Social-emotional learning

44 Kappan October 2013

Being careful about character
Emphasizing the so-called soft skills has troubling implications for the
education 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 ROSE is 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 dened
by the subset of skills measured by standardized tests
in 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 much
or more than cognition, these qualities account for
success 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 learning
accept without question the reductive notion of cog-
nition that runs through our education policies and,
by accepting it, further afrm it. Economists exac-
erbate the problem with their methods for carving
up and dening mental activity. If scores on ability
or achievement tests represent cognition, then any-
thing not captured in those scores like the desired
qualities of character is, de facto, noncognitive.
Were left with a skimpy notion of cognition and a
reductive dichotomy to boot.
Downplaying the cognitive and constructing the
cognitive/noncognitive binary has some troubling
implications for education, especially for the educa-
tion of the children of the poor.
Labeling character qualities as noncognitive
misrepresents them. Self-monitoring, for example,
has to involve a consideration and analysis of ones
performance and mental state a profoundly cogni-
tive activity. Flexibility demands weighing options and
Probably one of the surest claims one could make
about how to lead a successful life, in or out of school,
is that qualities such as determination, perseverance,
self-control, and a degree of exibility matter a lot. In
todays education lingo, these qualities get labeled as
character or social-emotional learning. Whatever
the label, there is a rapidly growing interest in how to
teach character and measure it. Conferences, consul-
tants, and special issues of journals focus on character.
In late 2012 journalist Paul Tough wrote a best-selling
book, How Children Succeed, that garnered a lot of at-
tention because it nicely summarizes the various bodies
of research behind the current boom.
As I watch the latest version of character education
take off, I worry about how we dene these qualities,
and I worry that so much of the discussion focuses on
the education of low-income children.
Many of those who advocate character education
believe our current educational focus on cognition
has been misguided. Theyre right to object to the
way cognition has been reduced to a shadow of its
former self under No Child Left Behind and Race
46 Kappan October 2013
where academic interventions have failed to reduce the
achievement gap. Perhaps psychological and educa-
tional interventions that focus on developing persever-
ance, self-control, and the like will help poor children
succeed in school. Such qualities are indisputably key
to a successful life, and theyve been part of our folk
wisdom 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 of
neuroscience. Because brain imaging allows us to see
how the frontal lobes light up when someone weighs a
decision, these claims about character seem cutting edge.
This aura of the new contributes to a belief that we might
have 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 Heckman
advocates early childhood intervention programs for
poor kids. Charter schools like KIPP infuse char-
acter education throughout the school day. And a
whole range of smaller extracurricular and after-
school programs from Chicagos OneGoal to a
chess club in a public school in Brooklyn focus
their efforts in helping the children from low-in-
come homes develop a range of mental strategies and
shifts 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. They
need to be funded and expanded. Poor kids carry big
burdens 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 the
long-awaited key to helping the poor overcome the
assaults of poverty. I worry that we will embrace these
essentially individual and technocratic xes men-
tal conditioning for the poor and abandon broader
social policy aimed at poverty itself.
Given a political climate that is antagonistic to-
ward the welfare state and has further shredded our
already compromised safety net, psychosocial inter-
vention may be the only viable political response to
poverty available. But can you imagine the outcry
if, lets say, an old toxic dump was discovered near
Scarsdale or Beverly Hills and the National Institutes
of Health undertook a program to teach kids strate-
gies to lessen the effects of the toxins but didnt do
anything to address the toxic dump itself?
We seem willing to accept remedies for the poor
that we arent willing to accept for anyone else. We
should use our science to gure out why that is so
and then develop the character and courage to fully
address 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 description
of something, how can you help people develop it,
especially if you want to scale up your efforts?
Furthermore, students develop these desired
qualities over time in settings and relationships that
are meaningful to participants, which most likely
means the settings and relationships will have sig-
nicant cognitive content. Two of the classic pre-
school programs that have provided a research base
for the character advocates the Perry Preschool
and Abecedarian Projects were cognitively rich
in imaginative play, language use, and activities that
required thought and cooperation.
A very different example comes from a study I just
completed observing community college occupational
programs as varied as fashion and diesel technology.
As students developed competence, they also became
more committed to doing a job well, were better able to
monitor and correct their performance, and improved
their ability to communicate what they were doing and
help others do it. You could be by inclination the most
determined or communicative person in the world, but
if you dont know what youre doing with a garment or
an 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 this
cognitive/noncognitive binary in light of the history
of American educational practice. We have a power-
ful tendency toward either/or policies think of old
math/new math or phonics/whole language. Given
this 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 particularly
successful in some cases, student behavior is not
affected, or changes in beliefs and behaviors dont last.
Finally, the focus of the current character educa-
tion 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.
Theres a stirring moment in Paul Toughs book
where a remarkable chess teacher decides shes go-
ing to try to prepare one of her star pupils for an
admissions test for New Yorks selective high schools.
She nds that this stunningly bright boy has learned
pitifully little academic knowledge during his eight
years in school. It would be tragic to downplay a
strong academic education for children like him.
When the emphasis on character focuses on the
individual attributes of poor children as the reason for
their sub-par academic performance, that can distract
us from making bigger and deeper policy changes that
will 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.