Measuring what Counts: The Implementation and Measurement of Social Emotional Learning in Chicago Public Schools

Over the last twenty years, there has been growing interest and research done in how to explicitly teaching children social and emotional skills in the school setting. While the benefits of social emotional learning (SEL) and the development of SEL programs has been thoroughly explored, the research into creating the measurement tools to determine the efficacy of these initiatives has been lagging behind. The purpose of this study was to get a better understanding of how Chicago Public Schools (CPS) has approached its implementation of SEL. Illinois is one of four states to have free-standing SEL standards for K-12, and CPS has increasingly invested resources into implementing SEL. However, the process for how the district is measuring its progress related to SEL is not as clear. Using a mixed methods approach, I use both interviews from those within CPS as well as publicly available school data in order to better understand how SEL operates on both the district and school level, what metrics are currently being used to measure progress, and whether or not some of these measures are valid metrics to be using.