The American education system currently faces an array of threats as the Trump administration works to hollow out — and ultimately kill — the Department of Education, undermine education access for immigrant and Native American students, and slash Head Start, among other early moves.
Opposition to social and emotional learning, or SEL, has received less attention, but this education strategy is also a target — despite its proven effectiveness. UNESCO, which calls SEL “the key to transforming education,” defines it as “the process of acquiring the competencies to recognize and manage emotions, develop care and concern for others, establish positive relationships, make responsible decisions and handle challenging situations effectively.” In other words, including relational and growth mindset skills along with academics to educate a growing person in a more holistic way.
Since it was founded in 1994, a nonprofit called the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) has worked to advance SEL, partnering with school districts to support implementation, informing state and federal policy, and building the field through research and collaboration. CASEL’s funders include the Gates Foundation, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the Oak Foundation and the Raikes Foundation.
Most parents and educators don’t question the value of SEL skills. They are also ones that employers say they look for in prospective employees.
But in recent years, SEL has come under attack from conservatives. The Federalist, a conservative publication, dubbed SEL “a leftist Trojan horse.” This year, lawmakers in eight states proposed anti-SEL legislation. Now, the Trump administration has taken up the offensive as Education Secretary Linda McMahon criticized Biden administration efforts to promote SEL.
As the right targets SEL, CASEL has also found itself in the crosshairs, including from Moms for Liberty. The conservative parents’ group argues that SEL makes students vulnerable to indoctrination, and blames CASEL for its role in promoting it. As one of the organization’s publications put it, “Since SEL programs follow CASEL’s guidelines, updates and framework, the people who control CASEL ultimately control our education system.” CASEL has received a number of online attacks in recent years and was advised by law enforcement to hire a security company to monitor threats.
Given President Donald Trump’s assaults on education institutions and efforts to eliminate all policies and programs associated with DEI, some philanthropic leaders are avoiding potentially controversial causes. As a result, some funders are backing away from SEL, or trying to find ways to support SEL principles without using the term itself. But many education experts argue that — administration pressure or not — now is the time to strengthen support for SEL. In fact, SEL is an essential education tool if schools are to improve lagging learning outcomes and tackle chronic absenteeism — both of which were a problem before COVID, and persist today.
How social emotional learning became a political hot button
Why has SEL, with its emphasis on fostering positive qualities like communication, empathy and belonging, become such a charged issue for the Trump administration and its allies?
In fact, SEL is popular among educators and parents alike, and today, SEL skills are widely incorporated in American education. Last year, RAND reported that in the 2023 school year, “83% of school principals reported that their schools used an SEL curriculum, up from 76% in the 2021–2022 school year.” But over the last several years, as conservatives stepped up attacks on public schools for, as they saw it, promoting progressive values and critical race theory, SEL was swept up in the culture wars.
“It was around spring of 2021 that CASEL really got thrown into the political culture wars,” said Aaliyah Samuel, CASEL’s president and CEO. “At that time, there was a lot of political noise around critical race theory, and how it was being taught in K-12 schools. In fact, there was no evidence of that, because CRT is not taught in public school. So critics looked at some of the skills promoted in SEL and it got tagged as critical race theory. That’s when the spin started to happen.”
Samuel, a teacher who formerly worked at the Department of Education, joined CASEL in 2022, and has worked to counter that spin and build the evidence base for SEL. “I wanted CASEL to engage head-on in the national discourse, to really elevate what SEL is and is not,” she said. “I want to be clear that CASEL has always been a nonpartisan organization serving every state and every community. That is at the core of who we are.”
Funding leaders on the evidence-backed effectiveness of SEL
To help increase awareness of SEL and dispel the myths, CASEL launched Leading with SEL, a coalition of over 40 organizations, in 2022. Partners include the National Association of Teachers of Mathematics, Parents as Teachers, and the National Association of School Psychologists.
“These organizations have memberships in the hundreds of thousands, and that has given us an opportunity to understand the needs of those broader constituents within the education community,” Samuel said. “It has also helped us coordinate our messaging to be able to, in real time, respond to the questions and some of the misinformation around SEL.”
For instance, SEL’s detractors claim that “many schools are seeing a rapid decline in proficiency since the focus has shifted from academics to ideology with SEL,” as Moms for Liberty puts it.
In fact, there is abundant evidence demonstrating the benefits of SEL — in terms of both student welfare and academic achievement. Research overseen by Andreas Schleicher, the OECD’s director for education and skills, for example, identified a strong link between SEL and academic success: “These skills — enabling students to understand and regulate their emotions, interact effectively with others, and persist through challenges — are vital for both short-term academic success and long-term personal development,” Schleicher wrote in an OECD report.
NewSchools, the ed-focused venture philanthropy organization, has worked closely with CASEL over the years, and used its research to help develop its Expanded Definition of Student Success framework, according to NewSchools’ CEO, Frances Messano. She has observed SEL in action at the schools her organization works with. “What we’re seeing is that as our schools integrate both a focus on social emotional learning and a focus on strong academics, their academic outcomes are almost turbo-boosted,” she said.
Gini Pupo-Walker, director of national education strategy at the Raikes Foundation, agreed. “The Raikes Foundation centers student wellbeing and student experiences in school as a priority for our grantmaking and for how we think about trying to create positive change in education,” she said. “We’ve supported CASEL for a number of years now, and we consider them an important partner in our work. CASEL has done a really good job partnering with school districts and bringing in strong professional development and support systems to change the dynamic in classrooms to have a much more student-centered approach.”
Before joining Raikes last year, Pupo-Walker saw this firsthand as an educator and administrator in Nashville, Tennessee. “I watched the transformation of our district when CASEL came in and invested time and energy in helping us think about how to better serve our students,” she said.
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Will philanthropy keep backing SEL as the Trump administration works to undermine it?
Most parents want their children to master the qualities that SEL imparts. A 2021 survey by the Fordham Institute reflected broad support for including SEL skills in schools, though even then, the survey found that “the term ‘social and emotional learning’ is relatively unpopular.”
But Moms for Liberty and its members are more opposed to SEL than ever. The group, which encouraged its members to “fight like a mother” against former Vice President Kamala Harris, counted on Trump to bolster its battle against SEL after he was elected, as Chalkbeat reported earlier this year. It didn’t take long. In March, the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights issued an FAQ that charged some schools of seeking to “veil racially discriminatory policies with terms like ‘social-emotional learning’ or ‘culturally responsive’ teaching.” (CASEL released this statement in response).
In May, Education Secretary McMahon released the department’s proposed Supplemental Priorities for use in discretionary grant programs. McMahon accused the Biden administration of advancing “a discriminatory diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) ideology, infusing many grants programs with divisive race stereotypes and even racial quotas,” and cited “promoting social emotional learning” as an example.
CASEL objected to the mischaracterization of SEL. “Now is not the time to abandon evidence-backed strategies like social and emotional learning that help students learn to read and ultimately prepare them to read to learn,” wrote Samuel and Lakeisha Steele, CASEL’s vice president of policy.
As SEL has become increasingly controversial, Samuel has found that, while some of CASEL’s funders are doubling down on their support, a few are pulling back, reluctant to provoke a backlash from the administration and its supporters.
The Raikes Foundation, for one, has no intention of shifting its strategy on SEL or ending its support for CASEL. “Just because the current administration is opposed to SEL doesn’t change our priorities and our belief in what CASEL is doing,” Pupo-Walker said. “We have not changed direction on any of our grantmaking or priorities in this season, and we don’t plan to. We believe organizations like CASEL are highly aligned to what we think is important for student success. Frankly, we’re in it for the long haul.” (See a recent guest post by the foundation’s cofounder, Jeff Raikes, urging philanthropy to defend its values.)
Samuel hopes education funders will continue to support SEL. “As a nonprofit where 60% of our budget is reliant on philanthropy, we actually need funders to lean in, now more than ever,” she said. “The reality is, we’re not going to see chronic absenteeism rates drop until we start talking about the social and emotional wellbeing of our kids in school environments. And we’re not going to see an increase in proficiency scores until we really start supporting our kids’ wellbeing.”
