After COVID-19, Schools Are Spending Big On Social And Emotional Learning. Is That A Problem? – Forbes

Social and emotional learning (SEL) looms large in schooling. Just last week, an analysis of how the nations 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 rights new CRT panic. Last spring, SEL played a major role in Floridas recent decision to reject dozens of textbooks, and its garnered lots of airtime in angry school board meetings.

If SEL means that teachers are making a concerted effort to promote tolerance, cultivate ... [+] relationship skills, and encourage better decision-making, then its a good and healthy thing.

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?

Lets 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 isnt. The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL), perhaps the nations 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. Thats one reason for some of the attendant conflict.

After all, theres much about SEL that appeals. Its stuff that good educators have always done, and its 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, its more of a variation on a historical themethat 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, Rousseaus Emile, and even Platos Republic. Given all this, SELs popularity is no great surpriseespecially 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. Its 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, its 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, theres 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. AEIs Max Eden has pointed out, for instance, that, over the past couple years, CASEL has redefined core concepts to match woke dogma. CASELs 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 its 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.

Full coverage and live updates on the Coronavirus

See the original post:

After COVID-19, Schools Are Spending Big On Social And Emotional Learning. Is That A Problem? - Forbes