New Report Touts Social-Emotional Learning to Boost School Safety. But School Climate Surveys Tell a Very Different Story

Two weeks ago, the Aspen Institute’s National Commission on Social, Emotional, and Academic Development published its long-awaited and much-vaunted, albeit slightly syntactically challenged, report: From a Nation at Risk to a Nation at Hope.

The commissioners declare, “After two decades of education debates that produced deep passions and deeper divisions, we have a chance for a fresh start” — social and emotional learning.

So far as educational fads go, SEL has distinct virtues.

Like some of its predecessors, SEL sounds like the kind of thing no respectable person could oppose. After all, how could someone be against social and emotional learning?

But unlike many of its predecessors, SEL is basically unfalsifiable. Reforms intended to improve reading and math achievement face an annual reality check from standardized tests; that’s how we know that reforms like the Common Core and test-based teacher evaluation did not work. But SEL outcomes are rarely measured and made public.

So parents ought feel a touch of trepidation at the report’s call for “systemic change … it’s not a matter of tinkering around the edges. It requires fundamentally changing how we teach children.” And policymakers ought to look very closely at the particular policies being pushed under the umbrella of the report’s substantively ambiguous but rhetorically unambiguously virtuous recommendations.

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Max Eden is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Follow him on Twitter here

This piece originally appeared in The 74