing that goal. The problem is that the evidence for “restorative justice” is unconvincing, at best. Rather than suspending or expelling dangerous students, schools sit them down to share their feelings. While this may sometimes be life-affirming in the right hands, there’s good reason to believe this stuff makes schools less safe when done rashly or clumsily (as is too often the case).
This kind of tension crops in plenty of places besides school safety. AEI’s Max Eden has pointed out, for instance, that, over the past couple years, CASEL has redefined core concepts to match woke dogma. CASEL’s notion of “self-management” now incorporates “resistance” and “transformative/justice-oriented” citizenship. In its “Roadmap to ReOpening,” CASEL stipulates that “self-awareness” now entails challenging “implicit biases” and “self-management” requires “practicing anti-racism.” As Eden notes, none of this is “morally or politically neutral.” And, when SEL is interpreted in accord with such doctrines, it should surprise no one that parents and conservative activists would push back.
Look, if SEL means that teachers are making a concerted effort to promote tolerance, cultivate relationship skills, and encourage better decision-making, then it’s a good and healthy thing. But if SEL winds up enabling ideologues to promote their agendas, emphasize microaggressions at the expense of math, and excuse student misbehavior, concerns are justified.
In the end, as with so many school reforms, a sensible intuition risks being undermined by hubris and agenda-driven advocates. Educators and communities are right to make use of SEL, so long as they do so with eyes wide open.
