Lessons learned & opportunities to grow after A Nation At Hope's first year

On January 29, America’s Promise Alliance held a Whole Child Movement Convening: A Year After a Nation at Hope. A day of panels and conversations followed, all focusing on critical questions building on the work of the initial report: what do we know, where have we come, and what’s next?

Only one year ago, the National Commission on Social, Emotional & Academic Development published a frame-changing piece on the American educational system. The Nation at Hope Report reclaimed space for considering students’ social and emotional needs alongside academics, not as “a shifting educational fad,” but as “the substance of education itself.”

Reports from the Youth Development Work Group followed the report. These included Building Partnerships in Support of Where, When and How Learning Happens, which highlights the importance of learning not just in school, but before school, after school, and during the summer as well. Moreover, this report created a set of policy actions for partners to take in achieving equity in all these times and places, including an appeal to:

Increase all young people’s access to a rich range of high-quality, year-round learning opportunities, throughout their developmental years, by documenting key gaps in availability, affordability, accessibility, quality, and appropriateness and strategizing about how to work together to fill them.

Over the year, we have continued to see recognition that learning happens across settings.

• The federal government’s Perkins V (CTE) plan put a focus on all the places where and when learning happens
• States like Oregon have make large investments in student wellness and success, including funding for afterschool and summer learning programs
• Maryland, New Mexico, New York, and other states investing in community school models
• Vermont’s governor set out a 2020 proposal for statewide universal afterschool; and New York City Council saw introduction of a similar idea
• More states are including community partners in school needs assessments and planning
• Eighteen states (up from 14 in 2018) currently have social and emotional learning (SEL) competencies and guidelines

The January event built on momentum for whole child education and offered some additional food for thought.

Given that the concept of social and emotional learning can be so broad, many speakers relayed a need to consider messaging in the field. SEL should be both messaged and put into practice as a means to enhance student belonging, build challenging opportunities for youth, and provide academic and non-academic supports. Messaging also should recognize possible misconceptions and how to identify misapplications in the field of social and emotional learning. For example, one common fear surrounding SEL was its potential application as a mechanism of control over student behavior or a means to pressure some youth to exchange their traditional or cultural ways of being for a Eurocentric way. One of the day’s profiled programs, Alive and Well (a program in Missouri) focused how important it is to break through Eurocentric thinking and challenged the educator audience to contextualize student notions of safety and belonging, and to actively work with youth to understand what safety might mean in the context of historic relationships of bias and power disparities.

With that common framework and understanding established, Hal Smith of the National Urban League explained that partners can do their work to promote more social and emotional learning opportunities in education by seeking coherence among their ideas and supporting the work of other partners, more than seeking an exact alignment among the goals, definitions, and desired outcomes of each group. Each partner can see a young person and build a narrative in a complimentary way, without a single group or idea having to win the day, Smith reminded.

The event was also focused on two essential pieces of building the movement: First, the importance of practitioner, family, and student voice with real partnership around ideas, shared decisions, and implementation; and second, the importance of change that extends beyond an important individual student and adult relationship to systems-level change.

Afterschool partners filled the room and discussion highlighted essential points of connection.

In discussing conditions for systems-level equity, afterschool/out-of-school-time program availability and quality showed prominently in a list presented by the Education Trust. In his lunch keynote, Jerry Tello, National Compadres Network co-founder, humanized the day’s conversation and spoke about youth having places to go “where someone is always there without being diagnosed, assessed, or referred.”

Pennsylvania Superintendent Pedro Rivera, discussed bringing people together to create a joint vision, goals, and understanding, as well as sharing resources, because, “You can’t decouple the needs of a community from its schools.”

Austin, Texas Superintendent Paul Cruz closed out the day in response to a question from Boys & Girls Clubs of America on partnerships. While acknowledging the challenge principals in his district face in prioritizing and nurturing partnerships given their busy schedules, he described how schools can often have coordinators who facilitate the right relationships for schools and students. It was time well spent, he concluded: “Out-of-school is extremely important to us. It is not another thing. It is the thing.”

With this growing coalition, ever-increasing understanding, and the daily work of practitioners, partners, and advocates who support youth every day, we hope to get closer to our most personal of the six important Commission goals: “Provide access to quality summer school and afterschool programming for each young person.”

To learn more about this issue see the Afterschool Alliance Toolkit on Social and Emotional Learning here.