Recent actions by President Donald Trump’s administration and conservative activists could reinvigorate political pushback to social-emotional learning, with potentially long-term consequences on how schools teach the concept.
While earlier political arguments during the waning days of the pandemic claimed SEL was a way to inject progressive ideology into classrooms, a new missive from the U.S. Department of Education is homing in on SEL as a means of discrimination. At the same time, a prominent conservative activist group has launched a campaign to animate parent activism around SEL.
Although limited in scope, the actions have put proponents of social-emotional learning on edge.
“I think it’s really important for us to understand that what the federal government is doing here is misusing the office for civil rights to violate state and local control and to mislead the public about social and emotional learning,” said Lakeisha Steele, the vice president of policy for the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning, or CASEL.
The Education Department’s office for civil rights issued a Dear Colleague letter last month warning K-12 schools and colleges that they risk losing federal funding if they provide any race-based programming to students, sparking confusion over what exactly is considered discriminatory by the new administration. Shortly after, the department launched an “End DEI” portal for the public to report practices of diversity, equity, and inclusion in schools.
The complexity of defining SEL
At issue for SEL advocates is a follow-up FAQ document from the Education Department that details how schools might run afoul of the directive. The document states that schools have advanced discriminatory policies and practices through DEI initiatives, while “other schools have sought to veil discriminatory policies with terms like ‘social-emotional learning’ or ‘culturally responsive teaching.’” The OCR will determine whether a SEL program is discriminatory on a case-by-case basis.
In a press release, CASEL said the FAQ document misrepresents SEL while threatening districts with investigations and the loss of funding if they implement programs the OCR “falsely characterizes as ‘discriminatory.’”
But opponents of SEL say they’re heartened that the administration is taking their concerns seriously. Tina Descovich, a co-founder and executive director of Moms for Liberty, a conservative parents’ rights organization, said she hopes the FAQ document will result in the removal of SEL from schools.
“All parents want children to be able to regulate their emotions,” said Descovich. But she’s concerned that SEL prompts teachers to use an equity lens when approaching students, and “that is where critical race theory and DEI are now coming in and being tied deeply to the social-emotional learning programs.”
SEL has become a key area of activism for Moms for Liberty, and it’s featured prominently in the organization’s latest campaign: Moms for Liberty University, or M4LU, a series of monthly events that launched in January. The first event focused on the history of SEL “and how it has invaded our schools,” according to the Moms for Liberty website.
“We looked at the issues that were most concerning and most pressing, and social-emotional learning is the one that I think that often parents are confused about and don’t really understand,” Descovich said.
In the first event, which was held in Nashville, panelists discussed ways they believe the concept is used to manipulate students to adopt values counter to those of their parents. The event also laid out parents’ rights to reject this educational program.
There is a lot of confusion outside K-12 education professions about what what exactly SEL in schools is, leaving an opening for different interest groups to define it. Steele, of CASEL, said social-emotional learning was developed as a preventive measure to address a student’s specific needs.
“Social-emotional learning is this process by which children develop these important skills to help them be successful in school and life,” Steele said. “But it also helps create learning environments where students feel valued and seen and heard.”
SEL is not therapy or counseling, she said.
Many people still don’t understand SEL
What exactly SEL looks like can vary greatly from district to district. States and schools have increasingly invested in programming to teach life skills, such as emotional management, empathy, and responsible decisionmaking, to all students. But schools deploy SEL to support a wide range of efforts, including improving academic achievement, lowering bullying and discipline rates, and even retaining teachers.
Chase Christensen, superintendent and principal of Sheridan County school district in Wyoming, said he uses SEL even though it is not implemented directly into the curriculum. The high school uses the program Sources of Strength Secondary, which was originally intended for suicide prevention, but Christensen said the skills it teaches—helping students identify strengths they can fall back on when in crisis—served a broader lesson.
“I think that SEL leans into that self-awareness where my graduates are going to know where their strengths are, and they’re going to know where they need to focus their efforts in, in further learning to make sure that they are that candidate [that wins the interview process],” said Christensen.
Until recently, SEL had broad bipartisan support. Following the 2018 school shootings in Parkland, Fla., and Santa Fe, Texas, Trump assembled a federal school safety commission that included social-emotional learning in its recommendations for schools.
“Even going back to Trump’s first administration, what you often see is social-emotional learning has been routinely identified by the office for civil rights as a remedy for hostile school climate in civil rights investigations,” Steele said.
But that bipartisan support shifted with COVID-19. The pandemic brought with it both a surge of interest in SEL and the first wave of political pushback against it. Flush with federal COVID-relief aid, districts invested heavily in SEL to help students cope with the behavioral and academic fallout of the pandemic disruptions to schooling and life. At the same time, conservative activists began to claim that SEL was a trojan horse for teaching the “divisive subjects,” such as racism and sexuality, that many Republican state lawmakers were backing bills to limit.
A 2021 study by Tyton Partners, an education consulting firm, and CASEL found that a majority of teachers and administrators cited the pandemic and a greater focus on racial injustice as driving a rising interest for social-emotional learning in their schools.
Teachers, principals, and district leaders struggled to respond to the sudden skepticism and concerns from parents and community members over what had been an unchallenged mainstay in education for many years.
The term social-emotional learning is not popular among parents, particularly Republican ones, according to a 2021 survey of parents by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a right-leaning think tank. However, the skills and concepts taught under SEL, such as goal-setting, controlling emotions, and being informed citizens, are popular among parents of all political leanings, the study found.
The fact that people struggle to define SEL makes the concept particularly vulnerable to getting ensnared in political fights, said Andrew Hartman, a history professor at Illinois State University.
“[SEL] does seem like one of these amorphous things that is like a big bucket that anything can fall into, including things that conservatives really dislike,” he said. “And some school districts have meshed social-emotional learning with DEI or with other forms of pedagogy or curriculum that on the face of it, conservatives would find distasteful.”
What happens next for SEL?
What do the Education Department’s efforts to weed out social-emotional learning mean for schools in the near- and long-term? A point of concern for Steele is how the administration will wield the office for civil rights to investigate SEL and other equity-minded educational initiatives.
“We understand what is connected by such an FAQ when you’re tying it to Title VI, and therefore federal financial assistance,” she said. “Using [the] office for civil rights to control state and local curriculum, that certainly even despite them saying that it does not have the force of law, it certainly can have a chilling effect here.”
The nation’s two largest teachers unions have sued the Education Department over its threat to pull federal funding over race-based programming and equity initiatives.
Meanwhile, Hartman said he’s concerned that SEL’s continued politicization—whether from the administration or activists—will affect teacher recruitment.
“I teach future teachers—they’re excited about entering the profession, but they are also extremely anxious and also fearful,” he said. “From their perspective, there is a nonstop barrage of people attacking schools.”
What does this mean for SEL in the classroom?
More schools may move toward creating a more defined role for SEL in their schools, said Adam Newman, a co-founder and managing partner of Tyton Partners and school board member of Weston public schools in Massachusetts. In particular, he said, schools are having success incorporating SEL into multi-tiered systems of support frameworks.
That framework creates clear delineations, he said, between classroom-based social-emotional learning that teaches all students skills such as resilience and emotional management, and more intensive, personalized mental health supports for students who need it provided by school counselors, social workers, and psychologists.
Newman said this has helped some communities depoliticize SEL.
“SEL’s now in a context and framework that is not exclusively about equity, it’s really viewed through the lens of student success, student performance, student persistence, and really helping students to achieve their fullest potential,” he said.
School staff roles around supporting students’ mental health and general well-being are also clearer, Newman said, with teachers acting as referral points for more intensive services when necessary.
“I think the temperature in communities that are framing SEL appropriately within their MTSS efforts, it is finding safer waters,” Newman said.
Even with fierce political pushback, Hartman said it would be impossible to fully expunge social-emotional learning from schools because students must have the social skills necessary to function in a classroom environment and learn.
Most likely, teachers will continue to teach social-emotional skills, he said, whether it is called SEL or something else.
In his school, Christensen said he does not always explicitly say that the Sources of Strength Secondary program is, essentially, a form of SEL.
“Given the political environment in which we operate, I’m not out yelling SEL and DEI and such when we’re doing those things,” he said. “It’s just we do what’s right for kids.”
