Socio-Emotional Learning and Teacher Quality

It is difficult for national educational policy makers to take the long view. Few nations afford educational bureaucracies the stability and power to plan along a twenty or thirty-year time frame. This chapter reviews two major schools of thought used to explain global trends in educational policy, and analyzes the rise of the major testing programs that appear to exert considerable effect on national policy debates. It then explores the early institutionalization of traditional subject matter in international testing programs, combined with a long-term policy ‘myth’ linking education and economic growth, kept SEL measures from being integrated into cross-national assessments. This has created a gap in the international discussions of what constitutes good, effective, or quality teaching. Given the long-term trends in educational expansion, where a greater and greater proportion of the first decades of human life are spent in schools (Baker, 2014), this is a remarkable lacuna in our understanding of what teacher quality means.