Is social-emotional learning a transformational means to improve public education or a threat to it? Ask K-12 educators, and their responses are mostly somewhere in between.
While SEL has permeated many K-12 classrooms and weathered political attacks, educators’ views toward it have remained steadily positive—if not overwhelmingly so—for the past four years, according to surveys by the EdWeek Research Center.
For example, about half of educators rate SEL’s effects on their students’ academic outcomes and soft skills as “somewhat positive,” showing little change from 2022.
That was around the time that SEL was swept up in larger political debates about diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, and critical race theory. Some conservative activists claimed SEL was liberal indoctrination, leading some schools to distance themselves from the term SEL, if not the practices.
But those political debates haven’t appeared to drastically shift educators’ views on SEL’s effectiveness, said Michael Petrilli, the president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.
“The stability is the main takeaway here, and also that some of the debates that we have inside of our little education policy bubble about things like SEL may have been overblown,” Petrilli said. “You wouldn’t necessarily know that this was a big culture war flashpoint by looking at these survey results.”
There were mild shifts in educators’ attitudes toward SEL that potentially were a result of that politization a few years ago, but nothing dramatic, Petrilli said.
The Education Week Research Center surveyed nationally representative groups of teachers, principals, and district leaders on their attitudes toward SEL in September/October 2022, December 2024, and December 2025/January 2026.
Educators think SEL is effective, but not a panacea
Overall, a majority of teachers and school and district leaders believe that social-emotional learning—the process of teaching students’ non-academic skills such as emotional management, cooperation, goal-setting, and empathy—has had a positive impact on students’ academic and social skills.
However, a substantial share of educators believe that SEL hasn’t had any impact on their students’ academic and social skills. That sentiment peaked in 2024, with about a quarter of educators saying that SEL didn’t have an effect.
Teachers and school and district leaders are most likely to say that SEL is one of many strategies available to them.
Much smaller shares of educators see SEL as a passing fad or a threat to public education than educators who see SEL as transformational, promising, or a viable strategy. Again, educators’ opinions haven’t shifted much since 2022, even as political debates over SEL have flared up.
Why is support for social-emotional learning not growing?
While educators’ attitudes toward SEL’s effectiveness haven’t tanked following contentious political debates, their mixed opinions of it remain fairly entrenched. The data then beg the question: Why don’t educators see social-emotional learning as more effective despite schools’ investment in the concept?
There could be a few reasons, said Jerome Graham, an assistant professor of K-12 educational administration at Michigan State University.
One may be the fact that resources and enthusiasm for new initiatives of any kind—SEL or otherwise—tend to wane a few years after launch as new problems crop up, district leadership gets distracted, and professional development and other resources dry up, he said. Teachers may also have unrealistic expectations for what SEL can accomplish, seeing it as a quick strategy to fix students’ bad behavior without recognizing the weaknesses in their own social-emotional skills, Graham said. If teachers are not modeling good social-emotional skills, students are less likely to pick them up.
“We know from very rigorous research that SEL skills are impactful, that SEL programs can be impactful,” he said. “We see good research on the economic returns at individual and societal levels. We have a good understanding of how we improve the skills. But if we think that we can just drop a program into poor organizational routines and expect to have optimal results, we’re not going to see that.”
SEL initiatives are more effective when they focus first on building adults’ social-emotional skills and creating a positive school culture, he said.
While many educators see social-emotional learning as meaningful to students’ learning, they may not think they should be the ones who have to teach it, Graham said.
“Based on my own experience when I talk to educators, that was a common refrain... ‘This is the job of counselors, this is the job of social workers, I just want to teach students math or literature,’” he said. “So there is a contingent of teachers who feel that way. I imagine that there’s risk that that contingent can grow, especially as teachers are increasingly stressed and having to deal with a lot.”
Perceived barriers to SEL remain consistent over time
When asked what the major challenges to social-emotional learning are in schools, educators cited a number of barriers.
Among the most common challenges are: students’ social-emotional needs are beyond what educators can cope with; SEL is difficult to integrate into academic subjects; educators receive insufficient professional development and educational resources to teach SEL, and the effort to catch students up academically leaves little bandwidth for focusing on social-emotional skills.
Educators’ opinions on the biggest challenges have also not shifted much in the past four years, with the exception of there being a lack of bandwidth for SEL in the effort to catch students up academically. Coming out of the pandemic school closures in 2022, catching students up academically was the most cited challenge, with 46 percent of educators saying that’s why they didn’t have time to teach social-emotional skills.
That share dropped to 38 percent in 2024, and 28 percent earlier this year.
Petrilli worries that those numbers reflect a more concerning trend: not that educators suddenly have more time in the day to focus on SEL, but rather that educators are focusing less on catching students up academically.
“This is bad because clearly the job is not done yet on catching kids up—far from it,” he said. “I personally wish schools were feeling more pressured to do that.”
Wherever educators’ opinions fall on the effectiveness and value of SEL, many are bullish about how much their schools and districts plan to invest in it moving forward.
About half of educators told the EdWeek Research Center earlier this year that they predict their schools and districts will emphasize social-emotional learning more in the next five years. Fewer than one in 10 educators think their school or district will deemphasize SEL in the near future.
When asked how their support for social-emotional learning has changed in the past year, 29% of educators said it had increased a lot—and that share was much higher among elementary teachers and principals, 40% of whom said their support had increased a lot. A quarter of all educators said that their personal support had increased a little, and about one in 10 said it had not changed.
SEL is essential to running an elementary school classroom, and educators teach these skills whether they call it SEL or not, said Petrilli. But SEL shouldn’t be confined to the early grades, he said.
“At the high school level, we’re having these discussions around the [portrait] of a graduate where you see a lot of these skills mentioned,” Petrilli said. “It’s there. It’s in the air. Maybe this represents that we’ve just come back to some common sense that says, of course, these are skills that schools need to teach.”
It just shouldn’t be done at the expense of academic subjects, he said.
