Dear Colleagues,
Introduction
It seems that educators can’t go anywhere on their on-line news feeds (e.g.,
the74
, ASCD’s and others’
SmartBrief
s,
Learning Forwa
rd, the
Huffington Post
,
Education Dive K-12
,
Education We
ek, etc.) without hearing about the virtues of Social-Emotional Learning (SEL).
Yes. . . SEL has become education’s newest bandwagon. And, districts are jumping on.
Indeed, in the September 28, 2018 issue of
Education Week’s Market Brief
, Holly Yettick reported that, “Nearly 90 percent of district leaders say they have already invested in social and emotional learning products, or plan to do so over the next year.”
This past week, Allstate’s Foundation committed $45 million to social-emotional learning initiatives over the next five years.
And,
Learning Forward
—also this week—got into “the game” by stating that, “(A)s more practitioners and researchers recognize the importance of addressing students' social and emotional learning (SEL) in schools, we can't leave to chance the professional learning needed to make these efforts effective.”
And yet,
what is not being reported is that
:
- SEL’s recent popularity (and legitimacy—at least, in the media) is the result of a multi-year effort to court foundations, politicians, well-regarded educators, and other powerful national figures;
- Many SEL programs and research studies have significant science-to-practice limitations;
- Many districts and schools are purchasing “SEL programs and curricula” without independently and objectively evaluating (a) their research to determine if they are “ready” for field-based implementation; (b) whether they “fit” the demographics, students, and needs of their schools; and (c) whether they have a high probability of positively impacting the social, emotional, and behavioral student outcomes that they seek; and
- The SEL movement has become incredibly profitable for some publishers and vendors—leading to “marketing campaigns” that mask the questionable quality of some programs and curricula.
_ _ _ _ _
In this two-part Blog, I would like to discuss the concerns above.
In a nut shell, SEL has become a non-stop “movement” (see below), and many districts and schools are “searching for SEL in all the wrong places.”
The fundamental problem is that many educators do not understand the (political) history, its current research-to-practice status and its scientific limitations, the true outcomes of an effective SEL program, the absence of valid implementation strategies, and SEL’s potential strengths and limitations.
And in the rush to implement, many districts and schools are choosing incomplete, ineffective, and inconsequential (if not counterproductive) strategies that are wasting classroom time, squandering schools’ precious resources, and undermining districts’ professional development decisions.
Districts and schools are also inappropriately attributing their social, emotional, and behavioral “successes” (often limited to declining discipline problems, rather than improving student self-management) to their “SEL programs.”
I say “inappropriately” because they are making
causal
statements that, “Our SEL program was directly responsible for our decreased office discipline referrals”. . . when the relationship is
correlational
at best. . . and there are other more directly relevant factors to explain whatever successes they are having.
Finally, what is
not recognized
is that all of the “positive press” about SEL program “success” is a biased sample. The press is not going to report
the unsuccessful SEL initiatives
, because virtually no one is interested in these. My work around the country suggests that
the ratio of schools implementing SEL to the schools directly successful
because of SEL
is very low.
And this is not to mention the fact that most schools have been unable to sustain their SEL strategies for more than three years at a time.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
Where Did SEL Come From
? The
Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning
(CASEL) and its Political History
SEL is inextricably tied to the
Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning
(CASEL) which was formed in 1994 by a group of researchers, educators, and child advocates. With Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence work as an early building-block, CASEL functioned originally as a “research-based thought group” that ultimately wanted to impact schools and classrooms.
Despite this goal, CASEL has no interest in large-scale training, or in deploying legions of consultants to “scale-up” its work across the country. While it has partnered with a number of state departments of education and large city school districts, it has done this to advance its agenda, and to collect the “data” to support its “movement.” Critically, most of CASEL’s efficacy data have been published in its own technical reports. They have never been independently evaluated through an objective, refereed process—like articles in most professional journals.
And make no mistake about it, CASEL does want SEL to be “a movement.”
To support this statement, the history of CASEL’s interactions with politicians, foundations, celebrities, and the
National Commission on Social, Emotional, and Academic Development
(which it established) is detailed.
Relative to foundations, they clearly have the right to fund whatever they want to fund. But the funds often come “with strings attached.” And few financially-strapped school districts are going to refuse the funds—even though the initiative may actually result in (a) a loss of staff trust and morale, (b) the establishment of faulty student/instructional systems that will take many years to repair, and (c) a generation of students who have missed more effective educational opportunities.
Indeed, there is a growing history where some foundations’ conceptualizations of “effective educational practices” were not effective, and were retroactively proven to be misguided and counterproductive.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
The foundation to CASEL’s SEL movement are “three” research studies that are continually cited by districts and schools nationwide as the empirical “proof” that SEL “works.”
All “three” studies involve meta-analyses—a statistical approach that pools the results of many other individual studies, that have studied the “same” area, variables, or approaches, into a single “effect size.”
The cited studies are by Payton and colleagues (published by CASEL in 2008), a “study” by Durlak and colleagues (published in the journal
Child Development
in 2011), and a more recent study by Taylor and colleagues (also published in
Child Development
in 2017).
The Blog continues with a critique of the three studies. . . which have significant flaws that result in questions about their validity and utility. A brief discussion on meta-analysis follows. . . emphasizing the characteristics of good meta-analytic research, and the science-to-practice limitations of this statistical technique.
The critical take-away is that, just because we know that a meta-analysis has established a legitimate connection between a program, strategy, or intervention and student behavior or learning,
we do not necessarily know the implementation steps that were used by each individual study included in the analysis
.
Moreover, we cannot assume that all or most of the studies used (a) the same or similar implementation steps, or (b) the most effective or best implementation steps. We also do not know if the implementation steps can be realistically replicated in “the real world” as many studies are conducted under controlled “experimental” conditions.
In order to know exactly what implementation steps to replicate with our staff and students (to maximize the program or intervention’s student outcomes), educators need to “research the research” that was included in a specific meta-analysis.
[Message Continued Below]
