I hate it when retired teachers comment on how glad they are not to be in the classroom in 2024. Their reasons range from academic and justifiable (“teachers have lost their professional autonomy”) to annoying (“kids today…”) to reflections on teaching in the era of Trump, when general nastiness is perceived as strength.

When teachers leave the classroom early in their careers, we lose something that was once commonly understood, across a diverse nation: teachers as respected members of the community, educated people whose opinions were valued. Teachers taught kids to wash their hands, tie their shoes and read books, and hauled them up for threatening weaker kids on the playground.  And parents appreciated those efforts.

In between critical content, from calculating sales tax to constructing a coherent paragraph, teachers must build little communities where kids can work productively together, pass safely through the halls, and experience the parameters of getting along with others.

Are all teachers successful in nurturing this? Of course not.

But all teachers do understand that there is not a lot of learning happening without order, structure and consideration for others. Every single teacher, from green newbie to grizzled veteran, struggles with this.  And there’s turnover every year, a new set of behavioral challenges that need to be addressed.

It’s the foundation of that recently vilified educational concept: Social-emotional learning.

I am currently running for school board in the community where I (happily) live—a school district that is well-run and offers solid programming, a place where students are known and cared for. I attended a Board retreat last week, and as part of the goal setting process, the facilitator invited attendees to name teachers or other school staff who are doing an outstanding job.

A dozen hands went up immediately, and the comments made by Board members, administrators and parents were all about things staff members did to enhance students’ personal growth and well-being. In other words, social-emotional learning, woven into curriculum, instruction and school climate.

Understand: all teachers either consciously include social-emotional elements in their daily practice, or benefit from good SEL, instituted by other educators in the pipeline, teaching kids how to behave in school along with their ABCs.

This—empathically—does not refer to pre-packaged “character” curriculums, as one size never fits all. You can’t buy genuine social-emotional learning. It has to be custom-tailored to the kids in front of you.

If you try to remove genuine social-emotional considerations from instruction and classroom management, you’ve created more problems for yourself. It’s the old saw about kids needing to know the teacher cares and will try to make their classroom a safe space for everyone.

So they can learn.

I’ve read lots of pieces about the corrosive effects of SEL, which generally boil down to the fact that SEL, as a set of pedagogical ideas, is not value-neutral.  And that’s true. Social-emotional learning reflects the values of the teacher and school, whether explicitly expressed or not.

That’s really not what anti-SEL commenters are worried about, however. As self-titled “Instruction Geek” Daniel Buck says: At its worst, SEL is a means to slip progressive politics into the classroom.

Gasp! There’s the rub, all right. Things like examining evidence for truth? Not in my school!

In fact, there’s always been social-emotional learning in schools, from the dunce cap to the hand-slap ruler wielded by Sister Victorine against misbehavers in your fifth grade. Labeling it and examining it—whether you call it character education, or classroom rules—is a good thing. What are we trying to teach kids, besides Algebra and World History?

I’ve always been intrigued by the KIPP Charter Schools’ founding motto, established in 1994: Work hard. Be nice. Those are certainly two explicit values, values embedded in what I think Americans want from their public schools—academic rigor and cooperative students.

When the KIPP organization decided to drop that motto in the summer of 2020, here’s what their CEO, Richard Barth said: It ignores the significant effort required to dismantle systemic racism, places value on being compliant and submissive, supports the illusion of meritocracy, and does not align with our vision of students being free to create the future they want.

Which the Wall Street Journal and a dozen right-wing bloggers called “woke nonsense”—and worse.

If KIPP schools can re-think their expressed values, for the benefit of students, so can public school teachers. It’s possible for schools to reflect the values of their community, as well as cultivating the characteristics of civic engagement, kindness and diligence.

It’s how you build a learning community