Nancy Bailey sees another Reformer trick rapidly overtaking teachers and schools: Social emotional learning, like this is a new idea or something that never occurred to teachers.

She writes:

Social-emotional learning (SEL) in schools makes many parents and teachers nervous. We worry there’s an ulterior motive to collect behavioral data on how children think and act, and that the ultimate goal is to privatize public schools and track students.

Talk about transforming our public schools away from cognitive learning to SEL is everywhere!

Those promoting this kind of push for self-regulation of students and massive character data collection claim that teachers have methodically taught students without caring about their feelings.

This is an insult, especially since the test-and-punish era that hurt students, came from the same outside corporate reformers who mean to privatize public schools and who are now promoting social-emotional learning!

It’s the roadblocks that have been put in a teacher’s way by corporate outsiders that have made teaching regimented and cold. High-stakes testing, and increasingly difficult standards, rigor, even for kindergarteners, were created to shut down public schools. This never came from teachers!

The last straw occurred when she saw that David Brooks was writing about “social-emotional learning,” and she knew that SEL has become an empty phrase.

Bailey says that if you want to see true teacher love for students, think about the thousands of teachers in Los Angeles, picketing in the rain so their students would have better education.