The widespread enthusiasm for social and emotional learning (SEL) is easy to appreciate. After all, it seems painfully obvious that children learn better when they feel valued, supported, and safe. And yet, the push for SEL has been a big deal in recent years. In large part, that's because No Child Left Behind's earlier, equally sensible insistence that students need to be able to read and do math morphed into a bizarre exercise in “Office Space”-style management — yielding schools which too often seemed uncaring and test-obsessed. And, without wading into last decade's teacher evaluation mania or last century's character education goofiness, let's just note that education has an unfortunate history of sensible ideas going south.
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