Social and emotional learning (SEL) advocates always insist that their enterprise is “evidence-based.” There is, in truth, remarkably little rigorous evidence demonstrating SEL’s academic benefits. A 2017 Rand Corporation review of the SEL literature found a single study meeting its highest threshold for evidentiary rigor demonstrating positive academic achievement effects. But what SEL advocates lack in quality, they make up in quantity. There have been a great many studies of non-cognitive interventions that have shown results, and occasionally academics group these studies together into a meta-analysis alleging to prove that SEL “works.”

The latest such study , published last month, reviewed 424 studies involving a total of over half a million students. Unlike previous meta-analyses, the authors do not offer a list of studies to facilitate spot-checking (an exercise which, when I conducted it on earlier ones, revealed that many of the studies didn’t resemble contemporary SEL programs). But the topline conclusion is that participation in SEL programming “improves skills, attitudes, behavior, school climate and safety, peer relationships, school functioning, and academic achievement.”

Regardless of how reliable the studies are, this seems like if anything it should be good news, no? Well, likely not.

In fairly dispassionate academic prose, the authors effectively corroborate the concern about SEL often articulated by parental rights groups like Moms for Liberty: that it is a vehicle for promoting critical race theory ideology. The authors write:

Now, if you ask most parents to think back to their school experience, they probably wouldn’t point out that the discourse of their emotions was situated within the politics and power of the system. This isn’t how human beings have normally experienced the world. Nor did Kimberlé Crenshaw, the woman who coined the term “Critical Race Theory,” simply describe a hitherto unrealized but also always omnipresent social reality when she coined the term “intersectionality.” This is all, as SEL advocates would say, a “lens.” Which is to say, it’s a way of looking at and thinking about reality as distorted through an ideological prism.

That prism has, as the authors note, increasingly become a core feature of the SEL enterprise ever since 2019 when, with the Jagers et al paper cited, the Collaborative for Academic Social and Emotional Learning (CASEL) embraced what it calls “Transformative SEL.” As I’ve detailed in several other pieces , Transformative SEL takes the previously morally neutral core competencies and infuses them with CRT-derived values.

This is especially noteworthy, given that – as the authors point out, SEL in practice is essentially an inherently ideological enterprise: “Activities that focus on values were endorsed in 220 studies (49.5%), activities that focus on perspectives were endorsed in 125 studies (30.2%), and identity instruction was endorsed in 145 studies (34.1%).”

Whose values? What perspectives? Who defines “identity”?

Beyond the surface politicization, there is a deeper danger in all of this. Back before we referred to it as a “CRT” lens, and back when this way of viewing the world was still predominantly confined to college campuses, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt made an excellent case in The Coddling of the American Mind that the internalization of this ideology effectively encourages people to adopt perceptive habits commonly associated with mental illness. They referred to it as “reverse cognitive behavior therapy.” Whereas an unintended personal snub can and should be brushed off, it could also be perceived as a “micro-aggression” reflecting grave societal inequities that the individual is powerless to affect, engendering feeling of rage and despair. It all depends on what “lens” you look at it through.

If we grant that SEL can “work,” that is, can affect a student’s attitudes, perspectives, and “identity,” then whether it is likely to help or harm is contingent on the content of the SEL. Virtually all of the SEL studies reviewed in meta-analysis were on programs that preceded the rise of “Transformative SEL.” If those programs really did work, then parents today have all the more reason to worry.

This article originally appeared in the AEIdeas blog and is reprinted with kind permission from the American Enterprise Institute.