Selling SEL (Social Emotional Learning)

By the late 1960s, James Comer had begun to implement public school interventions in New Haven, CT that focused on the social and emotional needs of children living in poverty.  This was the beginning of the modern social-emotional learning movement. 

Principals, parents, teachers, and social services professionals worked together to evaluate and alter school programs that these stakeholders deemed to be exacerbating behavioral problems among poor children in New Haven.  To the surprise of no one, student attendance and achievement improved as a result, as did overall school climate and relationships among students and between students and staff:

In the late 1960s, during his early days at Yale School of Medicine's Child Study Center, James Comer began piloting a program called the Comer School Development Program. It was, as he wrote later in a 1988 Scientific American article, centered on his speculation that "the contrast between a child's experiences at home and those in school deeply affects the child's psychosocial development and that this in turn shapes academic achievement."

The School Development Program focused on two poor, low-achieving, predominately African American elementary schools in New Haven, Connecticut, that had the worst attendance and the lowest academic achievement in the city. With help from the program, the schools established a collaborative-management team composed of teachers, parents, the principal, and a mental health worker. The team made decisions on issues ranging from the schools' academic and social programs to how to change school procedures that seemed to be engendering behavior problems.

By the early 1980s, academic performance at the two schools exceeded the national average, and truancy and behavior problems had declined, adding momentum to the nascent SEL movement.

Then with the birth of the "no excuses" movement and zero tolerance policies in schools during the 1990s, the focus of social-emotional learning shifted away from attempts to alter school environments to take into account the effects of poverty on children.  Instead, the new social-emotional learning began to shift toward altering children so that become immune to the effects of poverty, thus capable of high test scores without the need for expensive social interventions or time-consuming community input. 

Soon thereafter there began the incessant glorification by the media of high test scores from the KIPP Model charter schools, which served to accelerate the effort to alter children's behaviors to fit the segregated authoritarian corporate model of schooling.  This turning of social-emotional learning on its head set us on a track that continues to gain political traction today, even as skepticism and resistance grow among child advocacy groups, civil rights organizations, and education rights activists. 

What began with Comer as a humanitarian impulse to better fit schools to the needs of impoverished children has become a kind of behavior sterilization craze for poor children that we have not seen since the physical and mental alteration programs of the eugenics movement a hundred years ago.  What was once a collaborative process among parents, health care personnel, principals, and teachers to develop humane education programs to fit the needs of children has become a small menu of canned indoctrination programs aimed to fit children to the needs of corporate reform schools.

As a result of increased awareness of the oppressive and abusive conditions of KIPP Model charters, the callow positivity wrapped in civil rights rhetoric by privileged TFA recruits in the charter chain gangs grows more stale by the day, and the brash, insensitive preaching by Barack Obama on the virtues of "no excuses" ideology sounds more and more hollow. 

Even the NAACP has started to awaken to the educational genocide taking place in the corporate hell schools that are offered poor parents as choice schools.

With the coming of the new federal ESSA, we see that a new generation of neoliberal policymakers are now incentivizing states to come up their own measures of non-cognitive skills for social-emotional learning.

Maurice Elias, a psychology professor at Rutgers University and director of the university's Social-Emotional Learning Lab, describes SEL as the process through which we learn to recognize and manage emotions, care about others, make good decisions, behave ethically and responsibly, develop positive relationships, and avoid negative behaviors.

Rather than modifying school environments or programs to address the needs of children living in poverty, the onus now is on changing the students, themselves, to fit corporate needs of Common Core testing factories.  And, of course, making these children and their teachers "accountable."

What about that tricky issue of measuring social-emotional learning? The controversial approach has been heavily discussed lately because the Every Student Succeeds Act, or ESSA, requires states to add an "additional indicator" to their school accountability systems in addition to traditional factors, like student test scores. While the law lists examples like school climate and student engagement, some have suggested that including social-emotional learning in accountability might be an effective way of spreading it to more schools. A group of California districts, known as the CORE districts, have already experimented with the concept.

At present, eight states have signed up to work with the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) to develop SEL standards. Eleven states are standing by to use those standards, once developed. 

Will we end up with a Common Core of behavioral and character standards that all children will be subjected to?  If NEA, AFT, NPE, Lamar Alexander's team, and the Clintonians have their way, that is where we are headed.