The National Pulse: “Social Emotional Learning” Standards Continue Ominous National March

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Here are excerpts from a recent article at The National Pulse about the continued relentless push for subjective, non-academic, parental autonomy destroying social emotional learning programs:

Despite lots of concerns by Ohio parents and pro-family state school board members, as well as troubling data provided by Education Liberty Watch, (summarized here) and activism by Eagle Forum and Concerned Women for America, the full Ohio state board adopted statewide SEL standards by an 11-6 vote. Although there were promises made that students, teachers, and schools would not be assessed or rated on these standards, the strategic plan putting the SEL standards adoption into motion the previous year clearly states in several places that they would be. The board also voted down a resolution by member Kirstin Hill, who led the opposition, to codify that these standards would not be assessed…

…Presidential candidate and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has also significantly changed school discipline policies in that city’s public schools, both by imposing social emotional learning programs and restorative justice programs. SEL is going to be in every middle school in the city…

…The last piece of evidence I would offer for this steady and depressing march toward government mandated SEL is a statement by another Democrat presidential candidate, Congressman Tim Ryan of Ohio, who said in the first night of the Democratic presidential debate:

Ninety percent of the shooters who do school shootings come from the school they’re in, and 73 percent of them feel shamed, traumatized, or bullied. We need to make sure that these kids feel connected to the school. That means a mental health counselor in every single school in the United States. We need to start playing offense. If our kids are so traumatized that they’re getting a gun and going into our schools, we’re doing something wrong, too, and we need reform around trauma-based care.

Unfortunately, the congressman is ignoring lots of evidence that SEL and mental screening does not work to prevent school violence. Ryan has been an SEL supporter for a long time and is making it a major centerpiece of his education policy platform. He was actually honest enough to admit that SEL is an integral part of Common Core and more important than academics during final debate on the Every Student Succeeds Act.

You may read the full article here.

The National Pulse: Here’s What States Should Do to Really Get Rid of Common Core

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The Florida Stop Common Core Coalition’s list of national expert recommendations for full getting rid of Common Core in Florida are listed in this article at The National Pulse. 

The Florida Stop Common Core Coalition and I are grateful to Dr. Sandra Stotsky, Dr. Mark Bauerlein, and Dr. Duke Pesta for their direct involvement and recommendations in this document, as well as Dr. Louisa Moats for her seminal work on phonics and literacy education. We are also grateful to Ze’ev Wurman, Dr. Ted Rebarber, and J.R. Wilson for their direct work on the math portion of this document, as well as to Dr. James Milgram for his long and seminal work on math standards as a mathematician across the nation. Finally, we wish to acknowledge Emmett McGroarty’s involvement and advice from a policy perspective.

The recommendations common to both subjects are offered first, followed by those specific to math and then to English language arts (ELA). Discussion of each recommendation accompanied by extensive references follows after the recommendations in the full document. Although recommendations and accompanying references in both of these documents are geared toward Florida and Governor DeSantis’ executive order, the recommendations here are generalized for any state.

Recommendations Common to Mathematics and ELA

1.) The best solution would be to review and adopt one of the best pre-Common Core sets of standards for English Language Arts and math as discussed for the subject specific standards. This would stop the academic decline seen across America and for the U.S. in international comparisons.

2.) Any statewide standards review should reject efforts to “tweak” or “fix” the current Common Core-based standards, but instead remove the entire set of these systemically inferior, deficient, and in some cases experimental standards and use the standards of one of the high performing states or countries listed in the subject-specific recommendations below as the basis for a review.

3.) The premises of the Common Core are fundamentally defective. Having the public comment on individual standards implies that the standards need to be tweaked, or adjusted, at specific passages. It will thus likely lead to a repeat of the rebranding that has occurred across the nation. Public comment on individual standards will not fix the systemic sequential flaws of the current math standards nor address needed content that is not present in the standards for either subject. Intentionally or not, constraining comments in this manner limits the ability of parents and other citizens to make broader points about the standards and gives the impression that public input is not really welcome.

4.) Completely reject “social-emotional learning” or “21^st Century” psychosocial skills in the standards, such as “grit/perseverance” or a “growth mindset.” Both the math and the ELA standards are supposed to be and have been portrayed as rigorous academic content standards, and should focus on subject-matter academic content. The research supporting such fuzzy standards is unreliable and some of it borders on fraudulent.

5.) Prominently include, especially for review of the high school standards, content experts (e.g.,professors of mathematics, engineering, and physics as opposed to professors of mathematics education) in the subject matter standards for final review. Some of the experts reviewing the standards for younger students should have strong abilities in child development to make sure that new standards are developmentally appropriate, a glaring problem with Common Core.

The individual recommendations for math and English are available in the full article.

The National Pulse: “A Little Troubling”: Study by Pro-Common Core Group Finds Standards Have Failed

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This study by a pro-Common Core group as summarized by Dr. Effrem confirms what many experts and parents have known all along – that the Common Core standards were going to fail academically. Here is an excerpt:

Yet another study confirms what a miserable academic failure the Common Core standards have turned out to be. The research was carried out by the federally funded Center on Standards, Alignment, Instruction, and Learning (C-SAIL) and reported by Lance Izumi of Pacific Research Institute in the conservative Daily Caller, as well as by Chalkbeat, a very pro-Common Core establishment outlet.

The key findings of this study are as follows:

Contrary to our expectation, we found that the CCR [College and Career Ready, i.e. Common Core] standards had significant negative effects on 4th graders’ reading achievement during the 7 years after the adoption of the new standards, and had a significant negative effect on 8th graders’ math achievement 7 years after adoption based on analyses of NAEP composite scores. The size of these negative effects, however, was generally small, ranging from -0.10 to -0.06 SDs.

Although the authors say that the negative effects were “generally small,” one of the authors admits in the Chalkbeat piece:

“It’s rather unexpected,” said researcher Mengli Song of the American Institutes for Research. “The magnitude of the negative effects tend to increase over time. That’s a little troubling.”

As Izumi states, “it is more than a little troubling.” Here are several reasons why:

• C-SAIL, the federally funded research entity that supervised the research, is headed by Morgan Polikoff, who is very much in favor of Common Core and student data mining. If research put out by these people and entities is finding that Common Core is harmful, then the outlined problems are quite likely to be real.
• The actual researchers are from the American Institutes for Research (AIR) which bills itself as “one of the world’s largest behavioral and social science research and evaluation organizations,” and they are also strong supporters of Common Core and Social emotional learning (SEL) teaching, testing, and data collection. According to AIR’s contract with the state of Florida, they not only write state level Common Core assessments, but also the NAEP and the validation studies for the NAEP, the scores for which were examined for this study. If AIR researchers, with their vested interest in showing that Common Core and their state tests improve the NAEP scores (which they also write and which could easily be manipulated by them), found that Common Core in fact damages academic achievement measured by the very tests they write, then those findings must truly be very significant and “troubling.”
• Tom Loveless of the center-left Brookings Institution (and long a critic of the Common Core standards as a means of improving academic achievement) said when asked about this study, “One thing standards advocates need to think about is that this doesn’t appear to work very well.”
• Other pro-Common Core researchers and advocates admit that the methodology of this study is sound.
• Chalkbeat is already discussing a study not even released yet that has NAEP results only through 2013 that allegedly shows improvements with Common Core in a attempt to blunt the seriously bad news for Core supporters from the C-SAIL/AIR study.

You may read the entire article at The National Pulse.

Why Ohio Should Reject “Social Emotional Learning” Standards

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This article written by Dr. Karen Effrem for The National Pulse details Ohio’s new plan to implement social-emotional standards into its state education system.

A committee of the Ohio State Board of Education is scheduled to vote on advancing a proposal to the full state board to implement statewide social emotional learning (SEL) standards this coming Tuesday, May 14th. This is part of a national movement to psychologize education, falsely advertised as improving academic achievement and preventing violence and suicide.

The problems with this approach are myriad. They include the following points (with more information available from the Pioneer Institute, as well as this list of concerns for Ohio and numerous writings in this space, such as here):

SEL would further erode the fundamental right of parents to control the education and upbringing of their children due to unjustified expansion of the schools beyond their basic mission of academics.

Some SEL assessments and lessons promote highly controversial topics that, regardless of one’s view of them, ought to be up to parents to decide how to discuss and present to their children.

Even proponents of SEL have admitted there is a lack of consensus in defining it and multiple flaws in the research, with mixed or negative evidence of academic improvement.

The teaching and assessing of SEL by untrained or minimally trained, already overburdened school personnel, as well as the linking of SEL to violence and suicide prevention via mental-health screening, can lead to many problems such as biased or inaccurate assessment based on subjective criteria, improper referrals, diagnosis and over-treatment with potentially harmful medications.

Experts have admitted and research has shown that over-medication has occurred in the most vulnerable populations, including foster children and minorities.

There are strong linkages between SEL and Common Core, as well as between SEL and competency-based education/personalized learning that further dilute the promised rigor of Common Core and nudge/force children into career paths not of their choosing.

Competency-based education and the education technology on which it is based, like SEL and Common Core, has little to no evidence of improved academic achievement and severely damages student-teacher interaction.

If SEL is about meeting the individual needs of the “whole child” and the Department of Education claims this will be implemented according to the individual needs of the school districts, why is there a need for statewide SEL standards?

If there is no reliable way to assess SEL standards, as admitted by experts such as “Grit Guru” Dr. Angela Duckworth, and the Aspen National Commission on SEL strongly recommends against assessing students and teachers on these subjective standards, then why have them?

If SEL’s definition, assessments, and research are all questionable, and experts admit no evidence of cost effectiveness, should Ohio be spending its state’s share of what national proponent groups have estimated to be $30 billion on SEL in this time of tight education budgets, teacher shortages, infrastructure issues, etc.?

The state superintendent’s budget testimony mentioned $4.2 million in federal grants related to SEL, school climate and mental health. That means Ohio will have to follow the dictates of the federal government to use these funds for SEL and will not have the flexibility to use them as state officials see fit. This is similar to issues of state sovereignty that arose with No Child Left Behind’s testing mandates and Race to the Top that required the adoption of Common Core.

If you are an Ohio resident and wish to make your voice heard on this critical topic, please consider a personalized note using arguments from this list or the other resources cited above in your email. Addresses may be found here. As we celebrate mothers and families this weekend, let us always be vigilant to guard parental rights and the hearts and minds of our children.

The full article can be read on The National Pulse’s website.