Time that should be spent helping kids recover from pandemic learning loss is being spent instead on SEL, parents said.
During the pandemic, Traci Spiegel’s son and most of his Howard County, Md., classmates received virtually no mathematics instruction for five months.
What little ineffective virtual instruction he did receive didn’t prevent his grade from plummeting from an A to a C. So when he returned to the classroom as a high-school freshman, he became incredibly frustrated that he and his peers were asked to spend 40 minutes every Monday on so-called social-emotional learning (SEL).
Instead of spending as much time as possible making up the ground they had lost in math and other subjects, they were taught how to avoid committing microaggressions, how to use pronouns, and how to avoid offending gay people, according to Spiegel’s son.
Since conservatives at all levels of government embraced the fight against critical race theory, dissenting parents nationwide know how to recognize and counter racially divisive curricula. But a broader suite of radical ideas, couched in therapeutic language, is quietly being advanced under the banner of SEL, parents whose children have been exposed to such programming told National Review.
In a recent Washington Post article, SEL advocates argued that the conservative outcry is an unwarranted attack on crucial mental-health programming for kids.
A review of SEL materials obtained by the nonprofit Parents Defending Education (PDE) confirms parents’ concerns that mental-health language is being co-opted to advance radical ideas about race, gender, and sexuality. But even if some of the SEL material is innocuous, parents told NR they’d still be concerned because time spent on SEL is time not spent helping kids recover from the learning loss they suffered during two years of school closures.
As Spiegel put it: “Where is the algebra? Where is the biology? Where is the English?”
A life-long Democrat, Spiegel joined the fray over the school reopening issue. Her activism grew after her son started complaining about the weekly social-justice-heavy SEL lessons, curated by each individual teacher and administered to high-schoolers county-wide. One question on a quiz caught her eye: “How do you feel when you see two men kissing?” she said it read, paraphrasing. The choices were “A.) Aggressive, B.) Passive aggressive, C.) Neutral, or D.) None of the above,” she said.
Her daughter, a high-school senior, took a quiz that asked something to the effect of: “If you didn’t have a diverse makeup of friends in your friend group, is it racist to seek out another race to fill your friend group?” Spiegel said.
Given that the district never explained the purpose of the SEL lessons, Spiegel and many of her fellow moms felt like the lessons were either a waste of their kids’ precious instruction time or a manipulative tactic to diagnose a bigotry problem in the schools that didn’t exist.
“My daughter’s asking me if she’s a racist and my son’s confused about why he has to take these,” Spiegel said.
Of course, examples of SEL in the classroom extend beyond Howard County, Md.
Elementary-school students in West Hartford, Conn., public schools were subject to “social-emotional learning through an equity lens,” and their parents were not given the choice to have their kids opt out, PDE discovered in November.
Parents from the district sounded the alarm over materials being used to teach their kids about niche sex-and-gender identities, including transgender content being taught to kindergartners. For example, a first-grade text included Jacob’s New Dress, a story about a boy who wants to wear a dress to school, and a fourth-grade text included When Aidan Became a Brother, which pushes gender theory and teaches kids to question the sex they’re assigned at birth, parents told PDE.
The West Hartford district’s director of equity advancement, Roszena Haskins, emailed parents that the schools have “redoubled district-wide efforts to attend to the social and emotional needs of children and adults” with “social justice standards” that come from the Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning framework, or CASEL.
Haskins wrote that “CASEL acknowledges that ‘while SEL alone will not solve longstanding and deep-seated inequities in the education system, it can help schools to promote understanding, examine biases, reflect on and address the impact of racism, . . . close opportunity gaps and create a more inclusive school community.’”
Back in Howard County, a mother named Kim, who has a middle-schooler, told National Review that her daughter dropped from gifted to basic math, from the 82nd percentile for math in fall 2019 to the 51st percentile by fall 2020, as a result of learning loss over the pandemic. The SEL diversions likely exacerbated the decline, she said.
For all of her fifth-grade year, from April 2020 through June 2020, rather than a daily math class, Kim’s daughter received 20 minutes of math per day via an app called “DreamBox,” where she completed modules with little guidance, Kim said. Kids met with math and English language arts (ELA) teachers only once a week, Kim claimed. It got worse the next year. “Because Howard County went on a block schedule, my daughter had no math or ELA from September 2020 to January 2021. So, I basically forgot about math for her until the 3rd quarter that started mid-January 2021,” Kim said.
And yet, her eleven-year-old received weekly SEL lessons during related arts class, one of which Kim said was called “How You Can Be an Upstander.”
The PowerPoint posed the following scenario, she said: “You are watching a makeup tutorial on YouTube. The person putting on makeup in the video identifies as male. There are people in the comments saying extremely hateful and cruel things. What could you do to be an upstander in this situation?”
On September 10, 2020, a mother of a student at Harper’s Choice Middle School in Howard County Public School System (HCPSS) posted a screenshot to Facebook of a similarly progressive presentation in her son’s eighth–grade math class that read:
You are at lunch with a group of friends. A male classmate walks by. He loves theater and dance, doesn’t play sports, and often hangs out with more with girls in class than with boys. A friend at the table refers to the student with words that you know are insulting and offensive. If you were a student at this table, what would you do?
An HCPSS teacher and parent told National Review that she pulled one of her kids out of the school system and put the child into Catholic private school, even though she still teaches in the district, “because we didn’t want to put her through this.”
Corroborating Spiegel and Kim’s account, the teacher said that her daughter “basically didn’t have math for a year.” And when she did, her daughter’s teacher took 20 minutes of the 45-minute class period to talk about Black Lives Matter “almost every single day,” coinciding with the racial riots in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in the summer of 2020.
Her daughter would ask her teacher, facetiously, “Isn’t this algebra class?” and the social-justice tangents would stop for a day or two, but then start back up again, she said.
At one point her daughter’s teacher told the students they’d have to skip an important unit of algebra because they “didn’t have time,” she added. Similarly, her son attended cell meetings every week to discuss white privilege, being an ally to the gay community, and the like, she claims.
“CRT-lite is what I would call it. It’s not high-level academic but it’s watered-down CRT,” she said.
HCPSS did not respond to a request for comment.
As for Spiegel’s son, one of his teachers told his class to take an online test based on Individual Differences Research on one of more than 100 grievance subjects, including transphobia, homophobia, racism, gender, fascism, sexism, BLM, and socialism, he said. He took the homophobia quiz, which asked questions like “Does the thought of being gay make you feel gross?” he said.
Besides being overtly political, these school activities diverted the class from more meaningful learning, which was long overdue, Spiegel’s son said. When he finally physically sat in math class again for tenth grade, the first thing he and his classmates did was take a gender-identity questionnaire. It took ten minutes to complete and prevented him from finishing his math placement test, leaving the teacher with an incomplete picture of his deficiencies and areas in need of improvement.
As schools in Howard County used valuable class time to push SEL, many parents were hiring tutors to compensate for their kids’ slumping academic performance, Spiegel said.
“But what about the parents who don’t have the means to hire tutors?” she wondered.
“I wake up angry every day over what they did to my children and am working hard to get a commonsense person elected now.” Spiegel is now the campaign manager for Tudy Adler, who is running for Howard County Board of Education on the platform, “a voice for parents.”
“There are ‘me’s’ all over the country: angry moms waking up to what’s going on,” she said.