[Hoover] The California-born self-esteem movement has morphed into "social-emotional learning." But it still sidelines real academic skills.
Longtime Democratic lawmaker John Vasconcellos died in 2014, but the educational disaster he laid on California in the 1980s lives on. Indeed, its likeness thrives today across a broad swath of America’s K‐12 schooling, supported by foundation grants, federal funding, and both nonprofit and for-profit advocacy groups. Only its name has changed‐from self-esteem to social-emotional learning.
If only the trend had stayed in the Golden State.
Younger readers may not remember Vasconcellos, the assemblyman and state senator whom one obituary described as a "titan of the human-poten-tial movement." In 1986, Vasconcellos managed to persuade California’s con-servative Republican governor, George Deukmejian, to support a blue-ribbon task force to promote self-esteem and personal and social responsibility. The ensuing hoopla loosed a tsunami of enthusiasm for building self-esteem as a solution for almost everything that ails an individual, including low achieve-ment in school.
The task force’s final report, in 1990, ascribed (as I wrote at the time) "near-magical powers to self-esteem, characterizing it as ’something that empowers us to live responsibly and that inoculates us against the lures of crime, violence, substance abuse, teen pregnancy, child abuse, chronic wel-fare dependency, and educational failure.’ "
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