Social-emotional learning or SEL has become the latest educational catch-phrase. SEL has been broadly defined as “non-cognitive” or “soft” skills, such as interest and engagement, and has been recognized by policy-makers and the broader public as a set of skills...

In 2014, the CORE Districts—a consortium of eight of the largest school districts in California serving more than one million students—began measuring students’ social-emotional learning (SEL) as part of a No Child Left Behind (NCLB) waiver enabling CORE to develop...

This brief applies value-added models to student surveys in the CORE Districts to explore whether social-emotional learning (SEL) surveys can be used to measure effective classroom-level supports for SEL. The authors find that classrooms differ in their effect on students’...

Students have the greatest stake in their education but little to no say in how it is delivered. This lack of agency represents a lost opportunity to accelerate learning and prepare students for a world in which taking initiative and...

Distinguished Professor George Farkas presented his latest research findings at the Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE) group in Sacramento on August 13. The meeting title was PACE Policy Research Panel on Special Education: Organizing Schools to Serve Students with...

Researchers who examined data from five large California school districts have concluded that measures of students’ personal strengths and interpersonal skills are not reliable enough at this point to include in states’ and districts’ school accountability systems.

Transforming Education and Policy Analysis for California Education partnered to analyze data from over 500,000 students across 8 districts in California. This brief provides benchmarking data that is designed to allow practitioners to compare their aggregated data across grade levels...

The new RAND Corp. survey results come as Congress proposes $260 million in funding for SEL programs and whole-child initiatives.

A recent WestEd event brought together representatives from healthcare, philanthropy and justice to discuss how partnerships with school and district leaders can improve prevention.

Since 2015, CORE (California Office to Reform Education) school districts have been doing districtwide surveys to measure students’ social and emotional learning (SEL). This is the first time social and emotional learning has been measured at scale, said Heather Hough...

In The 74, writer Kate Stringer reports on how the Long Beach Unified School District and other CORE Districts are tracking students’ growth in both academic and social-emotional skills. Long Beach Unified is part of the CORE-PACE Research Partnership, established in...

The increasing focus on school climate and students' relationships to their peers and their schools is a potentially powerful catalyst for school improvement and student achievement. How to measure school climate and students' social and emotional development with confidence? For...

Education Week article by Evie Blad describes a report coordinated by the CORE-PACE Research Partnership. The report looks at the experiences of the Fresno Unified School District, part of the CORE districts, a group of California school systems that regularly...

Education dive features PACE research that address the needs and opportunities for social emotional learning (SEL) to include the role of clubs and other after-school activities that help to broaden and extend social-emotional skills such as empathy and communication.

As pressures grow on schools to address students’ physical and mental health, including the stress and trauma they may experience in their homes and neighborhoods, many California educators are acknowledging that they don’t have the resources they need to respond...

As U.S. public schools become increasingly diverse racially, culturally and economically, they are turning to social emotional programs to better serve the different ways in which students interact with and invest in schooling and their education. Social emotional learning (SEL)...

California ranks at or near the bottom of all states when it comes to the percentage of students with access to health and mental health care at schools. Yet, with $90 in added annual spending per student—which would total about...

PACE and the Learning Policy Institute hosted an event on how schools can be organized to support the whole child, which featured a series of panels with leading researchers, policymakers, and practitioners. Topics included:

• A new framework on how...

The development of social-emotional skills within the CORE districts, a network of urban California school districts that serve more than 1 million students A new Policy Analysis for California study, " Trends in Student Social-Emotional Learning: Evidence from the CORE Districts,"...

Nowhere is a data-informed approach to social-emotional learning more pronounced than in California’s CORE Districts, which embarked on a groundbreaking effort in 2013 to capture a more holistic vision of student success and school quality. There, eight of the largest...

Nowhere is a data-informed approach to social-emotional learning more pronounced than in California's CORE Districts, which embarked on a groundbreaking effort in 2013 to capture a more holistic vision of student success and school quality. There, eight of the largest...

Students’ reports of whether they have developed a growth mindset continue to climb steadily throughout their K-12 years, but their assessments of their social awareness skills and feelings of self-efficacy drop sharply beginning in middle school, according to a recent...

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...

Policy Analysis for California Education and CORE, an organization representing eight urban school districts in California, released a new practice brief highlighting lessons learned on implementing social and emotional learning programs from the CORE districts.

With an increased appreciation of students’ social-emotional skills among researchers and policy makers, many states and school districts are moving toward a systematic process to measure Social-Emotional Learning (SEL). In this study, we examine the measurement properties of California's CORE...