As the conversation grows over how to measure SEL among students grows, gathering their own perspectives is an important part of the picture. States are also beginning to include student surveys as one piece of their accountability plans for the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). An earlier paper from PACE notes that there is “growing confidence” that schools can contribute to the development of students’ social and emotional skills and that SEL and school culture and climate outcomes can also predict performance in academic areas, such as math scores, graduation rates and English learners’ proficiency in English. Because including such measures in accountability systems is new territory for most states, the PACE researchers note that it’s important to learn from the CORE districts — which received a No Child Left Behind waiver to develop their own accountability and improvement system. The researchers note that while the SEL survey can show which schools have students with higher-than-average responses and which schools have lower-than-average results, the differences across schools don’t vary enough to be especially useful. Education researchers also don’t know enough about what students are thinking when they answer these kinds of survey questions about themselves, they add. Finally, it’s unclear how educators might try to “game” the results if they are being used as part of an accountability system. Even so, the researchers conclude that when combined with other measures of school performance, SEL and school climate surveys “may inform a broader understanding of a school’s strengths and weaknesses and prompt action on a new dimension.”