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Social-emotional learning

44 Kappan October 2013

Being careful about characterEmphasizing the so-called soft skills has troubling implications for theeducation of low-income children.

By Mike Rose

We seem

willing to

accept

remedies for

the poor that

we arent

willing to

accept for

anyone else.

MIKE ROSEis a research professor at the University of Cali-

fornia, Los Angeles Graduate School of Education and Infor-

mation Studies and author of Back to School: Why Everyone

Deserves a Second Chance at Education (New Press, 2012).

Copyright 2014, 2009 by Mike Rose. This excerpt originally

appeared in Why School? Reclaiming Education for All of Us,

published by The New Press. Reprinted here with permission.

Thinkstock/Fuse

to the Top. Increasingly, cognition has been definedby the subset of skills measured by standardized testsin reading and mathematics.

In an attempt to counterbalance that narrow cog-nitive focus, educators have begun to emphasize de-veloping qualities of character, arguing that, as muchor more than cognition, these qualities account forsuccess in school and life.

Being reminded that education is more than tests

and grades is a healthy move, but I worry that ad-vocates for character or social-emotional learningaccept without question the reductive notion of cog-nition that runs through our education policies and,by accepting it, further affirm it. Economists exac-erbate the problem with their methods for carvingup and defining mental activity. If scores on abilityor achievement tests represent cognition, then any-thing not captured in those scores like the desiredqualities of character is, de facto, noncognitive.Were left with a skimpy notion of cognition and areductive dichotomy to boot.

Downplaying the cognitive and constructing thecognitive/noncognitive binary has some troublingimplications for education, especially for the educa-tion of the children of the poor.

Labeling character qualities as noncognitivemisrepresents them. Self-monitoring, for example,has to involve a consideration and analysis of onesperformance and mental state a profoundly cogni-tive activity. Flexibility demands weighing options and

Probably one of the surest claims one could makeabout how to lead a successful life, in or out of school,is that qualities such as determination, perseverance,self-control, and a degree of flexibility matter a lot. Intodays education lingo, these qualities get labeled ascharacter or social-emotional learning. Whateverthe label, there is a rapidly growing interest in how toteach character and measure it. Conferences, consul-tants, and special issues of journals focus on character.

In late 2012 journalist Paul Tough wrote a best-sellingbook,How Children Succeed, that garnered a lot of at-tention because it nicely summarizes the various bodiesof research behind the current boom.

As I watch the latest version of character educationtake off, I worry about how we define these qualities,and I worry that so much of the discussion focuses onthe education of low-income children.

Many of those who advocate character educationbelieve our current educational focus on cognitionhas been misguided. Theyre right to object to theway cognition has been reduced to a shadow of its

former self under No Child Left Behind and Race

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46 Kappan October 2013

where academic interventions have failed to reduce theachievement gap. Perhaps psychological and educa-tional interventions that focus on developing persever-ance, self-control, and the like will help poor childrensucceed in school. Such qualities are indisputably keyto a successful life, and theyve been part of our folkwisdom about success well before Dale Carnegie made

millions by promoting the power of positive thinking.But theyve gained luster via economic modeling, psy-chological studies, and the technological advances ofneuroscience. Because brain imaging allows us to seehow the frontal lobes light up when someone weighs adecision, these claims about character seem cutting edge.This aura of the new contributes to a belief that we mighthave found a potent treatment for the achievement gap.

A diverse group of players is involved in this redis-covery and championing of social-emotional learn-ing. Nobel Laureate in economics James Heckmanadvocates early childhood intervention programs forpoor kids. Charter schools like KIPP infuse char-acter education throughout the school day. And awhole range of smaller extracurricular and after-school programs from Chicagos OneGoal to achess club in a public school in Brooklyn focustheir efforts in helping the children from low-in-come homes develop a range of mental strategies andshifts in perception aimed toward academic achieve-ment. Ive worked with economically and education-ally disadvantaged children and adults for 40 years,and I know the importance of efforts like these. Theyneed to be funded and expanded. Poor kids carry bigburdens and have absurdly limited access to any kind

of school-related enrichment, especially as inequal-ity widens.But we have to be very careful, given the political

tenor of our time, to not assume that we have thelong-awaited key to helping the poor overcome theassaults of poverty. I worry that we will embrace theseessentially individual and technocratic fixes men-tal conditioning for the poor and abandon broadersocial policy aimed at poverty itself.

Given a political climate that is antagonistic to-ward the welfare state and has further shredded ouralready compromised safety net, psychosocial inter-vention may be the only viable political response to

poverty available. But can you imagine the outcryif, lets say, an old toxic dump was discovered nearScarsdale or Beverly Hills and the National Institutesof Health undertook a program to teach kids strate-gies to lessen the effects of the toxins but didnt doanything to address the toxic dump itself?

We seem willing to accept remedies for the poorthat we arent willing to accept for anyone else. Weshould use our science to figure out why that is so and then develop the character and courage to fullyaddress poverty when it is an unpopular cause. K

decision making. This is not just a problem of termi-nology, for if you dont have an accurate descriptionof something, how can you help people develop it,especially if you want to scale up your efforts?

Furthermore, students develop these desiredqualities over time in settings and relationships thatare meaningful to participants, which most likely

means the settings and relationships will have sig-nificant cognitive content. Two of the classic pre-school programs that have provided a research basefor the character advocates the Perry Preschooland Abecedarian Projects were cognitively richin imaginative play, language use, and activities thatrequired thought and cooperation.

A very different example comes from a study I justcompleted observing community college occupationalprograms as varied as fashion and diesel technology.As students developed competence, they also becamemore committed to doing a job well, were better able tomonitor and correct their performance, and improvedtheir ability to communicate what they were doing andhelp others do it. You could be by inclination the mostdetermined or communicative person in the world, butif you dont know what youre doing with a garment oran engine, your tendencies wont be realized in a mean-ingful way in the classroom or the workshop.

We also have to consider the consequences of thiscognitive/noncognitive binary in light of the historyof American educational practice. We have a power-ful tendency toward either/or policies think of oldmath/new math or phonics/whole language. Giventhis tendency, we can predict a pendulum swing away

from the academic and toward character education.And over the past 50 years, attempts at character edu-cation as a distinct pursuit havent been particularlysuccessful in some cases, student behavior is notaffected, or changes in beliefs and behaviors dont last.

Finally, the focus of the current character educa-tion movement is on low-income children, and thecold, hard fact is that many poor kids are alreadygetting terrible educations in the cognitive domain.Theres a stirring moment in Paul Toughs bookwhere a remarkable chess teacher decides shes go-ing to try to prepare one of her star pupils for anadmissions test for New Yorks selective high schools.

She finds that this stunningly bright boy has learnedpitifully little academic knowledge during his eightyears in school. It would be tragic to downplay astrong academic education for children like him.

When the emphasis on character focuses on theindividual attributes of poor children as the reason fortheir sub-par academic performance, that can distractus from making bigger and deeper policy changes thatwill address poverty and educational inequality.

One of the powerful strands in the current discus-sion of character education is that it might succeed

The focus of

the current

character

education

movement is

on low-income

children, and

the cold, hard

fact is that

many poor kids

are already

getting terrible

educations in

the cognitive

domain.

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C o p y r i g h t o f P h i D e l t a K a p p a n i s t h e p r o p e r t y o f P h i D e l t a K a p p a I n t e r n a t i o n a l a n d i t s

c o n t e n t m a y n o t b e c o p i e d o r e m a i l e d t o m u l t i p l e s i t e s o r p o s t e d t o a l i s t s e r v w i t h o u t t h e

c o p y r i g h t h o l d e r ' s e x p r e s s w r i t t e n p e r m i s s i o n . H o w e v e r , u s e r s m a y p r i n t , d o w n l o a d , o r e m a i l

a r t i c l e s f o r i n d i v i d u a l u s e .