After years of targeting things like “critical race theory” and education on racial injustice, right-wingers in NC have a new enemy in SEL.

by Kate Denning, Carolina Public Press
November 13, 2025

You may not have heard of SEL, but it’s the latest educational tool that may have found itself in the crossfire of politically motivated culture wars in North Carolina.

Self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills and responsible decision-making are the five competencies that Social-Emotional Learning, or SEL, aims to instill in both children and adults.

Some activist groups, including parents, are pushing back against SEL being intertwined within the public school curriculum, as it often is. Educational experts want to demystify the fears that these groups are trying to associate with SEL.

Graphic via PBS NC

Criticisms of SEL

SEL has been widely criticized by groups like Moms for Liberty, which the Southern Poverty Law Center considers a far-right antigovernment organization. Moms for Liberty largely focuses on issues of parental rights and began by advocating against mask mandates in schools. More than 20 chapters of Moms for Liberty exist across North Carolina.

On its national webpage, Moms for Liberty has a list of materials advocating against SEL. Its comprehensive “Social Emotional Learning: Guide for Parents” packet describes the five competencies of SEL as deceptive. The list also includes a podcast episode entitled “The Marxification of Education.”

‘It started as a lie’: Locals push back against Moms for Liberty in NC

“These seemingly innocuous skills are very deceptive to most people,” the packet reads. “The problem is these skills are delivered to students through an ‘equity lens’ aka the viewpoint of someone who believes America is systemically racist & oppressive.”

The Center for Nonprofit Advancement says the purpose of utilizing an equity lens is to be “deliberately inclusive as an organization makes decisions.”

“It is explicit in drawing attention to the inclusion of marginalized populations, typically communities of color, and can be adapted to focus on other communities,” the Center says.

“The lens questions are designed to create a more inclusive perspective, drawing attention to how the decision holds potential to affect marginalized groups. An equity lens will not tell you what action to take. Rather, the lens helps you discuss and reflect on the equitableness of the action and decision-making process.”

CASEL, the leading voice in schoolwide SEL implementation, does not explicitly promote an “equity lens,” though its website does include guidance for how SEL can be used for “advancing educational equity and excellence” and says SEL both fosters and depends upon an equitable learning environment.

The Pavement Education Project, a conservative North Carolina organization that tracks and advocates for the removal of inappropriate reading material in NC public schools, also criticizes SEL and says its implementation will replace family values with the values of the government.

Battling misconceptions

Dejanell Mittman, an assistant professor in Appalachian State’s Department of Counseling, Family Therapy and Higher Education, a licensed school counselor and former SEL Specialist, said sometimes approaching a new acronym can be intimidating. Simply breaking down the true meaning can make SEL more approachable for parents who might feel ideologically opposed to it and hesitant about its use due to criticisms SEL has received.

“There’s some misconception about when I hear SEL, they are teaching my child values that I don’t support, and that’s not the case. What they’re teaching your child is how to be self aware, how to manage themselves, how to build great relationship skills, how to make responsible decisions,” she said.

“When you break that down, because essentially that’s what it is, then it’s like, ‘Oh yeah, I want my kid to learn that. I absolutely want them to learn how to do those things.’ But oftentimes the conversation stops at the acronym, at SEL, and there isn’t any more, and it’s like, ‘Well, I don’t want that thing that they’re doing.’”

Another misconception is that SEL is a coordinated program, specifically one that is taking time away from academics, Mittman said. While different schools might vary in their approach, she said SEL works best when it is threaded through the school day rather than having dedicated blocks of time or just one educator utilizing SEL principles.

In Durham Public Schools, Senior Executive Director for Student Support Services LaVerne Mattocks-Perry said the district has taken a step further in how SEL is typically understood by incorporating it throughout all grade levels in various forms. DPS has been utilizing SEL in its curriculum since as early as 2021, but conversations began years prior to that.

DPS has exactly the kind of collaborative mindset that Mittman said makes SEL so effective, Mattocks-Perry said. That’s led to a more communicative and participatory environment.

“Our teachers, our counselors, our principals are all invested in making sure that not only students are aware of what the Social-Emotional Learning competencies are, we make sure that all of us can speak to those and that all of us are able to meet what we call cultural framework indicators that tell how we are to be in Durham Public Schools,” she said.

“Since we’ve implemented Social-Emotional Learning curriculum and our cultural frameworks paired right along with it, like restorative practices, what we do is we talk a lot more in Durham Public Schools.”

Durham parents have been very supportive of the implementation, though they tend to have questions regarding the regular surveys the district collects to evaluate students’ emotions toward themselves and their school environment, as is standard in SEL, Mattocks-Perry said.

While SEL has been around since as early as the 1960s with scholar James Comer’s work at Yale University’s Child Study Center, there does seem to be a heightened awareness of the practice now, Mattocks-Perry said. Some of that could be attributed to the ways the COVID-19 pandemic changed the way many think about mental and emotional health, especially for young people.

“We were almost in crisis stage,” she said.

“So a lot of schools and school districts really had to think about not only do we have to address the immediate needs of students as we’re coming back to in- person learning after varied amounts of time separated from the schools, but also we have to have a long-term response to to help students when they may have to deal with chronic stress or adverse childhood experiences.”

While the pandemic certainly changed a lot, Mittman said there was beginning to be an understanding amongst educators even before the quarantine era that students were seeming less-and-less prepared to move on to the next level of schooling, particularly regarding big transitions like elementary to middle school and middle to high school.

But it wasn’t that they weren’t ready academically. On paper, most seemed perfectly equipped to take on the next level. But it was the interpersonal and soft skills that many were lacking, Mittman said.

“They have the GPA, they have the courses needed, but there’s a lot of additional training that needs to happen,” she said.

“They don’t seem to have this ability to problem solve on their own when there is a minor conflict with another person. They don’t know how to work through that conflict. They just leave the situation or quit.”

But of course, some students are going to struggle more with their studies as well. But just like their peers, Mittman said, many seem to be missing some key qualities we all need in order to overcome such obstacles.

“You also have some students who, academically speaking, are not ready for the next level, and it is not due to any cognitive deficits or anything like that — it’s a motivation thing,” she said.

“It’s this ideal of resilience. When things get hard, when there’s a lack of understanding about this new concept that this teacher is trying to help you with, there is no resilience. There is limited perseverance there.”

It’s those observations along with increased emphasis on mental health that potentially increased educators’ interest in using SEL to respond to student needs. But Mittman said it’s vital to understand that teachers and counselors aren’t diagnosing students or providing therapy, it’s simply important for educators to be able to provide coping strategies and general support for their students while they’re at school.

Black Social-Emotional Liberation

In addition to its robust implementation of SEL, Durham Public Schools is also home to the first Black SEL Hub in the nation, located at Hillside High School — one of North Carolina’s historically Black K-12 institutions.

Black SEL is a distinct practice that recognizes and utilizes SEL principles but also provides additional pillars that acknowledge cultural context in order to serve the Black community. The leading organization, BlackSEL: The Social-Emotional Learning Hub for Black People, also uses the term Social-Emotional Liberation to describe what it hopes to achieve under the Black SEL framework.

Kristen Hopkins-Vincent, founder and executive director of BlackSEL, said the liberation aspect is there not only to teach to regulate emotions, but to reclaim them.

“It’s about reclaiming emotional freedom in a system that has often told us to suppress who we are,” she said.

“When our kids are emotionally liberated, they don’t have to survive in school. They transform schools. It’s thinking about a process of freeing our children from their emotional patterns, from the societal expectations, the systems that suppress how they think, how they feel and how they can express themselves.”

Black SEL began because there was a gap in SEL literature and research that resulted in a lack of culturally responsive and affirming resources, which led to Black children reporting lower in SEL competencies, Hopkins-Vincent said.

Now the organization has opened its first physical space in Durham and hopes to someday have many more. Hopkins-Vincent said spaces like theirs are even more important today, particularly for young people.

“Being able to create the Hub during a time like this, specifically when diversity, inclusion and equity is under attack, I think it was really important for our kids to feel seen, to feel heard, to feel valued, but also to talk about their lived experiences and the interconnected struggles between other races and how do we find common ground and just allow ourselves to understand our own social responsibility,” Hopkins-Vincent said.

It’s not necessarily a staple of SEL to have a physical space such as the Hub, but Hillside’s Principal Joshua Mallory said its presence in the school building makes for a more immediate and effective impact on students.

“Being able to have a human being to look you in your eyes, to be able to have conversation and dialog — that can only help increase intra and interpersonal relationships that students have with themselves, as well as with adults,” he said.

“I think it only increases the probability of success that they’ll find from a space like the Black SEL Hub.”

This article first appeared on Carolina Public Press and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.