ESSA opens school door to social-emotional learning

The Every Student Succeeds Act offers educators an opportunity to recognize the importance of developing the social-emotional skills of their students as tools for academics and life.

By any definition, my father was a self-made man. Growing up poor in Boston during the Great Depression, his options in life were severely limited. He graduated from high school, but college was never a consideration. He used to joke with my Harvard-educated husband that he, too, attended Harvard . . . every day on his way to work.

Like so many immigrant men of his generation, my father built a successful, happy life for himself and his family despite his limited education. When people ask me about his path to success, I always think about something he used to tell us about the two lions that stand guard in front of the New York Public Library. Although the library may house the books and the knowledge, he said the lions outside really tell you something worth knowing: Their names are Patience and Fortitude.

In his own way, my philosopher dad captured a sentiment that many today share. Acquiring knowledge is an essential goal of education, but it’s not everything. Other skills and competencies support and enhance an education and they, too, have real value. The No Child Left Behind era brought this message home for many educators. Holding schools accountable for the performance of all students was admirable, but the blunt policy instruments used to achieve that goal sucked all the air out the room. That left little time and few resources for educators to balance academic knowledge with opportunities to develop the other stuff that students will need as they move through secondary education and/or work life.

The debate about what constitutes the other stuff in education and its relative importance is not new. Many different groups focus on nonacademic skills and competencies. For years, researchers, policy makers, and pundits have argued over which skills and competencies matter and which are too soft to bother with in school.

ESSA opens a door

Social-emotional learning also has made its way in to the newly authorized Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). ESSA doesn’t use the phrase “social-emotional learning,” but the new law lets states and local districts define student success more broadly. The law specifically says “nonacademic” factors can be used in accountability. That would include indicators for student engagement, school climate, and safety.

In addition, ESSA encourages schools to “establish learning environments and enhance students’ effective learning skills that are essential for school readiness and academic success.” Elsewhere, ESSA recommends ‘‘activities to support safe and healthy students.” These could include fostering “safe, healthy, supportive, and drug-free environments that support student academic achievement,” helping to prevent bullying and harassment, improving “instructional practices for developing relationship-building skills, such as effective communication,” providing “mentoring and school counseling to all students,” and “implementation of schoolwide positive behavioral interventions and supports.”

While not explicitly supporting social-emotional skills, ESSA allows states and local districts to more broadly define student success and specifically refers to “nonacademic” indicators such as student engagement, school climate, and safety.

For those who have been advocating for a more nuanced set of indicators in state accountability systems, this opportunity was widely praised. For strict accountability hawks, such language represents a slippery slope. If schools are free to factor in measures that can’t be reliably tested, they worry that it creates an opening for all kinds of bad behavior by schools.

A recent New York Times piece by Kate Zernike did an excellent job explaining why emphasizing social-emotional learning in schools is so fraught with concern. First, there is no valid way to measure social-emotional skills. While you can structure teaching and learning to encourage the development of such skills, you can’t actually teach or test them. Angela Duckworth, perhaps the most noted scholar on social-emotional learning, summed it up bluntly in the Times piece: “[A]ll measures suck, and they all suck in their own way.”

Despite this kind of high-profile condemnation of tests to measure social-emotional skills, the momentum behind this movement is intense. California’s CORE districts (see my October 2015 column in Kappan for more information on them) led the way by including social-emotional measures in their new accountability formula, a move that was made possible when they received a waiver during the last accountability regimen. The formula is based on the School Quality Improvement Index, a 100-point rating system composed of measures of academic achievement (60%), school climate and culture (20%), and social-emotional factors (20%). The Times also reported that Duckworth was serving on a board overseeing the development of tests in California to measure these skills before she resigned saying she could not support using the tests to evaluate school performance.

Despite concerns about how to measure social-emotional skills, ample evidence suggests that employers highly value these qualities. In addition to research and reports developed by numerous social-emotional learning advocacy groups, the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Information Network (O*NET) database, the nation’s primary source of occupational information, also supports this notion. The O*NET database provides detailed information about the mix of knowledge and skills required for over 850 occupations. In a wide range of job categories, the skills and abilities required (examples include persistence, leadership, communication, social awareness, and self-control) are firmly grounded in the social-emotional domain. Anyone who has ever hired employees understands why this is the case. Knowledge and experience aside, employers want to hire rational, socially competent individuals who know how to manage themselves and play nicely with others. Future work-places will likely require individuals to be even more adept socially and emotionally.

Father knew best

Once again, my father hit the nail on the head when he urged his children to develop patience and fortitude — which is really just a fancy way of saying grit or perseverance. The world has transformed itself since I was a child, but the need for strong social-emotional skills remains. Working on an urban college campus only reinforces this belief. Surrounded by teens and 20-somethings, the need for some kind of higher social-emotional ground is palpable. The architecture of their young lives is for now built on Snapchat, Instagram, and selfies, but their professional lives — even in the 21st century — will require other social skills and abilities.

Whether schools can teach students social-emotional skills remains to be seen. Many educators and policy makers feel new college- and career-ready standards are an important step in that direction because they require students to engage in a more complex and rigorous kind of learning. Expanded learning opportunities and multiple pathways also are giving students a chance to develop a wider range of skills and competencies in and out of school. But schools alone can’t teach children everything they need to know about life; parents need to do their part, too. While all of us want to make life easier for our children, we have to allow them opportunities to do hard things on their own. They may flounder and even fail, but they will survive. Let’s face it, it’s hard to develop patience and fortitude if you’ve never had to wait or struggle through anything.

Citation: Ferguson, M. (2016). Washington View: ESSA opens school door to social-emotional learning. Phi Delta Kappan, 97 (8), 74-75.