Social-Emotional Learning, What It Was Meant to Be and What It Became

Nobody has ever stood up at a school board meeting to say, "I object to my child learning to share." If that were the whole of social-emotional learning, this column would be one sentence long and the sentence would be "Fine."

It isn't the whole of it. And the distance between the part everyone agrees on and the part some parents are asking about is exactly where a good argument lives. So let's draw the map: what SEL set out to be, where it went, what its best defenders say, and what a parent can ask for on Monday morning.

The definition, and the old wisdom under it

Social-emotional learning, SEL for short, is the label for programs that teach children skills for handling emotions, getting along with others, setting goals and making decisions. In the classroom it can mean anything from a five-minute morning check-in to a full curriculum with lessons, worksheets and surveys.

Here is the first point, and it is one conservatives should make before anyone else does: the idea is ancient. Aristotle held that moral virtue is formed by habit, that we become just by doing just acts and temperate by doing temperate ones. The Hebrew Scriptures are a long education in self-control, honesty and care for the neighbor. Every grandmother who ever told a child to count to ten before answering was running a self-regulation program. A school that helps a child manage anger, take turns, listen, apologize and finish what he starts is doing something that families, churches and schools have always done, and it is good work. I support it without reservation.

The question is not whether children should learn character. It is who decides what is taught, how it is taught, what is asked of the child, and whether the parent can see it.

Where the modern movement began

The term and the modern movement trace to 1994, when a group of researchers, educators and child advocates met at the Fetzer Institute in Michigan and created what became the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning, known as CASEL. The group's aim was to bring research on children's emotional and social development into schools in an organized way. Over the following years CASEL became the best-known institution in the field, producing guidance, standards and a widely used framework.

That framework identifies five core competencies:

1. Self-awareness: recognizing one's own emotions, strengths and limits.
2. Self-management: regulating emotions, managing stress, setting and pursuing goals.
3. Social awareness: understanding others' perspectives and showing empathy.
4. Relationship skills: communicating clearly, cooperating, resolving conflict.
5. Responsible decision-making: making constructive choices about behavior and relationships.

Read as a list, it is hard to quarrel with. Each item has a plain translation any parent would accept: know yourself, control yourself, notice other people, get along, choose well. Some education researchers have found that programs built on these skills, when well designed and well taught, are associated with improvements in behavior and school performance, though the strength of the findings depends on the program and the study, and a careful reader should look at the specific evidence for the specific program, not at a blanket claim.

The steelman: what SEL's best defenders say

Fairness requires me to state the case for SEL at its best. It goes like this.

Schools have always shaped character, whether they say so or not. A school that ignores emotions does not produce emotionless students; it produces students who handle their emotions with no help. Teachers report that classroom behavior, anxiety and conflict have all grown harder to manage, and they want tools. Programs that teach a child to name a feeling and pause before acting give teachers a common language for the very things that disrupt a lesson. Studies of some programs find modest gains in behavior and achievement. And children who struggle at home most need an adult at school who teaches the skills their parents may lack the time or the means to teach. For them, SEL is an equalizer. A child who learns to calm down and ask for help is a child who can learn math.

I agree with a lot of that, and I agree that character education is the school's business. Where I part from it is the section that follows.

What it became in some places

A movement that grows fast tends to broaden, and SEL did. In the late 2010s and early 2020s, an expanded version called transformative SEL gained ground, and CASEL took it up in its own language. In an update of its framework around 2020, CASEL described a view in which SEL is a vehicle for addressing inequity and building more just schools and communities, and it added discussion of identity, agency and "collaborative problem solving" about social conditions. I want to be exact about what I am and am not saying. I am not saying every SEL program adopted that framing. Most classroom SEL is still the plain thing: calm breathing, kindness, goal setting. I am saying that a significant strand of the field moved from teaching a child to manage himself to asking the child to examine social structures and his own place in them, and that this is a different enterprise, with different assumptions about what is true, and one a parent is entitled to know about and evaluate.

Here is the principle. Teaching a child to be patient is character formation, and almost everyone agrees on it. Teaching a child a particular theory of society is a contested matter of politics and belief, and in a country with many convictions, it belongs to the family unless the family has been told and has agreed. The first is the school's job. The second is a conversation.

The surveys: where the law comes in

The sharpest concern is not the lesson. It is the questionnaire.

Many SEL programs track progress through student surveys, which ask children about their feelings, their relationships, their home life, their sense of belonging, their stress, and sometimes more. Some districts administer these surveys to children as young as elementary age, and the questions can reach into territory that many parents consider theirs to discuss with their own children. A teacher reading answers aloud, a counselor following up on a response, a vendor storing the data: each is a point at which private information leaves the family.

Federal law addresses this directly. The Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment, or PPRA, found at Title 20 of the United States Code, section 1232h, applies to surveys, analyses and evaluations funded in whole or part by the U.S. Department of Education. It requires that, before a minor student is asked to take part in a survey that reveals information in certain protected areas, the school must get written parental consent. The protected areas include political affiliations or beliefs of the student or the student's parent, mental or psychological problems of the student or family, sex behavior or attitudes, illegal, anti-social, self-incriminating or demeaning behavior, critical appraisals of other individuals with whom respondents have close family relationships, legally recognized privileged relationships such as with lawyers, doctors or ministers, religious practices, affiliations or beliefs of the student or parent, and income. For surveys not funded by the Department, the law still requires that parents be notified and given a chance to opt their child out, and it gives parents the right to inspect, on request, survey materials and instructional materials used in connection with a survey.

I would encourage you to read the statute itself and the Department's guidance on it, because the details matter: which surveys are covered turns on the funding source, and the rights for non-funded surveys are opt-out rights rather than consent rights. A parent who wants to use the law should know which kind of survey she is dealing with. The Student Privacy Policy Office at the Department of Education, which enforces PPRA, takes complaints.

Now the argument.

1. The family is the first institution of character. This is the premise of the Judeo-Christian tradition and of the common law. A parent's authority over the moral formation of the child is not a privilege the state grants; it is prior to the state. Pierce v. Society of Sisters in 1925 said it in a sentence: the child is not the mere creature of the state.
2. Questions about a child's inner life, family and beliefs are the most intimate a school can ask. The PPRA recognizes this by making consent, or at least notice and opt-out, a legal requirement. It is not an accident that Congress picked those categories.
3. A parent cannot consent to what she cannot see. The right to inspect is empty if the materials are behind a vendor's login or a district's "proprietary" label. See Curriculum Transparency Laws, What They Require and Why They Help Teachers.
4. Data about children's feelings is data. Where a survey is stored, who can see it, how long it is kept and whether a third party can use it are questions every parent should be able to ask and get an answer to.
5. Where the program is what its defenders say it is, transparency costs it nothing. A good SEL program has nothing to hide. If the lessons are about patience and kindness, showing them to parents will win support. The programs that resist showing the materials are the ones that give parents the most reason to wonder.

The counterargument I take seriously

A reasonable teacher might respond: "If I have to get consent for every conversation about feelings, I can't teach. Children's emotional lives are the daily stuff of a classroom. A child who is crying on the floor needs an adult now, not a permission slip."

That's right, and I do not propose a permission slip for a hug. The legal distinction is between ordinary classroom life and structured collection of sensitive information. A teacher who responds to a distressed child, or leads a lesson on taking turns, is doing what teachers do. A district that administers a written survey asking about a student's mental health, family situation or beliefs is doing something the law treats differently, and for good reason. The line is not perfect, and good-faith disagreements will arise at the edges. The remedy is a clear, written policy that tells parents what will be taught, what will be asked, who sees the answers, and how to opt out.

A second response is that opt-outs stigmatize children. That's a concern worth taking seriously, and the best reply is design: make the alternative activity ordinary, offer the opt-out quietly and uniformly, and keep it private. Schools manage opt-outs for health curricula, field trips and photography already.

What parents can do

This is the practical part, and the steps are plain. For the broader process of getting documents, see How to Request Records From Your School District and Actually Get Them.

• Ask what program the district uses. Get its name, the publisher, the grade levels and the dates it is taught. Many districts list it on a curriculum page.
• Ask for the materials. Request the lesson plans, slides, handouts and any surveys in writing, citing your right to inspect under the PPRA and your state's parental-rights law. Keep a copy of your request and the date.
• Ask about surveys. Which ones are given, to which grades, who funds them, whether parental consent or opt-out is required, how the data is stored, and who has access.
• Ask about the opt-out. Request, in writing, that your child be excused from specific lessons or surveys, and ask what alternative activity will be provided. State laws on opt-outs differ, so check yours.
• Read it before you decide. Judge the program on what it says. Some will pass inspection easily, and you will be glad to learn it.
• Raise concerns where they count. Bring specific concerns about specific pages to the principal, then the superintendent, and then the board at its public comment period. Specific, calm and documented works better than general and angry.
• Know where to complain. If you believe a school has violated the PPRA, you can file a complaint with the Department of Education's Student Privacy Policy Office.

What the Founders would recognize

The founding generation took for granted that republican government depends on virtue, and that virtue is learned. Washington's Farewell Address named religion and morality as the great pillars of public happiness. The Northwest Ordinance listed "religion, morality, and knowledge" as the foundations of good government. Nobody in that generation would have objected to teaching a child self-command. They would have asked who was doing the teaching and in whose name. See Every School Teaches Morals, the Only Question Is Which Ones.

That question, in the end, is the heart of this column. A school teaching restraint, honesty and kindness is working with the grain of the republic. A school asking a child to analyze her family's place in a system of power, and recording her answers, has taken on a task that belongs to someone else, and a free people should say so politely and firmly.

I'd add one more thing, from the optimist's seat. Parents do not have to choose between SEL and no SEL. The better choice is better SEL: programs built on virtue and habit, open to review, aimed at the child's growth and not at a political outcome, and respectful of the family as the first teacher. Those programs exist. Parents who ask for them will help the schools build more of them.

The case in brief

1. Teaching children self-control, kindness and good judgment is old wisdom and a proper job for schools, and most classroom SEL is exactly that.
2. CASEL, founded in 1994, built a five-competency framework that is easy to endorse; its later transformative SEL framing extends the field into social analysis, which is a different and contested undertaking.
3. Student surveys about feelings, family and beliefs are the sharpest issue, and the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment gives parents consent, notice, opt-out and inspection rights, depending on the survey.
4. The best defense of SEL, that it helps struggling children, is strong, and a good program loses nothing by showing its materials to parents.
5. Parents should ask for the program name, the materials and the surveys in writing, request opt-outs where they want them, and bring specific concerns to the board.

What you can do: Send your school a written request for the SEL materials and any student surveys, citing your right to inspect, and keep a copy.