On behalf of The Family Foundation, I wish to express our objections to the proposed Virginia Social Emotional Learning Standards (“SEL standards”), which risk the health and privacy of all students, and undermine the ability of parents to teach their children important moral principles.

Similar to the Model Policies for the Treatment of Transgender Students, it appears that the development team for the draft SEL standards did not include researchers and experts concerned about this type of curriculum being taught to children who could have offered a balance.

As drafted, the Department’s proposed SEL standards present several concerns that range from detracting from core academic work to imposing on parental rights, to respecting the privacy of students.

The Proposed SEL standards will detract from the core academic curriculum.

These standards are poorly timed given that for over a year Virginia schools have been struggling to overcome the setbacks caused by mandated school shutdowns due to COVID.  If adopted, these SEL standards will impose non-academic instruction at a time when so many students in Virginia are struggling to maintain or improve their performance in core academic subjects.

The Proposed SEL standards will be difficult to teach and detract from core learning.  While academics and proponents of SEL have explained their opinion about the validity of SEL, it still lacks practicality.  For example, how does a math teacher design a lesson plan to instruct a full room of young students to empathize or be self-aware?  

The proposed SEL standards attempt to present a structuralized way to teach students about emotions and character.  But in actuality, these lessons often occur through unplanned, unprepared moments of opportunity.

The draft standards fail to identify the primary source that educators will rely upon for assessing SEL standards.

Proponents of SEL advocate for the development of the “whole child” (a core responsibility of parents, not government), in order to essentially teach students to become “better people,” but all this is based on subjective and values-laden standards.  

Consider the following statements in the draft SEL standards:

• SoA2: 7-8a, I can recognize and describe unfairness and injustice in many forms including attitudes, speech, behaviors, policies, practices, and laws.

• SoA2: 7-8b, I can explain the difference between conscious bias and unconscious (implicit) bias.

• SoA2: 9-10a, I can recognize that all people (including myself) have certain advantages and disadvantages in society based on who they are and where they were born.

Since many of the terms embedded in these statements could be interpreted differently, teachers and school administrators will be the ones to determine what laws are just or unjust, what constitutes bias (and which biases are good or bad), or even how someone is considered to be advantaged or disadvantaged.  They also lack any right/wrong outcomes.  For instance, cheating on a test would no longer be a right or wrong debate, but determined by social norms.

With these standards, the public school system will necessarily need to develop training programs for teachers and staff, which will further increase costs and place more demands on the classroom, detracting from the instructional time.

The proposed standards require too much introspection that could harm a child’s overall mental health and deviate from parental teachings.

According to Dr. Karen Effrem, M.D., SEL “will further spread the recent wave of amateur, unqualified psychoanalysis in schools,” which is not the purpose of public school education.

The proposed standards force elementary age students to begin thinking of people as groups for the purposes of forming their own identities (see SeA2: 1-2d, I can develop an awareness of multiple groups in society and SeA2: 3-4d, I can describe the multiple groups in society that help create my identity).  At a time when our culture is so divided and tensions are high, SEL seeks to push identity thought onto young children.  Furthermore, the public school system should not be urging students to look to groups and factions in society for the formation of personal identity because it erodes individuality and family values.

The proposed SEL standards exclude any mention of family values. 

While some of the broader concepts promoted through SEL, like respect for others and resolving disputes, are beneficial, the extent to which these standards overreach parental authority by addressing key principles that parents teach their children is very problematic.   

The five SEL “competencies” of self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making effectively replace the moral and character formation that starts in the home and that has been historically reinforced in schools. Rather than respecting a family’s faith or moral teachings, SEL and those teaching it become the arbiters of what’s right and what’s true.

VDOE’s definition of SEL wrongly suggests that all people develop and mature in the same way through the same processes.

VDOE defines SEL as “the process through which all young people and adults acquire and apply the knowledge, skills, and attitudes to develop healthy identities, manage emotions and achieve personal and collective goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain supportive relationships, and make responsible and caring decisions.”  This definition negates the religious and personal ways that a person can develop these qualities, which will result in students being taught one set of principles that are determined through social norms and selective academic research, likely overriding other important considerations such as religion and tradition.

It’s also filled with subjective goals like “healthy identities” and being able to “show empathy for others.”  How will the standards define a healthy identity?

It’s unclear how SEL instruction will be measured and assessed by teachers, and weather parents will be notified of any such assessments.

The proposed SEL standards give teachers and schools broad latitude in teaching and measuring these social and emotional qualities.  For example, what would be the proper way to formally teach empathy or self-awareness?

There is no indication of what protocols schools and teachers should follow should they use some kind of software to assess students on their social and emotional development.   Some educational software developers claim to have created products that can accurately assess a number of sensitive personality and character traits.  If teachers and schools utilize such assessments, under Virginia law parents must be notified and given the chance to opt their child out of such assessments if they are in survey form.

What assurances will be made to protect the privacy of student assessments?

When schools and teachers incorporate online or digital assessments, all of that data will be stored somewhere.  This requires procedures for data storage, protection and access, and if it’s violated a student’s personal feelings and thoughts could be captured by people with devious intentions.  Regarding access, will colleges and employers be able to gain access to how an elementary age student viewed various groups and identities?  A formalized assessment will lead to more student performance measures, which will necessarily lead to more data collection.

Conclusion

The proposed SEL standards place a significant amount of emphasis on managing feelings, and this will inevitably conflict with efforts to encourage students to think clearly, critically and independently.  Certainly feelings themselves are not bad or dangerous, but they can be misdirected without concrete principles of right and wrong.  Traditional public schools must avoid the tendency to force students to focus on non-academic concepts that detract from their ability to learn history, how to read, spell, add, subtract, multiply, etc.  We respectfully ask that VDOE revise these standards so they are less intrusive, and require more thoughtful protocols that protect the privacy and values of students, parents and families.