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.
In recent years, one of the most noteworthy instances of all this was the Common Core, where what started out as a mild-mannered proposal for states to adopt common standards for math and “English language arts” (reading) morphed into a battle royale marked by ham-fisted implementation and ideological conflict, arrogant advocates, and sleazy vendors. Indeed, the Common Core attracted a whole host of marketers and charlatans eager to pitch their program or curriculum, as schools struggled to sort the wheat from the chaff. While the Common Core lingers on in most states, it’s hard to find anyone who thinks that the Common Core has accomplished what it set out to do.
If one peers just a bit over the horizon, it’s possible to see SEL beginning to encounter many of the same problems. Especially at a time of heightened ideological polarization, schools may struggle to tackle sensitive elements of SEL without tripping over the same cultural divides that laid low Common Core. Given the potential benefits of SEL, if done well, educators and advocates are advised to learn all they can from what’s gone wrong before. On that score, they’ll do well to make a close study of Karen Nussle’s new essay, “A GPS for Social-Emotional Learning from One who Traveled the Common Core Highway.” Nussle comes at the topic with deep experience, having spent several years as the head of the Collaborative for Student Success — which took point in making the case for the standards. Drawing on what she saw first-hand, Nussle’s take on the Common Core experience offers some instructive lessons for the SEL community.
You can’t have both speed and scale — reformers must choose one. Those seeking to reform schools frequently start with bold agendas for social betterment; they see schools as a way to alleviate poverty, grow the economy, redress racial disparities, or much else. The nature of these goals inclines reformers to pursue big, dramatic ideas that can quickly be taken to “scale.” In today’s partisan climate, Nussle argues, “We need to give up the notion that we can have both scale and speed.” In schooling today, Nussle argues that the Common Core shows there “just isn’t enough trust for policy ideas that don’t originate locally — and local solutions take time.” In the case of the Common Core, she explains, “Once opponents branded the effort as a centralized, exclusive and Washington-driven exercise, even the states that had educators intimately involved lost the ability” to convincingly argue that their efforts were actually localized and responsive to teacher needs.
Take time to define the problem and get the terminology right. The Common Core also ran into grave trouble, Nussle argues, because the coalition failed to properly define its brand — what the Common Core was (and wasn’t) and what it really meant for kids and schools. Nussle urges SEL proponents to recall how the “general public had no idea” what Common Core advocates were talking about. Some proponents insisted this was “just” a framework of coherent reading and math standards, even as others hailed their revolutionary import and President Obama’s Secretary of Education termed them the biggest change to hit schooling since the Supreme Court’s 1954 desegregation decision. The standards wound up meaning all sorts of things to different people. Nussle wryly observes, “SEL has the potential to have similar ‘brand’ problems. The words ‘social and emotional learning’ are not words you hear commuting on the bus or at a weekend soccer game.” That lack of familiarity, combined with the fact that different advocates and educators describe SEL in a variety of ways, raises the possibility that SEL will get linked to (and blamed for) all manner of things — fairly or no.
Never underestimate the importance of trust. Schools are public institutions that connect with parents and communities in very personal and particular ways. That means that, as with pediatricians or babysitters, trust is an inescapable part of the equation. School improvement can never be just a matter of whether you think you have a good idea — it’s also about whether thousands (and millions) of strangers trust what you’re trying to do. Nussle talks about a “nexus of trust” being critical to the success of any ambitious reform effort. In the case of Common Core, she argues that “political forces, mainly on the right, vehemently proclaimed that the new Obama administration policy was certain to ruin our schools and our children” — and that such fears took root because what had started as a “widely bipartisan initiative” with support from many influential Republicans had never developed that kind of trust in the broader conservative community.
A lot of problems in school reform get chalked up to “communications” and “implementation.” The funny thing about these terms is that they allow the speaker to suggest that someone else is at fault for any failures and that any problems can be easily remedied. If it’s a “communications” problem, after all, it means that the idea is swell and the public will love it — the only problem is that it didn’t get explained clearly enough. The solution? Hire a new PR flak. If it’s an “implementation” problem, it means that any failures don’t reflect on the idea itself — they’re just a product of missteps and fumbling by people in schools and statehouses. The solution? Tell people to implement better.
All of this tends to fuel the bad habits that caused trouble in the first place. What’s nice about honest reflection is it can help advocates see where well-meaning efforts can fall short, and the Common Core exceptionally instructive on that score.
Frederick M. Hess is director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
