Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Panel: Measuring Social-Emotional Learning in Public Education Systems: Findings from the First Large-Scale Panel Survey of Students

(Education)

The CORE districts are a consortium of eight California school districts that collectively serve over one million students attending roughly 1,500 schools. In 2013, CORE received a waiver from the U.S. Department of Education that would provide six of its member districts—San Francisco, Fresno, Oakland, Los Angeles, Santa Ana and Long Beach—flexibility from key requirements of the No Child Left Behind school accountability system. Under this waiver, CORE sought to implement a different type of accountability system that, rather than looking solely at standardized test scores and graduation rates, incorporated schools’ performance across a broader range of outcome measures.

In particular, CORE sought to include measures of social-emotional learning (SEL) and school culture/climate (CC), alongside traditional academic indicators, in a more holistic index of school quality. CORE’s systematic measurement of school and student performance on SEL and CC is unparalleled and has generated widespread national interest in the field of education and in the popular press. Given the novelty of collecting measures of SEL and CC at scale, current research provides little evidence about the suitability of SEL and CC surveys as school performance indicators or how they can be used in a broader set of measures to inform school improvement.

In this panel, we bring together a set of quantitative papers that leverage a two year panel of SEL survey responses with over 500,000 responses per year in the CORE districts to explore several key aspects of measurement and use. In the first paper, Rob Meyer (University of Wisconsin) will present on how to approach the scoring of SEL measures, taking into account the psychometric properties of the measures and variations in individual responses. In the second paper, Martin West (Harvard University) will present data on the trends in SEL reports over time, including how survey responses vary by grade and student group. In the third paper, Susanna Loeb (Stanford University) will present a paper on variation across schools in the level and growth of SEL and parsing out the effects of schools on SEL development. In the final paper, Heather Hough (Policy Analysis for California Education) will show how the SEL and CC measures can be used in a multiple-metric system used for accountability and continuous improvement, including how the SEL and CC measures are related to one another and to other outcomes.

In this session, the chair (Noah Bookman, Chief Strategy officer of the CORE districts) will present a brief introduction, including an overview of guiding questions. After the presentations, the discussant, Brian Jacobs, will discuss the findings, bringing his background as a scholar of measurement and improvement in student outcomes. The chair will then facilitate discussion and solicit questions from the audience.