MAKING STUDENTS INTO SUBJECTS: ONE MOM’S FIGHT TO DEFEAT WOKE SEL ACTIVISTS

Social Emotional Learning is poisoning schools across America, but parents are starting to wake up—and fight back.

Part Two in a series about exposing the indoctrination in our schools.

By the end of 2022 Kristine Strachan was telling her son not to do assignments and regularly informing Principal Ottum, Superintendent Grotting, and School Board President Colett of material she thought was disturbing; answers ranged from promises to change it to general nonresponses. But she was also seeing even more aggressive uses of SEL.

One of these was the survey sent out to students grades 2–12 under the acronym SAEBRS (Social Academic Emotional Behaviors Risk Screener). This screener asked “a total of nineteen questions” which “school leadership and teacher teams will review” and “if further actions are necessary . . . will promptly reach out to the parents to initiate a collaborative partnership in developing a plan tailored to address your child’s specific needs.”

The unknowns the screener raises are concerning. What criteria do the “leadership” and “teams” use to evaluate whether “further actions are necessary” with a student? Who sets the criteria—an SEL consultancy, CASEL, government agencies, schools—and what is it based on? Is it accessible to parents? What “further actions” will be considered based on assessment of “risk” and can parents refuse them? If parents “opt out” of their children participating, is more scrutiny applied to the opt-outers over the long-term?

When it comes to the survey’s impacts on students, how will they work in practice? Will students figure out the “right” answers to give after a few tests and game the system? Or will the system keep changing the questions to catch students in traps and eliminate what it deems “at risk” behavior?

In George Orwell’s 1984, still (for now) the high school handbook for totalitarianism, the central character, Winston Smith, compares his question about government policy to “a piece of furtive knowledge which he happened to possess because his memory was not satisfactorily under control.”

How far away is this reality from SEL’s function?

Zooming out: From Beaverton to the Broader Networks

Worse, further research shows that educational moves like these aren’t anomalies. These management tactics are par for the course in the non-educational or semi-educational spheres that produced many of the Beaverton teachers and administrators like Jenna Garske, Paul Ottum, and Don Grotting.

These SEL feeders include administrative departments for mental and children’s health, along with programs instituted at places like Nike to manage workers’ “emotional well-being.” They also include less-traditional learning programs like computer science or STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics) which lend themselves naturally to introducing social-emotional regulation techniques for future corporate comp-sci-workers.

And they include early childhood education programs for low-income children—the most direct link to SEL, which was largely started by Yale child psychiatrist James Comer to manage underserved black communities by institutionalizing personality development in schools.

But the ultimate sources for these developments are management theories applied by corporations and adopted by Democrats to government since the early 1990s, which function to control workers and instruct citizens.

The Management Theorists and their Political Networks

One managerial progenitor of the educational applications was Michael Lerner, Hillary Clinton’s “guru” in the ‘90s who argued for government “mandating changes in the workplace to make it less stressful, more concerned about workers’ intelligence, creativity and ability to cooperate with others, and hence ultimately more productive.” These aims applied to education: “Encouraging schools to give equal (but not greater) importance to teaching empathy towards others (fellow students, neighbors, strangers, one’s own parents!) as to teaching mathematics.”

Then there’s the father figure of the contemporary management movement: W. Edwards Deming—a major influence on Democrats like Lerner, Hillary Clinton, Robert Reich and Al Gore. Gore’s government “cleanup” program off Deming-esque management theories, the National Performance Review, was labeled by critics “a strange mixture of personal confession and institutional uplift . . . in which no distinction is drawn between human potential and bureaucratic potential.”

Deming acolytes have also noted “striking” similarities to James Comer’s original SEL work, and equated Deming’s theories of corporate productivity to schools; in this schema the students are the “consumers” or “customers,” not too different than supplicants calling corporate help lines over a broken phone. Today, applications of Deming’s theories work in tandem with SEL and its derivations.

How Democratic Networks Helped SEL Spread

Led by these interconnected, little-known figures, Democrats have ardently backed the application of worker management techniques to schoolchildren. The biggest bridge-builder was Daniel Goleman, the director of SEL’s flagship program CASEL, which had its roots in the work of James Comer and Yale university president Peter Salovey. Thanks to national government grants to public schools as well as funding from Oprah Winfrey, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg, CASEL and its derivatives have developed and spread, including Positive Behavior Intervention Support (PBIS); the Neuro-sequential Model in Education; and Building Assets Reducing Risks (BARR).

Their political promoters include Obama adviser and educator Linda Darling-Hammond; Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D); and the Biden White House.

It’s through these non- and for-profit vehicles, their Democrat-linked derivations, and their shared focus on social emotional wellness (i.e. “fully integrating explicit SEL topics into the design of academic lessons”) that the more specialized developments Kristine’s son encountered (AMAZE; GLSN; applications of Adi’s Act and Erin’s Law) have taken root.

They’ve done this off the theory that overcoming gender, sexual, racial, and even climate anxieties are key to students’ psychological development. Thanks to a generous national government, this theory pays literal dividends to schools which compete for social emotional learning funds—and to the SEL consultancies these schools hire.

The State Legislatures Enabling the Spread

Even establishment-linked educational theorists and writers say that this focus on mental health is causing problems not solving them. One study of an SEL program showed that the students who took it exhibited “more depression, more anxiety, more difficulty managing their emotions and worse relationships with their parents” than those who took a standard health class. 

Still, both blue states like Oregon and red states like Missouri are pushing these programs, the latter thanks to centrist Republicans who want to stay clear of “culture issues” and let local districts decide about SEL, ignoring the fact that state education departments and state legislatures have de facto pushed it into schools in the first place.

“School choice” is these centrist Republicans’ solution to problems in public education, but it’s an extremely limited one. After all, some charter schools and charter networks are also pushing SEL, as are some religious schools; and many students, especially lower income ones, still rely on public schools.

So relying on school choice means standing by while an entire corporate and administrative class works to make children more dependent workers and citizens.

How to Fight Back

How do we stop the spread of SEL? Start by finding schools that don’t traffic in SEL. Kristine has done this by moving to Arizona, because “COVID lockdowns and seeing what the school was teaching were enough to make me move to a place that wasn’t teaching those things.”

Kristine’s decision has been reinforced by reports from Oregon friends. One family says its fourth and fifth graders are being given the option to pick a sticker with a gender pronoun on it every morning. One child says that, according to the school, transgenderism means liking people for their personality not their appearance. Another reports that half her class identifies as gay or bisexual. (Maybe, this kid thinks, it’s because the “identity” flags that festoon the rooms include a gray, “boring” one for heterosexuality.)

Thanks to reports like these, Kristine has been activated to work against SEL, and her decision to fight back matters: Given how much money is at stake as well as how widely it’s spread, it’s hard to see this power grab being challenged without a push from activists like Kristine and their elected leaders at the national and state levels.

This means legislatures holding hearings, asking questions, tracing who’s making the decisions to pay for what SEL program, and cutting off funding from schools who are pushing this agenda—and it means Republican Attorneys General taking action off these investigations.

These are relentless moves, but they’re merited. A rigged system is at work, which functions based on ideology, control and profit, and its subjects are America’s children. This means that, in the deepest and most long-term ways, what Kristine Strachan found matters for us all.