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"Social and Emotional Learning During COVID-19 and Beyond", Rosanbalm (2021)

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"Social and Emotional Learning During COVID-19 and Beyond", Rosanbalm (2021)

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"Universal SEL instruction has proven overwhelmingly beneficial in normal times—it is now an urgent need".

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Addressing Criticisms of Social-Emotional Learning in the Classroom (Opinion)

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Addressing Criticisms of Social-Emotional Learning in the Classroom (Opinion)

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"Some do not think that schools should spend time on social-emotional learning. We understand the concerns and offer the following in response to some of the common criticisms about SEL in the classroom".

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Today's guest blog is written by Nancy Frey, Douglas Fisher, and Dominique Smith.

As teachers, we recognize the value of attending to students' social and emotional learning. In fact, we believe that every lesson sends intended as well as unintended messages to children and youths about their social and emotional lives, what is acceptable and not, and how they should behave and interact with others. But some do not think that schools should spend time on social-emotional learning. We understand the concerns and offer the following in response to some of the common criticisms about SEL in the classroom.

1. There isn't time, and teachers should focus on the content standards.
We agree that it is critical to ensure that students learn the content. Yet we recognize that learning involves emotional processes and social interactions. Like many teachers, we cannot see a way to separate academic learning from social and emotional learning. Our interactions with students send powerful messages about who and what is valued. And our text selections convey our ideals, principles, and beliefs.

When we name emotions in books, for example, students learn to recognize their own emotions and note the ways that characters deal with those emotions. Consider the choice to share the book When Sophie Gets Angry-Really, Really Angry (Bang, 1999, Scholastic). This book allows students to name the emotion of anger and learn how Sophie manages her emotions. They are also still learning to read. Or for older readers, imagine the teacher selecting short stories from the book Dear Bully: Seventy Authors Tell Their Stories (Hall, Hall, & Jones, 2011, HarperCollins). Students get to see the impact of bullying and how bullies are stopped.

Our point is that SEL does not have to take away from the academic learning that students need to do but rather that it is part of the learning, and teachers can make choices to integrate opportunities for students to develop their SEL skills. We think that there are five social-emotional-learning areas that educators can integrate into academic learning:

Identity and Agency. Children and adolescents' sense of identity is shaped by a myriad of factors, including experiences in and out of school. Likewise, their agency, which is their belief in their own ability to influence the world around them, is materially governed by their identity. Over time, students develop a mindset that they are learners who strive and persevere through challenge.

Emotional Regulation. Young people need to understand that emotions happen, and some of those emotions negatively affect the individual and those around him. Emotion self-regulation requires the habits of self-checking and moderating responses. Students learn how to manage their behavior by accurately identifying their emotions, engaging in impulse control, and developing coping skills.

Cognitive Regulation. Successful students need to develop the habits and dispositions to regulate their own learning. Students learn to think about their thinking (metacognition), focus their attention, set and monitor goals, recognize and resolve problems, make decisions, and develop their organizational skills.

Social Skills and Relationships. Children and adolescents engage in relationship building and learn what it means to be a friend and a classmate. To do so requires developing empathy, as well as pro-social skills such as sharing and teamwork, which allow productive collaboration to occur. And it requires that students learn to repair the harm they cause to others.

Public Spirit. This is the basis for a democracy, as we create communities in which people are valued and treated fairly. Public spirit involves the development of students' character, their respect for others, ethical responsibilities, a sense of justice, perseverance in the face of injustice, and leadership.

But there are other concerns to address.

2. Parents should be the ones teaching social and emotional skills.
We agree, and yet children are in the company of adults in schools for six to 10 (or more) hours per day. The interactions they have with these adults will impact their social-emotional development. We have a choice here. We can leave this development to chance and hope for the best. Or we can help teachers and other school staff members recognize that their interactions and choices are part of the hidden curriculum of school and that they need to attend to the messages that they send. We are reminded of the book The Children's Story ... But Not Just For Children by James Clavell (1963, Dell Publishing).

Clavell is the author of Shogun, among other titles, but he wrote The Children's Story after his daughter returned home from her kindergarten class asking for money as reward for having memorized the Pledge of Allegiance. However, the girl had no idea what the words meant-she did it out of obedience and nothing more. As Clavell writes in his notes at the end of the book, "It was then that I realized how completely vulnerable my child's mind was-any mind for that matter-under controlled circumstances" (n.p.). Rather than allow social-emotional learning to remain hidden and rarely discussed, we believe that it should be part of the formal curriculum and thus open for public debate and review.

3. SEL will cause groupthink and anti-democratic thinking.
Given that social-emotional learning has always been part of the classroom, hidden or not, it's hard to understand why it would suddenly cause groupthink when these types of lessons have resulted in the country we enjoy today. Imagine the number of innovators, inventors, and creative spirits who have been nurtured by lessons that allow them to see differences as sources of pride and the full range of human experience celebrated.

Nancy's mother was a teacher for nearly 30 years. She retired more than 20 years ago but still tells the story about a young man in her classroom who struggled academically and was being teased by his peers. Nancy's mom selected the book Leo the Late Bloomer (Kraus, 1971, HarperCollins) as a read-aloud. This young man asked to borrow the book after the read-aloud and sat at his desk studying every page. He asked if he could take the book home to show his parents.

The boy's mother came to school the next day with tears in her eyes saying, "My little Ben thinks he's just like Leo. He finally has a role model and he read that book over and over. It's the first one he's ever wanted to read." This child's attitude toward school changed almost immediately and by 4th grade was doing quite well. Nancy's mom kept in touch with the family for many years and knows that Ben is now a successful businessman with a family of his own. He just needed a bit of validation and support, which started when Nancy's mom made a book selection with the intended purpose of addressing the social and emotional needs of the students in her class.

In sum, social-emotional learning is part of the fabric of schooling. But it's been swept under the rug and has become part of the hidden curriculum. It's past time to formalize the types of social and emotional skills our society wants students to learn and to engage in public discussions about this curriculum, like we do English, history, science, mathematics, and the arts.
Doug Fisher and Nancy Frey are both professors of educational leadership at San Diego State University and the authors of several books, including All Learning is Social and Emotional: Helping Students Develop Essential Skills for the Classroom and Beyond (ASCD, 2019). Co-author Dominique Smith is the director of student services at Health Sciences High & Middle College. Frey, Fisher, and Smith are also the authors of Building Equity: Policies and Practices to Empower All Learners (ASCD, 2017) and Better than Carrots or Sticks: Restorative Practices for Positive Classroom Management (ASCD, 2015).
Photo courtesy of Shutterstock.

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Addressing Criticisms of Social-Emotional Learning in the Classroom (Opinion)

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There is a lot of pushback from critics when teachers and leaders try to address the social-emotional-learning needs of students. The reality is that social-emotional learning is not only easy to address, it's important to do so, and this post explains why.

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Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning (CASEL) Program Guide

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Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning (CASEL) Program Guide

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The CASEL Program Guide is designed to help educators and school administrators select an evidence-based SEL program that best meets the needs of their community.

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Help your team choose a high-quality SEL program to meet your community's needs.

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Social-Emotional Learning Should Be Priority During COVID-19 Crisis | NEA (2020)

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Social-Emotional Learning Should Be Priority During COVID-19 Crisis | NEA (2020)

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"We have to take into consideration the fact that so many of our students are experiencing trauma at this moment. If we neglect to include SEL as a significant part of the conversations that we are currently having, we will not be equipped to meet the nuanced needs of all of our students in the future."

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"We have to take into consideration the fact that so many of our students are experiencing trauma at this moment," she says. "If we neglect to include SEL as a significant part of the conversations that we are currently having, we will not be equipped to meet the nuanced needs of all of our students in the future."

The foundation of Jensen's classroom are relationships, a commitment that doesn't deprioritize content expertise, methodology, and pedagogy, and classroom management. She just believes that supporting her students emotionally is integral to teaching and learning.

"This doesn't change as a result of COVID-19," Jensen adds. "My role and my responsibility as an educator is the same. I want to create a safe space for students to talk through their fears and apprehensions. We just happen to be doing so virtually."

Since the transition to online learning, Jensen uses virtual spaces to check-in with all of her seniors. Every Friday at noon, they ask each other open-ended questions about their well-being to ensure that everyone is coping (one ground rule: no talking about academics). Many are struggling, Jensen says, and need this time to work through the anxiety and loss they are experiencing.

"What currently keeps me up at night is the thought that too many students are living in abuse and neglect. What keeps me up at night is the thought of our LGBTQ+ students who are living in homes where they aren't accepted for who they are. What keeps me up at night are our students who don't have access to basic needs, such as food." - Lindsey Jensen, teacher

Prior to her school closing, Wendy Turner would start each class with her students with morning meetings and community circles. In an online environment, she uses discussion board to pose daily questions to her second-graders. How are you feeling today? What emotions are you experiencing right now? What can you do to make the day better?

"The focus, as always, is connection, community, and relationships. After, you can move over to the math assignment," she says. This week, Turner and her team used poetry writing activities to help the students share their fears and anxieties over the coronavirus.

"Lets not ignore what is happening around us. We shouldn't pretend it's not here. It's important to normalize emotions, and give students creative ways to have an outlet, as well as stay connected," Turner explains.

Carrying familiar routines over to an online environment, adds Cipriano, will be comforting to students,

"Practices such as check-ins, circles, greetings, and sharings, will help to create a sense of security and routine for your students in a space that may feel new and scary."

Facing the Ups and Downs

Social and emotional support doesn't - and shouldn't - stop with students.

"We miss our students beyond measure," Jensen says. "This undoubtedly takes a toll on our emotional and mental health. I don't know that I've ever felt more helpless than I do in this moment."

School buildings can be stressful places, but they are also places where educators have built strong relationships. Being in school each day can be a big comfort, and educators don't have that right now, says Turner.

"Staff connection, empathy, and support is just as important as what we need to do for our students in this crisis," she says.

As the coronavirus closed schools throughout March, Cipriano and her colleagues at YCEI and CASEL launched a survey via a webinar to take the pulse of educators' emotional health.

In just over three days, more than 5,000 educators responded, reporting being anxious, fearful, worried, overwhelmed, and sad.

"Educators are pulled in a tremendous amount of directions. They're expected to provide this top-level educational experience with varying levels of support with different levels of experience," Cipriano says. "Add to this the outrageous stress about what is going on in the world right now."

One educator who filled out the survey commented: "There is this huge dissonance right now between the messages such as 'be well' and 'take care of yourself' at the end of emails, and 'in this time of uncertainty.' Yet we have to partake in multiple seminars, read links related to online instruction, legal requirements in special ed, due process, timelines, etc. Everyone needs to be reminded again about how the brain works."

YCEI will be conducting more formal data collections as it designs additional SEL supports for educators during the COVID-19 crisis.

Fortunately, the importance of educator self-care has gained more traction over the past few years. More resources and tools - largely unavailable when Wendy Turner started her teaching career 10 years ago - have become available to help educators address their own anxiety and trauma.

"We're finally hearing from school leaders that this is something we must do - we have to take care of ourselves," Turner says.

"As educators, we're facing days with a lot of ups and downs. So stay connected whatever way works for you. Don't be afraid to ask questions and find peer groups. If you're struggling pause, breathe, rest, and maybe try the next day. We're all in the same situation."

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Social-Emotional Learning Should Be Priority During COVID-19 Crisis | NEA

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Experts say teaching and learning during closures is unrealistic if SEL for students and educators is left out of the conversation.

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There's Pushback to Social-Emotional Learning. Here's What Happened in One State (Edweek, 2020)

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There's Pushback to Social-Emotional Learning. Here's What Happened in One State (Edweek, 2020)

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Blad (2020) reports that some of Idaho’s lawmakers in the House Education Committee have expressed concerns that schools are overstepping their role, and that it is the exclusive responsibility of parents to help children develop self-control and relationship skills. Some lawmakers are skeptical about Social Emotional Learning programs in schools, seeing SEL as part of a problematic “national movement”.

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When Idaho state education leaders pitched a social-emotional learning proposal to lawmakers this week, one member of the state's House Education Committee compared the plan to the dystopian behavior control in the futuristic novel Brave New World.

Idaho Superintendent of Public Instruction Sherri Ybarra told Education Week Thursday that she was puzzled by the response, especially since the budget presentation focused largely on helping teachers work with students who've been exposed to trauma.

"We want to make sure we are connecting parents and students and teachers with the right tools and the right resources to get them the help that they need," Ybarra said. "I don't think there is any other way to talk about this. It is not a blue issue. It is not a red issue."

The reception Idaho leaders faced is a slice of pushback that occasionally bubbles up around the country as interest grows in social-emotional learning efforts.

Ybarra, an elected Republican, said she's learned since the meeting that some lawmakers had circulated materials from the Massachusetts-based Pioneer Institute, which is known for its opposition to the Common Core State Standards. That organization refers to SEL as a "new-age nanny state."

At the hearing Tuesday, Idaho Rep. Tony Wisniewski, a Republican, asked his fellow committee members to remember their own childhood experiences.

"Think about the school environment that we had," Wisniewski, says in a recording of the hearing, "and the respect that we had for teachers and other students. And the discipline that was enforced not only by the teachers but by our parents, who, if they found out we were misbehaving in school, would undoubtedly support the teachers and take us to the woodshed if necessary. ... Now we jump forward to the 2020s. To me ... it appears we are trying to get the collective behavioral approach that was depicted in Brave New World."

SEL is an education approach that emphasizes direct instruction of skills like how to resolve conflicts and understand differing points of view, changing school policies to be more developmentally sensitive, and working with family and community partners to meet students' non-academic needs.

As schools become more interested in nurturing children's social and emotional skills and creating better learning environments, states have also gotten on board. They've helped vet social-emotional learning programs programs, they've charted out developmentally sensitive benchmarks that show what qualities like social awareness look like at different grade levels, and they've offered teacher professional development in "whole child" approaches to education.

Those efforts are often well-received in many areas. But they've also faced resistence reminiscent of some other contentious education policy debates over issues like state standards (one Idaho lawmaker even raised the common core in this week's discussion of SEL).

At the heart of the arguments over SEL are common questions: What is the role of education? How should schools define success? What does good character look like? Who should be allowed to define it? Those questions are often intensified by skepticism of national education movements.

Idaho's Social-Emotional Learning Plan

Ybarra and Eric Studebaker, director of student engagement and safety coordination at the Idaho education department, had pitched a budget request to the House education committee Tuesday: $1 million in new funding to help develop and deliver statewide professional development for educators and administrators in social-emotional learning. The training would start with a cohort of districts and charter schools that would be selected after a voluntary application process.

Among the things the training would address: How to identify evidence-based SEL programs, how to assess a school or district's readiness to implement those programs, and how to help teachers recognize students' emotional struggles and address misbehavior.

"This is really all about creating the best conditions in a learning environment to support students so they can be successful," Ybarra told lawmakers Tuesday. "It's a conversation that's at the forefront across the nation. And there's growing recognition that we need to make sure that students develop the self awareness, problem-solving skills, and impulse control needed to overcome the challenges so that they can thrive."

Rather than imposing a uniform training on schools, state leaders want to allow them to voluntarily select their own approaches, giving them the training necessary to select and implement programs effectively, Studebaker said.

"The environment for kids is changing," he said. "Our classrooms nationwide are seeing common behavioral issues. But how this funding request seeks to address this problem will be uniquely Idaho."

"How much time are we actually talking about [for SEL] as opposed to time for what we think education really should be? You know: reading, writing, arithmetic," Rep. Barbara Ehardt, a Republican, asked. "When we're talking social emotional, we're talking about more time spent in an area ... that really is a role that should be dealt with in the home."

But others, including committee Chairman Rep. Lance Clow, a Republican, and Rep. Steve Berch, a Democrat, defended the proposal.

"I am not interested in building a bridge to the mythical 1950s where every parent was Ward and June Cleaver," Berch said. "The experience that we on the committee had as students is not the reality in today's classroom."

He listed trends like growing rates of teen suicide and depression, concerns about the effects of social media, and other stressors.

"We're talking about disruptive behaviors that are not expellable and affect everyone else in the classroom," Berch said. "And simply wishing that some parents raise their children better is not a solution."

In a Wednesday meeting, Clow said that it would be wrong to conclude that all of the committee members who walked out of the hearing did so out of protest. Some just had other hearings and issues to attend to, he said.

Common Pushback to State Social-Emotional Learning Plans

"Some states have encountered pockets of political resistance to having schools involved in SEL at all," CASEL reports. "Opponents of SEL often say it is the primary responsibility of families. These communication challenges can be successfully weathered. Critical to success is deep listening to understand concerns of the community, as well as a clear plan for communicating with and engaging stakeholders. The plan should identify key goals and audiences, clarify key messages, and prioritize key strategies for sharing those messages."

A few common concerns:

The CASEL report also acknowledges confusing language around SEL, which is referred to by a range of names, including character education, soft skills, 21st century skills, and grit. Programs may vary significantly in focus and scope, and different educators discuss SEL differently, sometimes depending on the school context. It's sometimes billed as an intervention that reduces misbehavior, which may give the perception that it is for a small pool of students. At other times, it's billed as a way to prepare all students for jobs in a changing economy.

Some conservative critics of SEL say an emphasis on tolerance may threaten to counter messages students receive at home about issues like gender, which may be grounded in their families' religious beliefs. And some have raised questions about assessing and tracking students' SEL competancies, which not all schools do. Can such qualities be reliably measured? Will children be treated differently because of the results? Will the data affect their "permanent record" ?

While some SEL critics reject the notion that it has some sort of devious undercurrent, they question whether the programs are really effective and whether schools have the capacity to properly put SEL strategies into place. (More on that debate here.)

There are also some interesting tensions in the debates. Some lawmakers reject SEL in favor of "developing character," but some in the education field say those two concepts are often very similar in practice. The confusing language and diffuse media environment may lead some lawmakers to talk past each other in these debates.

Policymakers across the political spectrum have responded to school safety debates after shootings in places like Parkland, Fla., by calling for efforts to address isolated students, to identify potentially threatening behavior, and to respond to students' mental health needs. Proponents of SEL say their strategies can help meet those mandates, but they still face resistance, sometimes from the same lawmakers who called for that approach to safety.

As social-emotional learning efforts continue to grow and evolve, it will be interesting to see how leaders and educators take on the challenge of addressing concerns and misconceptions about the work.

Ybarra's request for SEL funding is still on the table. It will be considered by a joint appropriations committee in the coming weeks.
Photo: Getty Follow us on Twitter @PoliticsK12. And follow the Politics K-12 reporters @EvieBlad @Daarel and @AndrewUjifusa.

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There's Pushback to Social-Emotional Learning. Here's What Happened in One State

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When Idaho state education leaders pitched a social-emotional learning proposal to lawmakers this week, one member of the state's House Education Committee compared the plan to the dystopian behavior control in the futuristic novel Brave New World.

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Explore SEL, Taxonomy Project, Harvard School of Education (2022)

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Explore SEL, Taxonomy Project, Harvard School of Education (2022)

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Navigate the complex field of social and emotional learning. Learn more about widely-used frameworks, and compare skills and features across them.

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Researchers, educators, employers, and parents agree that social and emotional learning (SEL) and non-academic skills matter for success in school and life, but it can be difficult to decide which skills to focus on - let alone how best to promote and measure them. Learn More.

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Navigate the complex field of social and emotional learning.

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How Should Social Emotional Learning Change Post-Pandemic?

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How Should Social Emotional Learning Change Post-Pandemic?

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As a college professor of educators who are entering the profession (pre-service teachers) and teachers returning to earn their master's degrees and advanced endorsements (in-service teachers), I am always involved in conversations about P-12 social emotional learning (SEL).

What is Social Emotional Learning?

The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) defines SEL as "the process through which all young people and adults acquire and apply 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."

SEL has been "talked about" for decades, while "walking the talk" has been more challenging. There are entire websites dedicated to SEL, such as the one at CASEL and Harvard University's EASLE Lab (see resources). With pandemic learning interruptions over the past year, educators have a prime opportunity to move social emotional learning alongside physical safety as priority No. 1.

Why Prioritize SEL?

Academic goals cannot be fully achieved without social emotional knowledge and skills.

Students, even those who were in physical classrooms for the past year, have not experienced optimal learning environments for developing SEL.

Given the very different academic and social emotional learning opportunities during the pandemic, returning to face-to-face learning will require more support for social emotional knowledge and skills.

What Might SEL Look Like in the Future?

Let's apply the CASEL Framework for SEL because it is research-based, well-known, and the foundation for the Illinois SEL Goals, which I focus on in my work with pre-service and in-service teachers. For more on the CASEL framework, click here: https://casel.org/fundamentals-of-sel/what-is-the-casel-framework/

I think about the CASEL Framework as three interconnected areas:

Regulating Self

Interacting with Others

Decision Making

From preschool through high school, students continue to develop in these three areas. During the COVID-19 pandemic, many hybrid and remote learning difficulties have stemmed from students (as well as families and teachers) not having developed the social emotional skills to adapt to learning in new contexts.

Returning to the brick and mortar classroom will be yet another challenging transition that will encompass next school year and beyond.

Regulating: Self-Awareness and Regulation Skills

All students need to develop self-awareness of what pandemic events and changes in their lives have meant for them. What emotions are they experiencing and what are the most effective ways for them to use these emotions in their learning and interactions with others?

In this way, SEL will need to go beyond the basics and extend to helping students process their return to in-person school, especially as social distancing guidelines change and masks may no longer be needed. A focus in this area suggests a change in the content of learning self-awareness and regulation skills, whether it is through morning messages and circle time for young children or narrative writing and group discussion for older students.

Language arts, health education, and fine arts will be essential in these explorations of: Who am I? Why do I feel this way? How can my emotions help me learn? How can I be happy?
Exploring a sense of self and identity is critical to SEL development, and students need this exploration as their lives move beyond the pandemic.

Interaction: Social Interaction Skills

Alongside personal social emotional awareness, students will need to develop their social skills with others. A year of social distancing, social cancellations, and masking has been critical for public health policy, but most students have not had typical interactions over the last year.

The new school year needs to be approached with much more social interaction that is positive, equitable, and carefully planned and monitored.

Teaching social skills should be a part of every lesson, and teachers must be careful not to return to the status quo.

All student groupings should be carefully planned and supported to promote respectful and productive interactions (e.g., classroom, playground, hallways, cafeteria, and after-school events). When left to their choices, students do not always benefit from partner or group work because they do not know how to interact effectively. An important lesson from the pandemic was that students who were victims of bullying found relief in the social distancing of classrooms or in remote learning. (Click here to read Brittany Wong's article about remote learning has changed bullying in schools: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/bullying-problem-remote-learning_l_5f61214fc5b68d1b09c8dc16

Social skills must be taught and regularly practiced. Classrooms are unique situations and students will need to adjust to these dynamic environments. Teachers will need to plan a coherent SEL curriculum across the academic year to sequence SEL lessons. For example:

September: Learning everyone's name and using it in classroom talk.

October: Demonstrating listening by rephrasing, using hand signals to agree or disagree, and using talk stems (Click here to learn more about talk stems: https://www.edutopia.org/article/what-productive-talk-looks-elementary-grades)

November: Taking turns in small groups and participating in equitable ways (not over-talking or under-contributing; learning how to invite others to the conversation and connect contributions).

Hopefully, you can see the possibilities in planning a progression throughout the entire academic year. If you don't think it is necessary to teach social skills and practice them, just reflect on how well students successfully participated during remote and hybrid learning.

Have fun together. Students (and teachers) need to experience more joy in the classroom.

Teachers of all ages should be thinking of ways to add fun into their planning, whether it's through non-competitive games, visuals, stories, stress-reduction activities or some other means.

Returning to school is going to socially awkward and challenging. Learning will be frustrating at times. Having fun in the classroom with a variety of peers will be critical to students' social emotional learning.

Decision-Making Skills

Making responsible decisions is the third area of CASEL's SEL Framework that pulls social emotional learning together. This competency area reflects the ability to make ethically and socially responsible decisions.

The pandemic has shined a spotlight on the need for more developed and responsible decision-making-a need that continuously shows up in our classrooms and everyday lives.

As more and more students return to be face-to-face in the classroom, while some remain in remote and hybrid learning environments, teachers need to support students in being able to:

Think about how our actions might impact others.

Respond effectively when there are unintended consequences of our actions.

Be curious and initiate new experiences.

Make decisions based on data and facts.

Just as teachers need a plan for helping students gain personal and social emotional awareness skills (Regulating and Relating), we will need to have critical conversations and design lessons around responsible decision-making.

These lessons can be designed for all ages and approach essential questions like: Why do people wear masks? What are some ways to have fun and socially distance? How do we know which pieces of information about COVID to trust?

Three Places to Begin

1. CASEL has already provided a downloadable roadmap for returning to school with SEL in mind for Spring 2021. Go to: https://casel.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/RefocusOnSELRoadmapCASEL1.pdf

2. PBS/WTTW has an excellent series of short videos and resources. Start with the one on responsible decision-making. Go to: https://whyy.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/responsible-decision-making-social-emotional/social-emotional-learning-video/

3. Planbook writes about how to reestablish SEL in returning students. Go to: https://blog.planbook.com/returning-students/

Reprinted with permission. Meyer, D. K. (2021, April 27). How should social-emotional learning change post-pandemic? Chalking the Line.

SEL Resources

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How Should Social Emotional Learning Change Post-Pandemic?

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By Debra K. Meyer, PhD, Professor of Education, Elmhurst University As a college professor of educators who are entering the profession (pre-service teachers) and teachers returning to earn their master's degrees and advanced endorsements (in-service teachers), I am always involved in conversations about P-12 social emotional learning (SEL).

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How ‘Socio-Emotional Learning’ Became Another Vehicle For Anti-White Racism In Schools (The Federalist, 2021).

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How ‘Socio-Emotional Learning’ Became Another Vehicle For Anti-White Racism In Schools (The Federalist, 2021).

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Writers of opinion-editorials in several conservative publications, such as this one by Robbins (2021), believe that Social Emotional Learning, along with Critical Race Theory and other “leftist dogma” are being taught in schools to influence children’s political beliefs.

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From The Federalist Read More
A learning focus popular in public schools has been converted into a vehicle for teaching critical race theory to elevate favored students based primarily on race.

Continue Reading

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How ‘Socio-Emotional Learning’ Became Another Vehicle For Anti-White Racism In Schools (from The Federalist)

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From The Federalist Read More
A learning focus popular in public schools has been converted into a vehicle for teaching critical race theory to elevate favored students based primarily on race.

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Social-Emotional Learning | PBS LearningMedia

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Social-Emotional Learning | PBS LearningMedia

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"The following videos provide an introduction to the core competencies of SEL as well as indicators of high-quality SEL achieved through a school-wide approach". Produced by ThinkTV in partnership with CASEL, the Montgomery County Education Service Center, and the Ohio Department of Education.

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Social-Emotional Learning | PBS LearningMedia

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Social and emotional learning (SEL) is key to advancing equity and excellence in education. It can help students experience greater agency and well-being; achieve academic, career and lifelong successes; and implement collaborative solutions that lead to a just, thriving society.
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Project supports social-emotional learning for students of color | Penn State University

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Project supports social-emotional learning for students of color | Penn State University

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"In an increasingly racially and ethnically diverse school population, a one-size-fits-all approach may not be effective in environments where students of color are impacted by circumstances that do not support a traditional SEL framework".

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Elementary students in the McKeesport Area School District are participating in a social-emotional learning program designed by Aaron Campbell. Credit: Photo provided. All Rights Reserved.

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) has been widely accepted by educators and researchers as a methodology that helps students of all ages to better comprehend their emotions, to feel those emotions fully and demonstrate empathy for others. However, in an increasingly racially and ethnically diverse school population, a one-size-fits-all approach may not be effective in environments where students of color are impacted by circumstances that do not support a traditional SEL framework.

Aaron Campbell, assistant professor of education (special education) in the Penn State College of Education, has established a partnership with two institutions in which she is evaluating the efficacy of an intervention program she designed to address the needs of African American students at risk of emotional and behavioral disorders.

“I would like to see African American students, especially males, have a more positive outlook when it comes to education,” said Campbell. “If we can teach them how to regulate emotions in elementary school, as they matriculate into middle and high school, they’ll have fewer instances where they’re being written up, fewer negative interactions with administrators, fewer interactions with school resource officers.”

Assisted by Meghan Allen, a second-year doctoral candidate in special education, Campbell has established partnerships with two participating research sites: an urban primary school in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, and a rural Head Start program in northwestern Pennsylvania. She and Allen are working with the McKeesport elementary school, in which 89% of the students are African American and many are struggling with behavioral difficulties. In the fall, Campbell will start a project at Head Start working with younger children of color.

Campbell and Allen are implementing a package of two interventions that normally work independent of each other — the Strong Start SEL curriculum, a program designed for promoting social and emotional learning of young children; and Check-In/Check-Out (CICO), a behavioral intervention in which a student and a mentor work together to improve behavior. Campbell said recent research shows that SEL curricula alone are not sufficient for students of color in urban schools. “They need extra constraints when it comes to building relationships with authority figures,” she said.

By pairing with Strong Start, Campbell said, the CICO program has been altered to align with SEL competencies; traditionally, the “teacher would just ask the student a bunch of questions about daily goals." In Campbell’s SEL-centered CICO, the teacher will consider the larger context of the student’s situation. For instance, when asking a student about what they did the previous night, they might learn that the student didn’t have dinner, or slept in a car. Accessing that kind of information, Campbell said, can enable the teacher to address the issue so that the students are on the same footing as their classmates.

In addition to revising the CICO program, Campbell’s project involves tweaking the Strong Start curriculum so it is more culturally responsive to African American students. Campbell said she has selected read-aloud books, based on the students’ grade level, that contain characters that “look like the students they are catering to” while other books have animal characters. The stories touch on culturally relevant issues such as how style choices impact public perceptions, and lessons on self-esteem and self-love for young Black girls.

Allen, a second-year doctoral student, said she is interested in the effect of SEL curricula on students that are disproportionately represented in special education. “I don’t think any of the students are operating from a malicious point of view,” said Allen. “Knowing they have teachers that want to work with Dr. Campbell and provide that support in the classroom is really encouraging and hopefully that’s a pattern we can see spread across districts as we move forward.”

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Project supports social-emotional learning for students of color | Penn State University

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A College of Education faculty member has established a partnership with two institutions in which she is evaluating the efficacy of an intervention program she designed to address the needs of African American students at risk of emotional and behavioral disorders.

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Test Score Patterns Across Three COVID-19-impacted School Years, Kuhfeld et al. (2022)

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Test Score Patterns Across Three COVID-19-impacted School Years, Kuhfeld et al. (2022)

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"The COVID-19 pandemic has been a seismic and on-going disruption to K-12 schooling".

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2. Test Score Patterns Across Three COVID-19-impacted School Years

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01/2022

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a seismic and on-going disruption to K-12 schooling. Using test scores from 5.4 million U.S. students in grades 3-8, we tracked changes in math and reading achievement across the first two years of the pandemic. Average fall 2021 math test scores in grades 3-8 were .20-27 standard deviations (SDs) lower relative to same-grade peers in fall 2019, while reading test scores decreased by .09-.18 SDs. Achievement gaps between students in low-poverty and high-poverty elementary schools grew by .10-.20 SDs, primarily during the 2020-21 school year. Observed declines are more substantial than during other recent school disruptions, such as those due to natural disasters.

Keywords

COVID-19; learning loss; achievement gaps

Document Object Identifier (DOI)

10.26300/ga82-6v47

EdWorkingPaper suggested citation:

Kuhfeld, Megan, James Soland, and Karyn Lewis. (2022). Test Score Patterns Across Three COVID-19-impacted School Years. (EdWorkingPaper: 22-521). Retrieved from Annenberg Institute at Brown University: https://doi.org/10.26300/ga82-6v47

Machine-readable bibliographic record: RIS, BibTeX

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covid-19; learning loss; achievement gaps

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Test Score Patterns Across Three COVID-19-impacted School Years

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The COVID-19 pandemic has been a seismic and on-going disruption to K-12 schooling. Using test scores from 5.4 million U.S. students in grades 3-8, we tracked changes in math and reading achievement across the first two years of the pandemic.

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How 'Social and Emotional Learning' Became the Newest Battleground in the Classroom Wars (Time, 2022)

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How 'Social and Emotional Learning' Became the Newest Battleground in the Classroom Wars (Time, 2022)

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"Now, SEL seems to be joining CRT, becoming a hot-button phrase that summons ideas of so-called “woke” pedagogical methods".

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How 'Social and Emotional Learning' Became the Newest Battleground in the Classroom Wars

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The longstanding educational concept has recently drawn backlash. Here's what 'social and emotional learning' really means

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How social-emotional learning became a target for Ron DeSantis and conservatives (NPR, 2022)

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How social-emotional learning became a target for Ron DeSantis and conservatives (NPR, 2022)

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The goal of social-emotional learning is to provide kids with a set of skills that they can draw on when they face challenges later in life, Goldstein explains. But, she notes, some conservatives see it as something that opens the door to larger discussions about race, gender and sexuality."

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Between fights over mask mandates and new legislation dictating how history should be taught, schools have become a battleground for America's culture wars. Recently,the Florida Department of Education announced that it was rejecting dozens of math textbooks because they incorporated "prohibited topics" or "unsolicited strategies," such as critical race theory.

New York Times national correspondent Dana Goldstein says Florida officials have given little evidence to back up these claims. Goldstein and her colleague Stephanie Saul reviewed 21 of the rejected math textbooks and found very little mention of race. Instead, Goldstein theorizes the objections related to the inclusion of topics concerning social-emotional learning.

Goldstein says the rejected textbooks addressed social-emotional learning in a variety of ways. "Some of them were quite awkward," she says. "There was one fifth grade math textbook from McGraw-Hill that had sort of a simple fractions question, and then right underneath it said, 'How do you understand your feelings?'"

Other social-emotional lessons were more seamlessly integrated. One high school textbook asked students to rate from 1 t0 4 how much they struggled with a concept. Another included cartoon figures encouraging students to ask a friend how they solved a problem.

"And then there were lots of references to this idea of grit, this idea of perseverance, and reminders to children that math is hard and they should keep going to find the answer," Goldstein says.

The goal of social-emotional learning is to provide kids with a set of skills that they can draw on when they face challenges later in life, Goldstein explains. But, she notes, some conservatives see it as something that opens the door to larger discussions about race, gender and sexuality.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis recently signed what critics have dubbed a "Don't Say Gay" bill, which prohibits school personnel from discussing sexual orientation or gender identity in kindergarten through third grade. He also signed the so-called " Stop W.O.K.E. Act," which proponents say wasdesigned to prevent both students and employees of private companies from feeling discomfort or personal guilt because of historical wrongs that have to do with race, gender or national origin.

Ultimately, Goldsteinsays, the convergence of politics and education is nothing new: "I'm the author of a history book about fights and debates about education since the 19th century till today, and one of the themes I draw out in my book is that there are always these moral panics over what goes on in schools, and we are definitely in a moment like that right now."

But, she adds, our current battles over education are coming at a particularly critical time, when many kids have lost a year and a half of in-person schooling due to the pandemic.

"Instead of coming back with a huge focus on getting kids up to par emotionally [and] academically, and bringing parents in as a support for kids who have lived through a lot the past two years, instead, we're seeing this huge focus in many communities on these culture war issues," she says. "It does call into question, for me, whether the classroom is just another front in this deeply divided and partisan political reality that we're all living through."

Interview highlights
On how right-wing activist Chris Rufo has made social-emotional learning a flashpoint for conservatives
Rufo ... has been instrumental in sort of putting out the idea that any discussion of racial inequity is, in fact, "critical race theory." Sort of introducing that terminology to conservative media and then, you know, pushing these laws that a third of states have passed, limiting how race, gender and sexuality are taught. ... From the critical race theory conversation, he then moved on to [a] LGBTQ set of issues and creating a real movement there to limit how those are talked about. ...

Mr. Rufo stated to me that while social-emotional learning "sounds positive and uncontroversial in theory, in practice, SEL serves as a delivery mechanism for radical pedagogy, such as critical race theory and gender deconstructionism." He continued to say that the intention of SEL is to "soften children at an emotional level, reinterpret their normative behavior as an expression of repression, whiteness or internalized racism, and then rewire their behavior according to the dictates of left-wing ideology."

I think one thing that really jumped out at me here was his notion that it would "soften children" to, you know, talk about their feelings and to encounter this social emotional learning content at school. A few people responded to my reporting on this saying like, this sounds really misogynist. Like it's almost it's too touchy-feely or too feminine for kids to talk about their feelings. But there's also an even more nefarious reading of this, you know, this idea of progressives or teachers as "groomers," which is circulating very widely in right-wing social media right now. The idea that somehow by talking about these different subjects and school teachers are sort of actively almost converting kids to gayness or to transgenderism.
On how many states in the U.S. choose their own textbooks
It's fewer than half that, at the state level, reject or accept textbooks for use. But Florida is one of the three big states that does do a process like this of accepting or rejecting textbooks at the state level. The other two are California and Texas. These three states really have a huge influence on what kids will see in textbooks, because the big publishers ... really want these states to approve their books so that they get out to more kids and more districts buy the books.
On how one rejected Florida math textbook addressed racial inequity
There's a lot of research showing that math anxiety is very real and that girls and kids of color feel it more than white males do. And another way that this is addressed was one of the few places where we did see race in the books. One high school math textbook had these mini biographies of mathematicians and all but one of them were of mathematicians through history who were women or nonwhite. Obviously, probably the majority of mathematicians through history were white men, so that was clearly a very purposeful decision, I think, to show kids that might have more anxiety about math, that, hey, this could be a career for you. Although that is in no sense critical race theory, as theorists would understand the term, I have seen throughout the country that any time that sort of white male achievement is underplayed in the curriculum, it can become a target of this movement.
On comparing a textbook used in California to an edition used in Texas
Just to talk about LGBTQ issues for a moment, the Texas textbooks do reference them in a few places, mostly in regard to contemporary debates over something like marriage equality. That is totally different than what you will see in California, which passed a law in 2011 that actually required schools to teach the contributions of LGBTQ Americans throughout history. In response to that 2011 law, the big publishing companies created thousands of words of new historical material on LGBTQ issues all throughout American history. So if you pick up a California book, you will learn about non-binary gender identities among Native American tribes in the 19th century. You will learn about same-sex families living as enslaved people. None of this would be covered in a Texas textbook. Perhaps most controversially, in California, you will learn about early gender reassignment surgeries in the 1950s. It's simply inconceivable that the state of Texas would ask publishers to include something like that in books. ...

The book looks the same, the cover's the same, the title's the same, the author is the same, but you turn the pages and you find these small differences, a paragraph here or there, but they can really give a really different view.
On Florida's Parental Rights in Education Law (which critics call a "Don't Say Gay" law), requiring parents to be notified if students go to mental or physical health services
Quite a lot of it is an attack on counseling services or social-emotional services that may be provided by schools. It requires schools to do this new bureaucratic thing, which is to create a list of all of the mental health or physical health services that are available on campus and provide that to parents and let them opt out of any element of it. And it also requires schools to immediately notify parents if students come to them for mental or physical health services. Again, it's very broadly and vaguely written. ...

The intention of those that wrote the bill would be to allow parents to object to schools affirming children's gender identity. So, for example, if a child who is assigned female at birth goes to a counselor and says, "I'm not sure I want to use she/her pronouns anymore. I want to maybe dress a little bit differently," the national standards of the counseling profession in the United States is to affirm that these are normal questions to have for that child. And if the child would prefer different pronouns, to use different pronouns, and to explore having the child dress in a way that feels right to that child.

Now, what those that wrote this bill would like to see happen is that immediately upon a kid raising any issue like this, parents would be immediately brought into the discussion, and it would be parents who would be allowed to drive what the response would be. So if mom or dad feel that, no, the message here is you're a girl, you're born a girl, you will always be a girl, and we are not affirming this questioning for you, that would be what the counselor would do and what the school would do. That is the intention here. But there is nothing in the bill limiting this parental control over counseling to gender issues. And I think that's really important to point out.

On the "Stop W.O.K.E. Act," (Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees) which Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis just signed into law
On how the "Stop W.O.K.E. Act" makes it difficult to connect history to current events
This is an act that's supposed to prevent both students and employees of private companies from feeling discomfort or personal guilt because of historical wrongs that have to do with race, gender or national origin. And what it says is that that type of instruction or diversity training in workplaces cannot occur. ...

So discussions of white privilege, the idea that all white people, even those that may suffer from other forms of discrimination in their own lives, carry some privilege due to their skin color. That would certainly seem to be off limits by the way this bill has been written. Diversity trainings, which are popular in corporate workplaces and also popular at many schools, would not be allowed here.

Learning history can be very difficult, very emotional, and can bring up very hard discussions and personal feelings. And so it seems very difficult for a teacher to broach some of these topics in their classroom while guaranteeing that students would not feel those feelings.
On how educators are responding to the debate over what they can teach
I will say that the bill does include language guaranteeing the right to bring up those subjects that you just mentioned, such as slavery or segregation or discrimination against women throughout history. But I think what it really is taking a target on is tying those historical topics to the present day, and specifically the framework that we are still living with the historical impacts of those discriminations, and we can still see that discrimination around us in various ways. That's the through line that is really targeted here.

Take the issue of segregation, for example. You'd have to be blind in America of 2022 to think that school segregation is over, or housing segregation, in which we have neighborhoods that are predominantly Black or predominantly white or predominantly Latino, is not here. Obviously, we are still living with the results of our history. And so it does seem to be that the purpose here is to not talk about that, to pull a shroud over the fact that history is not just in the past, but something that we live with today.

In some of the more conservative communities, where these fights have been really heated over the past year or so,teachers are really scared to speak out. It's not uncommon for me to come across a teacher who is commenting anonymously on some of these controversies, but who hesitates to speak out with their name attached. But you do see teachers who are brave, who go to the microphone at board meetings and who do speak to the press about why they disagree with these attempts to control what they do in the classroom.

I think there's no doubt that it's a scary time to broach subjects from American history, subjects from contemporary American life, or that are in the news in the classroom. I very often talk to teachers who hesitate to talk with their students about something like the Jan. 6 insurrection in the halls of Congress or talk about who won the 2020 presidential election because they know that it's just a super-charged issue in their communities.

Amy Salit and Thea Chaloner produced and edited the audio of this interview. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Nicole Cohen adapted it for the web.

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How social-emotional learning became a target for Ron DeSantis and conservatives

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Between fights over mask mandates and new legislation dictating how history should be taught, schools have become a battleground for America's culture wars. Recently,the Florida Department of Education announced that it was rejecting dozens of math textbooks because they incorporated "prohibited topics" or "unsolicited strategies," such as critical race theory.

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Leading with data: Using an impact-driven research consortium model for the advancement of social emotional learning in schools. - PsycNET (2020)

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Leading with data: Using an impact-driven research consortium model for the advancement of social emotional learning in schools. - PsycNET (2020)

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"SEL supports the development of skills in emotion regulation, social awareness, conflict resolution, and responsible decision making, all of which are essential to students’ success within and outside the classroom. These so called noncognitive skills are associated not only with proximal gains in students’ academic performance and reductions in conduct problems but also with their later choices related to education and employment".

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Leading with data: Using an impact-driven research consortium model for the advancement of social emotional learning in schools. - PsycNET

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How Has the Pandemic Affected Students’ Social-Emotional Well-Being? A Review of the Evidence to Date – Center on Reinventing Public Education

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How Has the Pandemic Affected Students’ Social-Emotional Well-Being? A Review of the Evidence to Date – Center on Reinventing Public Education

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"This report is part of a series that aims to provide a definitive account of the best available evidence on how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected America’s students".

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How Has the Pandemic Affected Students’ Social-Emotional Well-Being? A Review of the Evidence to Date

August 2021

This report is part of a series that aims to provide a definitive account of the best available evidence on how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected America’s students.

The Center on Reinventing Public Education compiled hundreds of studies and convened panels of experts to interpret what the data show. Three initial reports assess what we know to date about the pandemic’s effects on students’ academic progress, its effects on their mental health and social-emotional well-being, and its impact on students with disabilities. We will update these assessments and add more topics over the coming year as new data become available.

We aim to present a coherent baseline of what we know, don’t know, and need to know at this stage of the pandemic. These reports are designed to help system leaders, community leaders, policymakers, researchers, philanthropies, the media, and others to define ambitious goals and clear metrics that ensure our education system meets every student’s needs over the coming years.

The series of papers will culminate in the release of CRPE’s first annual Profile of the American Student. The report will provide a rigorous and nuanced assessment of 1) how extensive student needs and inequities are across a variety of dimensions, 2) how student needs vary across different dimensions and what that implies for policy and practice, and 3) what promising solutions and innovations are emerging to meet students’ needs.

In future years, these reports will track progress toward repaying every student the educational opportunities they are owed after this traumatic and disruptive period. Our goal is to provide an ongoing assessment of student needs and a look forward toward restitution and recovery.

Key Contributors

About this Series

About this Series

This report is part of a series that aims to provide a definitive account of the best available evidence on how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected America’s students. The series is part of a broader effort, the Evidence Project, which brings together researchers and policymakers to advance solutions-oriented analysis of the K–12 response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Center on Reinventing Public Education compiled hundreds of studies and convened panels of experts to interpret what the data show. Three initial reports assess what we know to date about the pandemic’s effects on students’ academic progress, its effects on their mental health and social-emotional well-being, and its impact on students with disabilities. We will update these assessments and add more topics over the coming year as new data become available.

We aim to present a coherent baseline of what we know, don’t know, and need to know at this stage of the pandemic. These reports are designed to help system leaders, community leaders, policymakers, researchers, philanthropies, the media, and others to define ambitious goals and clear metrics that ensure our education system meets every student’s needs over the coming years.

The series of papers will culminate in the release of CRPE’s first annual Profile of the American Student. The report will provide a rigorous and nuanced assessment of 1) how extensive student needs and inequities are across a variety of dimensions, 2) how student needs vary across different dimensions and what that implies for policy and practice, and 3) what promising solutions and innovations are emerging to meet students’ needs.

In future years, these reports will track progress toward repaying every student the educational opportunities they are owed after this traumatic and disruptive period. Our goal is to provide an ongoing assessment of student needs and a look forward toward restitution and recovery.

Overview

Overview

The COVID-19 pandemic upended daily life for every family and school across the United States. But its impacts were not universal. The inequities that cut across classrooms and communities have contributed to broad disparities in the losses, trauma, and isolation that many students and educators have endured. In addition, the converging social events of 2020–21, including protests for racial justice, a contentious presidential election, and a riot at the Capitol, have challenged young people to make sense of a turbulent era that few adults may yet fully understand.

In June of 2021, the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) gathered a panel of eight experts in child development, adolescent mental health, and social-emotional learning to assess and reflect on new research exploring the pandemic’s effects on student well-being, social emotional development, and ability to learn. In this paper, our panel situates these findings in context and offers an agenda for researchers and practitioners to work from in the years ahead.

Panel of Experts

Co-Chair Laura Hamilton, Associate Vice President for Research Centers, Educational Testing Service

Co-Chair Betheny Gross, Research Director, WGU Labs

David Adams, CEO, The Urban Assembly

Catherine Pilcher Bradshaw, Professor and Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Development, Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia

Pamela Cantor, Founder and Senior Science Advisor, Turnaround for Children

Robin Gurwitch, Professor, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Duke University

Robert Jagers, Vice President of Research, CASEL

Velma McBride Murry, Lois Audrey Betts Chair in Education and Human Development, University Professor of Human and Organizational Development, and University Professor of Health Policy, Vanderbilt University

Marleen Wong, David Lawrence Stein/Violet Goldberg Sachs Professor of Mental Health at University of Southern California

A Shock to Student Lives

The pandemic affected the lives and social-emotional experiences of every student to some extent. Along with the unprecedented closures of schools across the country in March 2020, virtually all social activities ceased. Students were cut off from their teachers, with uneven access to live instruction and hands-on, collaborative learning. There were few opportunities to see friends in person or engage in extracurricular activities. At the same time, many students also were contending with the pandemic’s frightening impacts on their family’s health and welfare, such as illness, the death of a relative or neighbor, and economic hardship. Some students also took on new responsibilities to care for younger siblings or contribute to family finances.

The human losses and financial tolls were more commonly experienced by Black, Hispanic/ Latinx, and indigenous students from lower-income communities. One survey found 41 percent of these young people reported providing care for someone else in their household and 62 percent reported being financially affected by the pandemic. These students also were more likely to be separated from in-person schooling for longer periods of time. In May 2021—some 14 months after the start of the pandemic—just 47 percent of high-minority school districts were operating fully in person compared to 61 percent of low-minority districts. In addition, chronic absenteeism is thought to have risen dramatically, especially among students of color, though attendance record-keeping was not consistent.

Not every student’s experience was wholly negative. Some families transitioned too remote learning and work with relative ease—enjoying more unscheduled time together and ever boosting their economic security during long months at home. Some students reported they preferred remote learning as a means to avoid social stresses or racial microaggressions they encountered at school. And some students undoubtedly developed resilience and thrived in ways that they would not have in the absence of the events of 2020 and 2021.

Fast-Moving Research in Tumultuous Times

Over the past year, researchers have worked faster than ever before to collect and analyze data on the experiences of young people. As a result, the field has a substantial account of the pandemic and its likely implications for youth. But students’ experiences were vastly different from one another during this time, based on their proximity to illness and loss, gender and race, age, and length of school closures, among other factors. One of the biggest areas of concern is the extent to which contextual variations between those experiences will affect individual development over the longer term.

This leads to a note on the scope of this report. While the factors contributing to students’ mental health and social-emotional development are expansive, our panel focused on the research exploring the effects of the pandemic and school closures on children and young people in grades K–12 in the U.S. We recognize that long-standing structural racism shaped the pandemic’s impact in meaningful ways, and that a nationwide reckoning over that reality has affected student well-being and development. This review does include research that considers racism’s effects in the context of the pandemic; however, far more can be examined and discussed than reflected here. We believe these issues should be considered in their full, complex, and essential breadth.

In addition, we acknowledge that the pandemic has taken a significant toll on adult caregivers and educators. Parents who may have been juggling their own fears of illness or economic hardship have had to step in as teachers to support young learners throughout the school day. Meanwhile, teachers were adapting instruction to fit often unfamiliar technological platforms while attempting to build and foster nurturing relationships with students they’d never met in person. A survey in late 2020 found that 78 percent of teachers reported frequent job-related stress and 27 percent said they were depressed, compared to average rates of 40 percent and 10 percent, respectively. While these adult issues are beyond the scope of this report, the well-being of families and educators should also be a significant area of focus as young people return to the classroom full-time.

What the Research Says So Far

Our main findings reveal widespread impacts on students’ mental health, while the effects of the pandemic on social-emotional development are less understood. More than anything, our panel felt that the pandemic revealed how inadequately we serve students’ mental health and social-emotional development in normal times.

The review also uncovered an urgent need for more effective social-emotional learning opportunities and innovative approaches to expand student supports. This calls for an integrated and responsive system of education and tailored supports, one that can flexibly meet each individual student’s highly variable needs on an immense, post-pandemic scale.

To inform this recovery work, our panel summarized the main research findings to date, explored what those findings tell us about student mental health and social-emotional learning, and identified the pressing questions still in need of answers. Looking ahead, researchers should focus on how schools and leaders can partner with community-based sources of support and stability, how race factors into students’ experiences and well-being, and how to more comprehensively define and measure school and student success.

Related Publications

How Has the Pandemic Affected Students’ Social-Emotional Well-Being? A Review of the Evidence to Date

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How Has the Pandemic Affected Students’ Social-Emotional Well-Being? A Review of the Evidence to Date – Center on Reinventing Public Education

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Leading Education Provider in Seattle, WA

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Education in a Pandemic: The Disparate Impacts of COVID-19 on America’s Students, Office for Civil Rights

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Education in a Pandemic: The Disparate Impacts of COVID-19 on America’s Students, Office for Civil Rights

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"This Report bears witness to the many ways that COVID-19, with all of its tragic impacts on individuals, families, and communities, appears to be deepening divides in educational opportunity across our nation’s classrooms and campuses"

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Schools, districts, states, and others can use CASEL’s Framework to:

Foster knowledge, skills, and attitudes across five areas of social and emotional competence;

Establish equitable learning environments and coordinate practices across four key settings that support students’ social, emotional, and academic development.

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Foster knowledge, skills, and attitudes across five areas of social and emotional competence;

Establish equitable learning environments and coordinate practices across four key settings that support students' social, emotional, and academic development.

Download more information on the framework (available in and Spanish).

Use our reflection protocol to facilitate a discussion on implementation efforts in your school, district, or other setting.

Read more about the 2020 update to our framework, which highlighted the potential of SEL in promoting educational equity and excellence.

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Communities

Communities. Community partners often provide safe and developmentally rich settings for learning and development, have deep understanding of community needs and assets, are seen as trusted partners by families and students, and have connections to additional supports and services that school and families need. Community programs also offer opportunities for young people to practice their social and emotional skills in settings that are both personally relevant and can open opportunities for their future. To integrate SEL efforts across the school day and out-of-school time, school staff and community partners should align on common language and coordinate strategies and communication around SEL-related efforts and initiatives.
Learn more: CASEL Guide to Schoolwide SEL - Community Partnerships

Families & Caregivers

Families & Caregivers. When schools and families form authentic partnerships, they can build strong connections that reinforce students' social and emotional development. Families and caregivers are children's first teachers, and bring deep expertise about their development, experiences, culture, and learning needs. These insights and perspectives are critical to informing, supporting, and sustaining SEL efforts. Research suggests that evidence-based SEL programs are more effective when they extend into the home, and families are far more likely to form partnerships with schools when their schools' norms, values, and cultural representations reflect their own experiences. Schools need inclusive decision-making processes that ensure that families-particularly those from historically marginalized groups-are part of planning, implementing, and continuously improving SEL.

Schools can also create other avenues for family partnership that may include creating ongoing two-way communication with families, helping caregivers understand child development, helping teachers understand family backgrounds and cultures, providing opportunities for families to volunteer in schools, extending learning activities and discussions into homes, and coordinating family services with community partners. These efforts should engage families in understanding, experiencing, informing, and supporting the social and emotional development of their students.
Learn more: CASEL Guide to Schoolwide SEL - Family Partnerships

Schools

Schools. Effectively integrating SEL schoolwide involves ongoing planning, implementation, evaluation, and continuous improvement by all members of the school community. SEL efforts both contribute to and depend upon a school climate where all students and adults feel respected, supported, and engaged.

Because the school setting includes many contexts-classrooms, hallways, cafeteria, playground, bus-fostering a healthy school climate and culture requires active engagement from all adults and students. A strong school culture is rooted in students' sense of belonging, with evidence that suggests that it plays a crucial role in students' engagement. SEL also offers an opportunity to enhance existing systems of student support by integrating SEL goals and practices with universal, targeted, and intensive academic and behavioral supports. By coordinating and building upon SEL practices and programs, schools can create an environment that infuses SEL into every part of students' educational experience and promotes positive social, emotional, and academic outcomes for all students.
Learn more: CASEL Guide to Schoolwide SEL

Classrooms

Classrooms. Research has shown that social and emotional competence can be enhanced using a variety of classroom-based approaches such as: (a) explicit instruction through which social and emotional skills and attitudes are taught and practiced in developmentally, contextually, and culturally responsive ways; (b) teaching practices such as cooperative learning and project-based learning; and (c) integration of SEL and academic curriculum such as language arts, math, science, social studies, health, and performing arts. High-quality SEL instruction has four elements represented by the acronym SAFE: Sequenced - following a coordinated set of training approaches to foster the development of competencies; Active - emphasizing active forms of learning to help students practice and master new skills; Focused - implementing curriculum that intentionally emphasizes the development of SEL competencies; and Explicit - defining and targeting specific skills, attitudes, and knowledge.

SEL instruction is carried out most effectively in nurturing, safe environments characterized by positive, caring relationships among students and teachers. To facilitate age-appropriate and culturally responsive instruction, adults must understand and appreciate the unique strengths and needs of each student and support students' identities. When adults incorporate students' personal experiences and cultural backgrounds and seek their input, they create an inclusive classroom environment where students are partners in the educational process, elevating their own agency. Strong relationships between adults and students can facilitate co-learning, foster student and adult growth, and generate collaborative solutions to shared concerns.
Learn more: CASEL Guide to Effective SEL Programs

Self-Awareness

Self-awareness: The abilities to understand one's own emotions, thoughts, and values and how they influence behavior across contexts. This includes capacities to recognize one's strengths and limitations with a well-grounded sense of confidence and purpose.

Such as:

Integrating personal and social identities

Identifying personal, cultural, and linguistic assets

Identifying one's emotions

Demonstrating honesty and integrity

Linking feelings, values, and thoughts

Examining prejudices and biases

Experiencing self-efficacy

Having a growth mindset

Developing interests and a sense of purpose

Check out this video from PBS Learning Media for more information.

Self-Management

Self-management: The abilities to manage one's emotions, thoughts, and behaviors effectively in different situations and to achieve goals and aspirations. This includes the capacities to delay gratification, manage stress, and feel motivation and agency to accomplish personal and collective goals.

Such as:

Managing one's emotions

Identifying and using stress management strategies

Exhibiting self-discipline and self-motivation

Setting personal and collective goals

Using planning and organizational skills

Showing the courage to take initiative

Demonstrating personal and collective agency

Check out this video from PBS Learning Media for more information.

Social Awareness

Social awareness: The abilities to understand the perspectives of and empathize with others, including those from diverse backgrounds, cultures, and contexts. This includes the capacities to feel compassion for others, understand broader historical and social norms for behavior in different settings, and recognize family, school, and community resources and supports.

Such as:

Taking others' perspectives

Recognizing strengths in others

Demonstrating empathy and compassion

Showing concern for the feelings of others

Understanding and expressing gratitude

Identifying diverse social norms, including unjust ones

Recognizing situational demands and opportunities

Understanding the influences of organizations and systems on behavior

Check out this video from PBS Learning Media for more information.

Responsible Decision-Making

Responsible decision-making: The abilities to make caring and constructive choices about personal behavior and social interactions across diverse situations. This includes the capacities to consider ethical standards and safety concerns, and to evaluate the benefits and consequences of various actions for personal, social, and collective well-being.

Such as:

Demonstrating curiosity and open-mindedness

Learning how to make a reasoned judgment after analyzing information, data, and facts

Identifying solutions for personal and social problems

Anticipating and evaluating the consequences of one's actions

Recognizing how critical thinking skills are useful both inside and outside of school

Reflecting on one's role to promote personal, family, and community well-being

Evaluating personal, interpersonal, community, and institutional impacts

Check out this video from PBS Learning Media for more information.

Relationship Skills

Relationship skills: The abilities to establish and maintain healthy and supportive relationships and to effectively navigate settings with diverse individuals and groups. This includes the capacities to communicate clearly, listen actively, cooperate, work collaboratively to problem solve and negotiate conflict constructively, navigate settings with differing social and cultural demands and opportunities, provide leadership, and seek or offer help when needed.

Such as:

Communicating effectively

Developing positive relationships

Demonstrating cultural competency

Practicing teamwork and collaborative problem-solving

Resolving conflicts constructively

Resisting negative social pressure

Showing leadership in groups

Seeking or offering support and help when needed

Standing up for the rights of others

Check out this video from PBS Learning Media for more information.

Social & Emotional Learning

Social and emotional learning (SEL) is an integral part of education and human development. SEL is the process through which all young people and adults acquire and apply 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.

SEL advances educational equity and excellence through authentic school-family-community partnerships to establish learning environments and experiences that feature trusting and collaborative relationships, rigorous and meaningful curriculum and instruction, and ongoing evaluation. SEL can help address various forms of inequity and empower young people and adults to co-create thriving schools and contribute to safe, healthy, and just communities.

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Our SEL framework, known to many as the "CASEL wheel," helps cultivate skills and environments that advance students' learning and development.

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Designing Family Engagement Strategies (Bergman, 2022)

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Designing Family Engagement Strategies (Bergman, 2022)

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In this report, we suggest three pillars of an effective strategy that brings together these essential conditions with insights from our 2021 annual surveys: 1. Place trust and teamwork at the center of the home-school relationship 2. Anchor family engagement strategies in student learning and well-being 3. Invest in building systems and structures that enable this work

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Challenges and Opportunities in the Applied Assessment of Student Social and Emotional Learning

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Challenges and Opportunities in the Applied Assessment of Student Social and Emotional Learning

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"Although SEL policies and programs designed to support the development of student competencies have advanced significantly, less work has been done to develop methods of assessing student social and emotional competence".

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Interest in school-based strategies to support student social and emotional learning (SEL) is strong. Although SEL policies and programs designed to support the development of student competencies have advanced significantly, less work has been done to develop methods of assessing student social and emotional competence. This article briefly reviews developments in the field of social and emotional competence assessment and examines challenges and opportunities in their applied use, including (a) balancing the priorities of assessment developers and educators; (b) ensuring that the inferences and decisions made from SEL assessment scores are supported by evidence of the assessment's psychometric merit; (c) establishing conditions for SEL assessment and data use that maximize benefit while mitigating risks; (d) coordinating standards, assessment, programs, and professional learning; and (e) balancing highly focused assessments that by design do not vary in content or format, and the varied cultural contexts in which they may be used.

Additional information

Funding

The research reported here was supported by Institute of Education Sciences through Grant R305A160053 to Rush University Medical Center. The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not represent views of the Institute or the U.S. Department of Education.

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Challenges and Opportunities in the Applied Assessment of Student Social and Emotional Learning

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Interest in school-based strategies to support student social and emotional learning (SEL) is strong. Although SEL policies and programs designed to support the development of student competencies have advanced significantly, less work has been done to develop methods of assessing student social and emotional competence.

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SEL Frameworks – Practical Challenges and Opportunities

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SEL Frameworks – Practical Challenges and Opportunities

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Recognizing the value and importance of frameworks in guiding social-emotional learning (SEL) efforts

and their measurement, a team of organizations convened a group of leaders, informally called the

Assessment Work Group (AWG), to create the

Establishing Practical Social-Emotional Competence

Assessments of Preschool to High School Students Project

. The project recognized the importance

of solid SEL frameworks to guide not only how you measure SEL but also how you think about it,

communicate it, and act upon it. The AWG’s series of framework briefs is designed to help practitioners

better understand and grapple with the challenges and opportunities multiple SEL frameworks can

present.

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The history of the social and emotional learning (SEL) movement is the story of a simple, but powerful idea: What if education fully supported the social, emotional, and academic development of all children?

From the seed of that idea, CASEL has been leading a growing movement to make SEL an integral part of education. Beginning in 1994, with a focus on collaboration, our nonprofit grew from a small conference in New Haven to partnerships across the country and an audience around the globe.

Since then, CASEL has served as a leader of the global movement and a trusted voice in the rapidly growing SEL field. Even as we reach more people than ever before, our work remains grounded in our history of working together to support the healthy development of all children.

We invite you to read about CASEL's history to learn where we come from and where we hope to go. Join us in our journey as we shape an education where all young people have the skills, environments, and relationships to thrive.

Our Founding Story
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The story of SEL is as old as the first relationships between teachers and students. The principles of SEL are present in every caring, collaborative relationship and live in the partnerships between students, schools, families, and communities throughout history. But the work of formalizing this field began more recently.

In 1968, Dr. James Comer and his colleagues at Yale University's Child Study Center began a program to put their ideas about supporting the "whole child" into practice at two schools in New Haven, Connecticut. By the early 1980s, the two schools saw a decline in behavior challenges and exceeded the national average in academic performance.

Building on that work, t he superintendent of New Haven Public Schools, John Dow, Jr., called for a districtwide focus on social development. From 1987-1992, a group of educators and researchers, led by Timothy Shriver and Dr. Roger P. Weissberg, began the New Haven Social Development program that pioneered SEL strategies across K-12 classrooms .

Around the same time, Dr. Weissberg, along with Dr. Maurice Elias, chaired the W.T. Grant Consortium on the School-Based Promotion of Social Competence, bringing together leading experts to create a framework for promoting social and emotional skills in schools.

In 1994, a passionate group of people came together to develop a field that would address the "missing piece" in education. The multidisciplinary collaboration included researchers, educators, practitioners, and child advocates who believed that schools must attend to all children's social and emotional needs. The group emerged from their meetings with a name and a mission: B oth CASEL and the term "social and emotional learning" were born.

CASEL's goal was, and still is, to establish high-quality, evidence-based SEL as an essential part of preschool through high school education. In 1997, nine CASEL collaborators co-authored Promoting Social and Emotional Learning: Guidelines for Educators, which formally defined the field of SEL. Over the following decades, a large body of research demonstrated the effectiveness of SEL for supporting students' academic and long-term success. Demand for SEL surged among teachers, school leaders, district administrators, policymakers, parents, employers, and students themselves. Increasingly, schools, districts, and states across the country are adopting and implementing evidence-based SEL strategies to support local priorities.

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CASEL Today
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Today there is unprecedented momentum for an education system that fully supports students' social, emotional, and academic learning. As the SEL movement continues to grow, the call for clear guidance, evidence-based practices, and continuous learning has never been greater.

The good news? CASEL and our collaborators are ready to meet this moment. Decades of evidence from research and on-the-ground implementation shows there is a clear path forward. Our collaborative brings together a wide range of expertise and experience to continue driving research, guiding implementation, informing policy, and convening networks to help make SEL a reality, everywhere.

CASEL is ready to build on our history, while staying true to our core principles. We invite you to join us on our mission to make SEL an essential part of every child's education. Together, we can create schools where all young people are connected, inspired, and ready to contribute to the world around them.

Learn more about our mission and work.

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The history of the social and emotional learning (SEL) movement is the story of a simple, but powerful idea: What if education fully supported the social, emotional, and academic development of all children? From the seed of that idea, CASEL has been leading a growing movement to make SEL an integral part of education.

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Identifying, Defining, and Measuring Social and Emotional Competencies (Berg, et al., 2017)

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Identifying, Defining, and Measuring Social and Emotional Competencies (Berg, et al., 2017)

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This report provides a database of the diverse frameworks and competencies identified in the scan, as well as related measures, which can serve as a guide for researchers and practitioners who are interested in identifying and making decisions about what social and emotional competency frameworks, competencies, and measures to use in their own work. Results from the study can also help the field develop better measures of social and emotional competencies for use in research and practice.

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Social Emotional Learning Debated at School Board Meetings

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Social Emotional Learning Debated at School Board Meetings

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Mandy Marger and her daughter Arliss, a rising freshman, both testified at Cherokee County school board meetings in support of social emotional learning. (Allexa Ceballos/Fresh Take Georgia)

A pushback on social and emotional learning in the schools is starting to surface as some parents believe this concept relates to tenets of the highly p oliticized critical race theo ry.

Parents at recent Cherokee County school board meetings have debated social and emotional learning, a process long used by educators trying to help students grow into productive adults.

It is defined by the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning as a framework “through which all young people and adults acquire and apply 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.”

Critical race theory is an academic framework developed by legal scholars in the 1970s and ‘80s that examines history through the lens of racism, and centers on the idea that racism is systemic in the nation’s institutions, which function to maintain white people’s dominance in society.

Concepts of social and emotional learning have been present in schools for much longer than critical race theory have also been discussed in school board meetings, but some parents believe that social and emotional learning is a gateway to discussions of critical race theory.

Two concepts conflated

Karen Hawley, an education professor at Reinhardt University as well as a former teacher and principal, told the Cherokee County school board that some parents have mistakenly conflated the concept of social and emotional learning with critical race theory.

While she understands their concerns about social and emotional learning, Hawley said children ultimately have to be prepared for the outside world, where these concepts are lived and experienced.

“The theory has been going on since the mid ‘90s, when we realized we have to do something to help kids to feel good about themselves to do well,” she said. “Because that’s what schools are all about; they should be all about helping that student become a successful, gainfully employed human being out in the world, and you’ve got to look at the whole child, and not just look at the academics.”

Some parents have stated that topics covered under social and emotional learning are inappropriate for children. In December 2020, the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning, also known as CASEL, updated its criteria to include evaluations based on “educational equity.”

According to CASEL’s December 2020 report, “issues of educational equity may pertain to a variety of student characteristics including race/ethnicity, culture, gender, sexual orientation, country of origin, socioeconomic status, health, and risk status.”

Equity has become another buzzword that certain parents associate with a liberal agenda. They also argue these student characteristics are inappropriate for teachers and students to discuss. At a June Cherokee County school board meeting, parent Shannon Wymer said she believes topics in the program intentionally place children in uncomfortable conversations that don’t belong in schools.

“They should have the freedom just like us all to learn, love and be educated without having to be asked questions that, to be honest, 30 years ago weren’t even allowed on our television, let alone in our schools,” she said.

Mandy Marger, another parent from Cherokee, argued at a May school board meeting against banning concepts that the public doesn’t fully understand.

Parents have different views

But what some parents see as political, others see as progress.

“No matter your family’s political background, we should have the same opportunities in education,” she said. “Progressive seems to be a bad word, but I mean, if you really break it down and become a student of history, you’ll see that we’re enjoying where we are right now because of progressive ideas, and really the idea of allowing kids to talk about feelings or concerns.”

Marger’s daughter and rising freshman, Arliss, spoke at the June meeting.

“People have suggested teachers stick to core subjects and not be allowed to stray from narrow topics, but I learn so much more in school than just the basics,” she said at the meeting. “I’m likely not going to be a scientist, mathematician, author or historian, but I am going to be a global citizen who is learning now in school how to relate to people, how to relate history to current events, and the idea of my future.”

Arliss was heckled by parents following her testimony. She said her classmates have used the internet to form opinions on these topics that differ from parents who speak for them. For Mandy Marger, this dynamic makes it hard to navigate relationships in her community.

“It’s difficult to separate kids from their parents,” she said. “Even the parents who were at those meetings and who were wearing what I regarded as kind of ugly t-shirts with mean sentiments on them, I know they’re not bad people, and I want my kids to be friends with their children. I want to be part of this community, but I want this community to have a heart.”

For more from Fresh Take Georgia and the latest updates, follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

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Social emotional learning debated at school board meetings

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Some parents are concerned about schools using social and emotional learning, which they have conflated with critical race theory.

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Ohio Adopts Controversial K-12 Social-Emotional Learning Standards (Heartland Institute, 2019)

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Ohio Adopts Controversial K-12 Social-Emotional Learning Standards (Heartland Institute, 2019)

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The board adopted the full K-12 SEL standards, which are to be included in “In Each Child, Our Future,” Ohio’s strategic plan for education.

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September 10, 2019

The board adopted the full K-12 SEL standards, which are to be included in “In Each Child, Our Future,” Ohio’s strategic plan for education.

The Ohio State Board of Education has adopted K-12 standards that put social-emotional learning (SEL) on par with math, English, and other academic subjects.

The goal of SEL is to develop the “whole child” by helping students build “self-awareness, social awareness, self-management, and relationship and responsible decision-making skills,” the Ohio Department of Education’s official description of the standards states.

In 2012, the state board adopted Early Learning and Development Standards for children from “birth” through “kindergarten entry” that included social and emotional development, the Education Department states. In 2015, those standards were extended through the third grade.

The board adopted the full K-12 SEL standards, which are to be included in “In Each Child, Our Future,” Ohio’s strategic plan for education, on June 11 of this year.

As more states rush to adopt SEL without any buy-in from parents or teachers, the curriculum is raising controversy. Skeptics express concern about what the state will measure, who will have access to the data, and the prospect of putting teachers in the role of psychological diagnosticians and therapists.

‘Voluntary’ Like Common Core

SEL is of questionable value and scientific validity, says Karen Effrem, a pediatrician and president of Education Liberty Watch.

“Evidence shows SEL’s definition, assessments, and research are all questionable, and experts admit there is no evidence of cost-effectiveness,” Effrem said. “Ohio therefore should not be spending its state’s share of what national proponent groups estimate is $30 billion on SEL in this time of tight education budgets, teacher shortages, infrastructure issues, etc.”

Use of the standards by local school districts is supposed to be voluntary, but national curriculum standards were also supposed to be optional, yet states were pushed into adopting them and local schools have had to comply, Effrem says.

“Most likely that means voluntary in the same way Common Core standards were for states and localities,” Effrem said.

‘Collaborative’ Approach?

The state school board claim that children will not be evaluated for their SEL competency is dubious, says Robert Holland, a senior fellow for education policy at The Heartland Institute, which publishes School Reform News.

“The value of the no-assessment pledge is suspect, given Cleveland’s partnership with the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL), the huge foundation which openly declares development of social-emotional testing mechanisms to be one of its highest priorities,” Holland said.

The Cleveland Metropolitan School District states it “established its SEL program, Humanware, in 2007.”

Potential ‘Collateral Damage’

SEL adds to the tasks of already overburdened teachers, says Jane Robbins, an attorney who has written on SEL.

“As if teachers didn’t have enough to do, now they’re supposed to take over the parents’ role in children’s social-emotional development,” Robbins said.

Districts that adopt SEL standards could stigmatize children, Robbins says.

“What happens when a mistaken evaluation turns up in the child’s long-term data dossier?” Robbins asked. “Guess we’ll have to see the collateral damage.”

Bonner R. Cohen, Ph.D. (bcohen@nationalcenter.org) is a senior fellow at the National Center for Public Policy Research.

Internet Info

“Ohio’s Kindergarten through Grade 12 Social and Emotional Learning Standards,” Ohio Department of Education, June 2019: https://www.heartland.org/publications-resources/publications/ohios-kindergarten-through-grade-12-social-and-emotional-learning-standards

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Ohio Adopts Controversial K-12 Social-Emotional Learning Standards

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The board adopted the full K-12 SEL standards, which are to be included in “In Each Child, Our Future,” Ohio’s strategic plan for education.

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Navigating SEL from the Inside Out (Harvard Education, Easel Labs, 2021)

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Navigating SEL from the Inside Out (Harvard Education, Easel Labs, 2021)

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This information can be used by schools, ECE providers, and OST organizations to: (1) select specific programs or strategies that best meet their individual needs; (2) guide planning and goal-setting conversations with school and district leaders, ECE administrators, OST partners, and other stakeholders; and/or (3) re-evaluate the fit and effectiveness of SEL programs and structures already in use.

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Social Emotional Learning in Elementary School: Preparation for Success (Dusenbury, et al., (2017)

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Social Emotional Learning in Elementary School: Preparation for Success (Dusenbury, et al., (2017)

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There is widespread evidence of successful, universal SEL programs and practices that can support social and emotional development in students during the elementary school years. Based on decades of research and evaluation in rigorous field trials, these approaches are now widely available to schools, along with teacher training and ongoing coaching to support high quality implementation.

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Conclusion
Schools should adopt effective SEL programs to ensure student success, and policymakers should create policies and guidelines that support SEL goals.
About The Pennsylvania State University
Founded in 1855, The Pennsylvania State University is a renowned public research university that educates students from around the world and collaborates with partners to share valuable knowledge that improves the health and well-being of individuals, families and communities. For more information, visit www.psu.edu. To learn more about the Edna Bennett Pierce Prevention Research Center, go to prevention.psu.edu.

preparing students for success

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Social Emotional Learning in Elementary School

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Conclusion Schools should adopt effective SEL programs to ensure student success, and policymakers should create policies and guidelines that support SEL goals. About The Pennsylvania State University Founded in 1855, The Pennsylvania State University is a renowned public research university that educates students from around the world and collaborates with partners to share valuable knowledge that improves the health and well-being of individuals, families and communities.

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New Study Finds Multiple Problems with Push for Social-Emotional Learning in K-12 Education (Pioneer Institute, 2019)

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New Study Finds Multiple Problems with Push for Social-Emotional Learning in K-12 Education (Pioneer Institute, 2019)

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Little research evidence for, or objective, reliable way to measure SEL’s efficacy; raises significant concerns about student health and privacy

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Little research evidence for, or objective, reliable way to measure SEL's efficacy; raises significant concerns about student health and privacy
BOSTON - Social-emotional learning (SEL) has been billed as a transformational tool that will propel students to greater academic achievement and personal fulfillment. Unfortunately, as a new Pioneer Institute study makes clear, the research evidence to back up these claims is thin and unpersuasive. Moreover, the risks SEL poses to student privacy and health are significant.

Proponents of SEL call for focusing less on academic content and knowledge in schools, and more on student attributes, mindsets, values, and behaviors. Not only are the goals of SEL ill-defined, but they also raise significant, unanswered questions about what attitudes should be promoted.

"It's one thing to direct your own moral, ethical, and emotional development or that of your children," said Jane Robbins, co-author of "Social-Emotional Learning: K-12 Education as New-Age Nanny State." "But having a government vendor or unqualified public school officials implement an SEL curriculum based on coffee-table psychology is quite another."
Video: Authors of New Pioneer Report Discuss Social-Emotional Learning
Educational software developers purport to have created products that can determine a number of sensitive personality traits through students' interaction with digital platforms. Much of this monitoring occurs without the consent of children or their parents. Some software - especially for video gaming - goes beyond assessing traits, and aims to encourage the production of students who are well suited for a workforce development-centered education.

"This technology, when coupled with SEL, will further spread the recent wave of amateur, unqualified psychoanalysis in schools," said Dr. Karen Effrem, M.D., who co-authored the study with Robbins. "Given the uncertainty around diagnosis and treatment of mental or emotional problems, even by highly trained physicians, the SEL movement runs the risk of further increasing the trend toward dangerous over-diagnosis and over-medication of American schoolchildren."

Social-emotional learning is being interwoven into the Common Core State Standards and school efforts to implement competency-based education (CBE). CBE digitally documents the attainment of various skills with the goal of demonstrating that a student is ready to move on in his or her "personalized learning path." SEL and CBE are heavily weighted toward a conception of education as focused on workforce development rather than preparing active, informed citizens.

Nationally, in 2018, federal, state, and local governments invested more than $30 billion annually to implement SEL in K-12 public schools. The level of expenditure is surprising considering tight public school budgets and the lack of any reliable, objective, researched-based method to measure or assess a student's personality, values, and mindsets as SEL proponents admit.

Researcher and standards analyst Robbins and Dr. Effrem, a pediatric medical doctor, call for ending taxpayer-funded implementation and expansion of SEL assessments, standards, and other programs in public schools.

The paper also features a foreword by Dr. Kevin Ryan, founder and director emeritus of the Center for Character and Social Responsibility, formerly known as the Center for Advancement of Ethics and Character, at the Boston University School of Education.
About the Authors
In place of SEL, the co-authors urge educators to refocus on a key lever that led to Massachusetts' rise to the highest-performing K-12 state in the nation - genuine academic achievement through state and locally developed standards, assessments, and curricula - rather than classroom content of dubious academic value based on pop psychology.

Karen Effrem, M.D. is president of Education Liberty Watch and executive director of the Florida Stop Common Core Coalition. She also serves as national education issues chairman for Eagle Forum and on the board of the Alliance for Human Research Protection. Dr. Effrem's undergraduate degree is in pharmacy from Purdue University, her medical degree is from Johns Hopkins University, and her pediatric training is from the University of Minnesota. She has provided testimony and analysis on children's education and health issues for Congress, numerous state legislatures, and for a federal lawsuit regarding unconsented mental screening. She has been interviewed by many local and national media outlets. Her writing on these topics has appeared in The Federalist, Townhall.com, The American Spectator, and Truth in American Education, among others.

Jane Robbins, J.D. is an attorney and independent researcher. She has written extensively about the deficiencies of progressive education and the Common Core, and about threats to student and family privacy posed by government policies such as training students with technology. She has testified about these issues before the legislatures of 12 states and the U.S. Congress. Jane earned an undergraduate degree from Clemson University and a J.D. from Harvard Law School.
About Pioneer
Kevin Ryan, Ph.D. is an emeritus professor of education at Boston University. He is the founder and director emeritus of the Center for Character and Social Responsibility. He is a former high-school English teacher and taught on the faculties of Stanford University, the University of Chicago, Harvard University, Ohio State University, and the University of Lisbon. Dr. Ryan was appointed to the Pontifical Academy for the Social Sciences by Pope John Paul II in 2003. He has authored and edited 22 books, primarily on moral education and the education of teachers, and written over 100 articles.

Pioneer Institute is an independent, non-partisan, privately funded research organization that seeks to improve the quality of life in Massachusetts through civic discourse and intellectually rigorous, data-driven public policy solutions based on free market principles, individual liberty and responsibility, and the ideal of effective, limited and accountable government.
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Problems with Social-Emotional Learning in K-12 Education | New Study

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Little research evidence for, or objective, reliable way to measure SEL's efficacy; raises significant concerns about student health and privacy BOSTON - Social-emotional learning (SEL) has been billed as a transformational tool that will propel students to greater academic achievement and personal fulfillment.

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Texas Town In Spotlight After Parents Push Back Against Diversity Plan | NBC Nightly News

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Texas Town In Spotlight After Parents Push Back Against Diversity Plan | NBC Nightly News

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Families and school officials in Southlake, Texas developed diversity and inclusion programs after a racist video went viral. The plan was halted after pushback from parents. NBC News’ Antonia Hylton talks to community members about the ongoing controversy.

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Texas Town In Spotlight After Parents Push Back Against Diversity Plan | NBC Nightly News

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The Evidence Base for How We Learn: Supporting Students' Social, Emotional, and Academic Development - The Aspen Institute (2017)

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The Evidence Base for How We Learn: Supporting Students' Social, Emotional, and Academic Development - The Aspen Institute (2017)

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The Evidence Base for How We Learn: Supporting Students’ Social, Emotional, and Academic Development articulates the scientific consensus regarding how people learn. The research brief presents a set of consensus statements—developed and unanimously signed onto by the Commission’s Council of Distinguished Scientists—that affirm the interconnectedness of social, emotional, and academic development as central to the learning process.

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The Evidence Base for How We Learn: Supporting Students' Social, Emotional, and Academic Development articulates the scientific consensus regarding how people learn. The research brief presents a set of consensus statements-developed and unanimously signed onto by the Commission's Council of Distinguished Scientists-that affirm the interconnectedness of social, emotional, and academic development as central to the learning process.

The brief draws from brain science, medicine, economics, psychology, and education research to describe why it is essential to address the social, emotional, and cognitive dimensions of learning; how these dimensions together shape students' academic and life outcomes; and how these competencies can be taught throughout childhood, adolescence, and beyond. The evidence outlined in this brief moves the nation beyond the debate as to whether schools should attend to students' social and emotional development, to how schools can integrate social, emotional, and academic development into their daily work.

For a synopsis of the Research Brief, click here

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The Evidence Base for How We Learn: Supporting Students' Social, Emotional, and Academic Development - The Aspen Institute

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Evidence Base for How We Learn: Supporting Students' Social, Emotional, and Academic Development articulates the scientific consensus regarding how people learn. The research brief presents a set of consensus statements-developed and unanimously signed onto by the Commission's Council of Distinguished Scientists-that affirm the interconnectedness of social, emotional, and academic development as central to the learning process.

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Parents protesting 'critical race theory' identify a new target: Mental health programs (NBC,2022)

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Parents protesting 'critical race theory' identify a new target: Mental health programs (NBC,2022)

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Groups have voiced opposition to suicide prevention programs, mental health coordinators and social emotional learning, claiming they are being used to indoctrinate students.

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At a September school board meeting in Southlake, Texas, a parent named Tara Eddins strode to the lectern during the public comment period and demanded to know why the Carroll Independent School District was paying counselors “at $90K a pop” to give students lessons on suicide prevention.

“At Carroll ISD, you are actually advertising suicide,” Eddins said, arguing that many parents in the affluent suburban school system have hired tutors because the district’s counselors are too focused on mental health instead of helping students prepare for college.

Tara Eddins speaks at the school board meeting in Southlake, Texas, on Sept. 27. Carroll ISD

“Some of these kids, they’re just trying to get through the day, get through compacted math, get through algebra, go to cotillion on Sunday,” Eddins said. “They are not thinking about these issues.”

Two days after Eddins made the remarks, Southlake Families PAC — a group that has fought to stop a diversity plan at Carroll — sent an email to supporters calling on the school district to “Leave mental health and parenting to parents.”

Christina Edmiston, a Southlake resident and mother of two, was outraged when she saw the email. Earlier that month, Edmiston had pulled her 12-year-old son out of the Carroll district after he reported thoughts of suicide after having been bullied by classmates for his sexuality.

“You can’t expect just to teach kids arithmetic and reading and look at their test scores and expect them to be decent human beings,” Edmiston said. “I personally cannot understand why a parent would not want their children to have knowledge of what depression looks like, what anxiety looks like.”

But that’s what’s now being debated in communities across the country. As school districts struggle to address accusations that administrators are indoctrinating students in progressive ideas about race, gender and sexuality, the same parents and activists making the claims have begun targeting school initiatives centered on students’ mental health and emotional well-being.

In Carmel, Indiana, activists swarmed school board meetings this fall to demand that a district fire its mental health coordinator from what they said was a “dangerous, worthless” job. And in Fairfax County, Virginia, a national activist group condemned school officials for sending a survey to students that included questions like “During the past week, how often did you feel sad?”

Many of the school programs under attack fall under the umbrella of social emotional learning, or SEL, a teaching philosophy popularized in recent years that aims to help children manage their feelings and show empathy for others. Conservative groups argue that social emotional learning has become a “Trojan horse” for critical race theory, a separate academic concept that examines how systemic racism is embedded in society. They point to SEL lessons that encourage children to celebrate diversity, sometimes introducing students to conversations about race, gender and sexuality.

Activists have accused school districts of using the programs to ask children invasive questions — about their feelings, sexuality and the way race shapes their lives — as part of a ploy to “brainwash” them with liberal values and to trample parents’ rights. Groups across the country recently started circulating forms to get parents to opt their children out of surveys designed to measure whether students are struggling with their emotions or being bullied, describing the efforts as “data mining” and an invasion of privacy.

Asra Nomani, a mother and activist in Fairfax County, said she supports school curricula focused on character development and emotional well-being, but she said SEL programs have been hijacked by progressives.

Asra Nomani, a former reporter for the Wall Street Journal, is a leader of Parents Defending Education. Mike Segar / Reuters file

“It took a turn in the summer of 2020, after the tragedy of George Floyd’s killing,” said Nomani, a leader of Parents Defending Education, an activist group that criticizes school diversity and equity efforts. After that, she said, social emotional learning “became a vehicle for this quote-unquote ‘social justice activism’ and the indoctrination of controversial ideas related to race, sexuality and even gender and identity.”

The attention to social emotional learning in particular has been further fueled by loyalists to former President Donald Trump. The Center for Renewing America, which was started by a former Trump administration official, published a glossary that claimed that teachers and counselors were embedding critical race theory into social emotional learning programs. And state GOP lawmakers who tried to stop certification of Joe Biden’s win in the presidential election in Wisconsin proposed legislation that would outlaw social emotional learning and other educational concepts that they labeled as “state-sanctioned racism.”

Parents who have packed school board meetings to protest diversity initiatives, including in Loudoun County, Virginia, have begun targeting social emotional learning programs. Evelyn Hockstein / Reuters

School leaders across the country deny that the initiatives teach children to judge themselves or classmates based on their race. Many districts, including several in Georgia, Missouri and Tennessee, say they launched new social emotional learning programs in response to rising youth suicide rates in recent years and to help children cope with bullying and other emotional issues that can inhibit students’ abilities to focus at school.

“It’s absolutely terrifying to think that our kids could be out there without the access to the things that they need,” said Amal Anthony, a parent in Carmel who runs a Facebook group supporting school diversity and inclusion efforts. “Because while we all like to think that our kids are going to come to us first, sometimes that’s not the reality.”

Although youth suicides remain relatively rare, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that 2,756 minors died by suicide in 2019, the most recent year for which data are available, making it the second-leading cause of death among children. Early CDC data from 2020 show that the number of children who visited emergency rooms for suicide attempts increased by 31 percent compared to a year earlier, feeding concerns among parents and pediatricians that more children have struggled with depression and suicidal ideation during the pandemic.

A recent report from the student safety company Gaggle, which monitors school-issued computers and tablets, said that among students at the 1,500 schools it does business with, nearly 9,000 threats of suicide or self-harm had been flagged as so serious that they required immediate intervention by school emergency contacts in the last academic year.

But the argument that social emotional learning and other school-based mental health initiatives are part of “a new-age nanny state” has been gaining traction in conservative media for months, including on Fox News. Columns in the National Review and The Federalist have suggested that social emotional learning has become “another vehicle for anti-white racism” and may soon eclipse critical race theory as the most debated phrase in education.

Some parent groups have advanced more extreme ideas. A national activist group, No Left Turn in Education, connected social emotional learning to the potential sexual grooming of children, calling it a “dangerous” philosophy that teaches students to put their trust in educators over the instructions of their parents. The group warned that even if social emotional learning doesn’t lead to “sexual assault by an adult,” it could cause children to question their gender identity and “will likely lead to some serious mental health struggles.”

As backlash over discussions about racism causes some schools to withdraw diversity and equity efforts, educators, child welfare experts and some parents said they worry that these protests could prompt a similar pullback from mental health programming.

“I am concerned, because the people that stand to lose are the kids,” said Karen Niemi, the president of the Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning, or CASEL, an organization that helps schools implement the framework. “And it does worry me that we could risk prioritizing what’s good for kids because of a misunderstanding or, potentially, social emotional learning being used for any political agenda.”

Mental health director under attack

In Carmel, a suburb of Indianapolis, voters overwhelmingly approved a tax increase two years ago to hire more school resource officers and social workers. Stephanie Whiteside, the Carmel Clay School District’s first mental health coordinator, was put in charge of using the money to hire therapists based in schools, who are accessible to students with parental permission. More than 400 students have participated in therapy sessions in the last 14 months, according to the district.

Nicki McNally, a Carmel parent who helped campaign for the referendum, said she can see the new programs’ paying off in the way her teenage daughter speaks freely with her friends about panic attacks, coping methods and seeing counselors, “because they’ve been trained that that’s OK, that’s normal, and that there are resources there for that.”

Carmel parent Nicki McNally helped campaign for more school resource officers and social workers. Robert Scheer / The Indianapolis Star via USA Today Network

But this year, as parents organized to push back against the district’s equity measures, activists made Whiteside one of their prime targets, accusing her of making “victimhood the highest social currency.”

Alvin Lui, who co-founded a group called Unify Carmel to fight the district’s diversity efforts, called the mental health coordinator’s job a “dangerous, worthless” position and circulated dossiers about Whiteside that included an analysis of posts she had liked or shared on social media that Lui said showed she held animus toward police.

Lui also criticized the district’s use of social emotional learning as “an extremely deceptive indoctrination system.” If schools want to address students’ mental health, he said, the best approach is “to involve parents if there’s an issue.”

“But focus the kids on academics,” Lui said. “Focus them on something productive and useful so that they feel competent and confident that they’re doing well in school. They shouldn’t be questioning their gender identity and worrying about marching and worrying about social justice.”

A crowd carrying signs protesting SEL gathers ahead of a Carmel Clay School Board meeting on May 17, 2021. MJ Slaby / IndyStar via USA Today Network

The district declined to make Whiteside available for an interview. In response to the criticism, administrators sent a letter to parents on Sept. 30 noting that she is married to a police officer and that her work in Carmel “has genuinely saved students’ lives.”

Carmel Clay Schools also defended the district’s reliance on social emotional learning programs in a statement issued by a spokeswoman, Emily Bauer. The lessons can be as straightforward as having elementary school students draw self-portraits to portray their strengths, Bauer said, or initiating group projects or discussions to help students learn how to better communicate.

The district said it completed 101 suicide screenings from the beginning of the school year through Oct. 18, more than twice as many as in the same period last year.

“This rhetoric that the mental health coordinator and mental health services are dangerous really sets us back,” McNally said. “We’re supposed to be moving forward to remove the stigma of mental health services.”

‘A lever for equity’

Some critics said they believe social emotional learning, first introduced in some schools beginning in the 1990s, has become entwined with progressive values.

Many point to CASEL, a nonprofit organization that is considered the leading authority on social emotional learning. After the protests for racial justice last year, CASEL updated language on its website to describe social emotional learning as “a lever for equity” that “affirms diverse cultures and backgrounds” and plays a role in eliminating “deep-seated inequities in the education system” — all phrases that conservatives have branded this year as critical race theory.

Niemi, CASEL’s president, said the backlash to the language around equity reflects a misunderstanding of social emotional learning, which is meant to adapt to whatever issues specific students might be struggling with, whether it’s stress, bullying or racism.

“When you’re in a classroom where racial issues are heightened, it is necessary for kids to have the skills to understand who they are, how to relate to other people, how to get along, how to solve problems,” Niemi said. “It’s not about telling them what to think or telling them how to feel.”

A survey of 2,000 parents released this year by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, a conservative-leaning think tank, found that people broadly supported the ideas behind social emotional learning. However, the support dropped when surveyors used the terms “social emotional learning,” “soft skills” and “whole child development.”

SEL often involves “a lot of jargon and ideas that may sound kind of ivory tower or foreign to a lot of parents,” said Adam Tyner, who analyzed the survey for the foundation. “It doesn’t surprise me that some of those parents expect the worst.”

Some parent groups have made more radical claims about social emotional learning, echoing baseless conspiracy theories popular among followers of QAnon.

At an event at a church in Whiteland, Indiana, last month hosted by the activist group Purple for Parents Indiana, Rhonda Miller, the group’s president, said grade school lessons centered on emotions are meant to prepare children for sex trafficking by teaching them to be accepting of LGBTQ identities and introducing them to books about sex, gender and sexuality.

“The schools are too dangerous,” Miller told the audience, according to a video of the meeting posted online. “They are doing exactly what they were designed to do. They’re not broken. When you go back and you look at the history of public education, it’s doing exactly what it was designed to do, which was to take our system down from within.”

Purple for Parents has been working with a state legislator to introduce a measure that would outlaw social emotional learning in Indiana schools. The group didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Parents raise privacy concerns

In Fairfax County, Virginia, where parents have spent months protesting the district’s diversity and equity initiatives, activists affiliated with Parents Defending Education have shifted the focus of their outrage in recent months to surveys that the school system has been sending to students as part of its social emotional learning initiatives.

The activist group has raised alarm that the Northern Virginia district of 178,000 students allocated $1.8 million in federal Covid-19 emergency funds to a five-year contract with Panorama Education, a Boston-based company, to survey students districtwide about their emotional well-being. The district said the survey will help it address mental health challenges worsened by the pandemic.

The surveys, which parents can opt their children out of, ask questions like “Overall, how much do you feel like you belong at your school?” Surveys intended for middle and high school students ask about their sexuality and gender identities, information that the company says is meant to help schools identify whether certain groups of students are struggling more than others.

Panorama said the surveys — used in more than 21,000 schools across the country — are designed to help educators track students’ well-being, identify those who may be struggling and suggest interventions to help them. Although some of the surveys ask about students’ experiences with racism, Panorama said the questionnaires are “not a tool for teaching critical race theory,” adding that it “does not market, sell, or rent any student’s personal information” to any outside companies.

Fairfax County Public Schools said survey answers are accessible only to educators who are directly involved with the students who responded and aren’t shared with the state or any company other than Panorama.

But Nomani, the vice president of Parents Defending Education, said schools shouldn’t be relying on outside companies and algorithms to address students’ mental and emotional well-being. And she said she doesn’t believe it’s appropriate for schools to survey children about their sexuality.

“What we need to do is to separate the authenticity of social and emotional learning from the activist, divisive agendas of profiteer consulting groups that are basically using our children to increase their bottom line,” she said, suggesting that the money spent to hire companies like Panorama could instead be used to hire more school counselors and therapists.

‘Shame on them’

Some conservative groups have explicitly targeted school-based anti-suicide initiatives this year, particularly those aimed at helping children younger than 12, arguing that the efforts distract from academics and introduce mental health issues to children who aren’t struggling.

Utah Parents Unite, an activist group that says it’s fighting indoctrination and mask mandates in schools, urged its members to lobby against a bill to expand suicide prevention programs to elementary schools, where, the group said, “suicides are not happening.” (National data obtained by NBC News show that the number of children ages 6-12 who visited children’s hospitals for suicidal thoughts or self-harm has more than doubled since 2016.)

“It’s not age appropriate,” Utah Parents Unite wrote of suicide prevention in elementary school, “and it’s not a topic we need to introduce into the minds of young children.”

Despite the objections, the Utah Legislature passed a bill that was signed into law in March.

Parent activists elsewhere have continued to make the argument, including in Southlake, a suburb 30 miles northwest of Dallas that was the subject of an NBC News podcast about the community’s fight over a school diversity plan.

Neither Southlake Families PAC, which sent an email to supporters in September claiming that “social emotional learning is critical race theory,” nor Eddins, the mom who accused counselors of “promoting suicide,” were willing to be interviewed.

In response to questions about the Carroll school system’s support for social emotional learning and whether it was appropriate for school counselors to focus on anti-suicide efforts, Karen Fitzgerald, a spokeswoman, said the district “is focused on what is in the best interest of all students.”

Edmiston, the Carroll parent whose child struggled with depression after classmates teased him over his sexuality, said the district needs more counselors and programs centered on the mental well-being of students, not fewer. NBC News isn’t naming her son, because he is a victim of harassment.

“I personally cannot understand why a parent would not want their child to understand — even if their child doesn’t have any mental health issues — ... what depression looks like, what anxiety looks like,” Edmiston said. “That doesn’t make sense to me, as a mom, as someone who’s a part of society.”

Edmiston said that classmates started teasing her son about his sexuality last school year after he came out as bisexual, and that by September, the harassment had escalated. Her son, a sixth-grader, said he had told a friend at school that he wanted to die. Afterward, according to her son, some of his classmates responded by grabbing a rope from gym class and stringing it over a goalpost like a noose at recess.

In an interview, Edmiston’s son said he started struggling with depression when he was 10 and has relied on therapists to cope. He said comments by parents claiming that most young children don’t need emotional support at school were “highly insolent.”

“I’ve had to have help with my mental health,” he said. “And if there’s other people who are having to struggle like me, or even worse, and a parent can’t recognize that because they think a child is younger and can’t have those feelings, then shame on them.”

As for Edmiston — starting this month, she said, she’s sending her son to a private school.

If you or someone you know is at risk of suicide, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255, text TALK to 741741 or visit SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for additional resources.

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Parents protesting ‘critical race theory’ identify a new target: Mental health programs

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Groups have voiced opposition to suicide prevention programs, mental health coordinators and social emotional learning, claiming they are being used to indoctrinate students.

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362 School Counselors on the Pandemic's Effect on Children: 'Anxiety Is Filling Our Kids' (NYT, 2022)

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362 School Counselors on the Pandemic's Effect on Children: 'Anxiety Is Filling Our Kids' (NYT, 2022)

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In a survey of 362 school counselors nationwide by The New York Times in April, the counselors — licensed educators who teach these skills — described many students as frozen, socially and emotionally, at the age they were when the pandemic started.

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American schoolchildren's learning loss in the pandemic isn't just in reading and math. It's also in social and emotional skills - those needed to make and keep friends; participate in group projects; and cope with frustration and other emotions.

In a survey of 362 school counselors nationwide by The New York Times in April, the counselors - licensed educators who teach these skills - described many students as frozen, socially and emotionally, at the age they were when the pandemic started.

"Something that we continuously come back to is that our ninth graders were sixth graders the last time they had a normative, uninterrupted school year," said Jennifer Fine, a high school counselor in Chicago. "Developmentally, our students have skipped over crucial years of social and emotional development."

Nearly all the counselors, 94 percent, said their students were showing more signs of anxiety and depression than before the pandemic. Eighty-eight percent said students were having more trouble regulating their emotions. And almost three-quarters said they were having more difficulty solving conflicts with friends.

"They have less stamina; more frustration; less flexibility; less effort; less perseverance; more escape and avoidance behaviors," Cassie Cerny, an elementary school counselor in Weston, Wis., said in response to open-ended questions in the survey.

Jennifer Schlatter, an elementary school counselor in Brighton, Colo., said: "Anxiety is filling our kids right now. They are worried about their family and friends. They are stressed because they are behind in school."

And even though schools have, with brief exceptions, been open this year, students have not yet made up the losses. Seven in ten counselors said that they had seen some improvement in social and emotional skills but that there was still work to be done. Just 11 percent said there had been a lot of improvement since the fall, while 17 percent said there had been none.

Only six of the 362 counselors said behaviors and social-emotional skills were back to normal for their students' age or that they hadn't seen lagging skills this year.

Among the survey respondents, counselors served an average of 377 students. In rural schools, the average was 413 (the American School Counselor Association's recommendation is one counselor for 250 students). Three-quarters said their school did not have enough counseling staff.

"With 375 students, my biggest fear is missing a kid," said Curtis Darragh IV, a middle school counselor in Danbury, Conn. "What if a kid tells me they are hurting themselves and I didn't get a chance to see them because of the amount of other duties that I am doing? I can't handle this by myself."

Virginia DeLong, who works with high school students in Norwich, Conn., said: "It's just nonstop putting out fires with kids. We don't have the staffing to do preventative work, which is what we're trained to do."

Since the fall, there have been increasingly loud alarms about children's mental health. Doctors who work with children called it " a national emergency," and Dr. Vivek H. Murthy, the U.S. surgeon general, warned that the effect of the pandemic and other stressors on youth mental health were " devastating." These concerns have been amplified since the mass shooting by an 18-year-old at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.

Schools, along with pediatricians, are on the front line to spot problems. The Biden administration nearly doubled this year's investment in social-emotional learning, mental health and student support, to $353 million, and some schools are spending Covid funding on counseling. Yet people in the field say schools desperately need more resources.

"This was a shared trauma, and that trauma and grief is not something you just come back and get over," said Jill Cook, executive director of the American School Counselor Association. "We want every child to have access to a trained school counselor. The issue, though, is there are not enough qualified, licensed personnel to fill these positions."

The counselors who participated in the unscientific survey are members of the association, which distributed it for The Times. The survey included counselors in 49 states who work with various age groups, from kindergartners through 12th graders. About a quarter were in urban schools, a third in rural areas and the rest in suburban schools. Roughly one-third worked in schools in which a majority of children qualified for free lunch.

In the last two decades, the role of school counselor has changed, from mostly providing academic guidance to teaching social-emotional learning to the whole school. During the pandemic, more students need their help than ever, they said, yet other responsibilities - paperwork or filling in for teachers because of staffing shortages - keep them from that work. They're referring more children to outside providers, yet these providers often have no availability. In some places, social-emotional learning has come under political fire.

"I can help you in crisis, but ultimately I need you to get to someone that has more time and often more training than me," said Leslie Spiller, a high school counselor in Bettendorf, Iowa. "But we have long wait lists to see psychologists and psychiatrists, and then don't even get me started on insurance. This speaks to a huge line between those that can afford to get help and those that don't have that ability."

Nine in 10 counselors said their jobs were more stressful than in previous years. Still, Ms. Fine in Chicago echoed a shared sentiment: "Kids are still kids. They still laugh, love deeply, find joy, and make this job worth it, no matter how stressful."

Emotional health is necessary for learning to happen, counselors said, yet children had lost stamina and motivation in the classroom: "If what they are asked to do requires critical thinking or more than 10 minutes of effort, many students struggle, become frustrated and refuse to do the work," said Laurenne Hamlin, a junior high counselor in Elkhart, Ind.

Another weakness was social skills. Sixty percent said children were having more trouble making friends, and half said there had been more physical fighting and online harassment of peers. "There is horrific violence and bullying," said Alaina Casey Mangrum, a counselor in a Pittsburgh elementary school. "There are physical altercations every single day."

Nearly all counselors said they were seeing more students with signs of anxiety or depression, and trouble regulating their emotions. In children, these issues often appear as acting out - yelling, fighting or arguing. "The smallest things will trigger an extreme emotional response that is disproportionate with the trigger," said Stephanie Coombs, an elementary school counselor in Wagener, S.C.

Many had seen an increase in suicidal thoughts, even among those in elementary school. "My department is conducting far more student safety screenings for suicidal ideation, gestures, plans, attempts than ever before," said Helen Everitt, a middle school counselor in Cary, N.C.

Children's mental health was worsening before the pandemic. The reasons aren't entirely clear - researchers point to rises in internet use and loneliness; less sleep and exercise; and earlier puberty. But the stressors of the last two years - disruption in routine; illness and death; parents' job losses - exacerbated the challenges.

One factor associated with more issues, the survey suggested, was how long a school was closed; other research has shown similar findings. At schools closed to in-person learning for a year and a half or more, three-quarters of the counselors said children were physically fighting more often, compared with less than half at schools that were open longer.

Computers were another factor, they said. After using them to attend school from home for so long, students are having trouble disconnecting, and more have had unrestricted access to the internet. Counselors connected that to an increase in age-inappropriate sexual behavior, drug use and vandalism. Thirty percent to 40 percent said they had seen an increase in each. In comments, many mentioned TikTok challenges, like one to vandalize or steal from school bathrooms.

"Having our students each have their own district-provided computer, I have seen a huge rise of inappropriate use during and after school hours," said Shannon Donnellon, a junior high counselor in Clarkston, Mich. "Students have been caught looking at inappropriate websites, playing video games during class, and even chatting with their peers during class time."

Amy DeCesare, a counselor at a Catholic elementary and middle school in Albuquerque, said: "The influence of things like the TikTok monthly 'challenges' to young people, encouraging them to vandalize or disrespect the school environment and staff, is obvious. We also see significant online bullying and harassment - frequently teachers are the targets."

Despite counselors' deep concern, they had reasons for optimism. Most had seen improvement once schools and in-person extracurricular activities reopened. Dozens said they were struck by children's resilience. And some said the experiences of the past two years had helped children grasp the importance of mental health.

"They are learning a lot about resilience and hardship, and we are finally talking openly about mental health and suicide," said Melissa Dole, who works with high schoolers in Longmont, Colo. "This makes me hopeful for students' ability to learn coping strategies and reach out when help is needed."

Michelle Flores, an elementary school counselor in Aloha, Ore., said: "Kids are so resilient. The smiles on their faces and the connections we are making is so encouraging. There's no way to make up for lost time, but we sure are trying."

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362 School Counselors on the Pandemic's Effect on Children: 'Anxiety Is Filling Our Kids'

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American schoolchildren's learning loss in the pandemic isn't just in reading and math. It's also in social and emotional skills - those needed to make and keep friends; participate in group projects; and cope with frustration and other emotions.