Giving Compass' Take:

• The Aspen Institute's  National Commission on Social, Emotional, and Academic Development released its report finding that social-emotional learning can help increase school safety.  However, after reviewing school climate surveys, it seems that the report discussed successes with social-emotional learning in a county that showed concerning results that would not warrant praise or achievement in SEL.   

• How can we be sure that SEL is helping progress to safer school climate? 

• Read more about the findings in the National Commission's report. 

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

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

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

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

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

For example, the second of the report’s six recommendations is “Transform Learning Settings So They Are Safe and Supportive for All Young People.” But behind that apparently non-ideological and “evidence-based” exhortation is a recommendation that is neither: transition from traditional discipline to restorative practices.

Unsurprisingly, the report highlights a high school from Washoe County, Nevada — a district that has gained national renown for its SEL initiative. Yet, somehow, despite all the attention lavished on Washoe County, no one appears to have checked the data.

Read the full article about social emotional learning by Max Eden at The 74