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Teachers do not magically know how to work with colleagues; districts must support and lead that work if PLCs are to live up to their potential.

In the early days of the COVID-19 outbreak, school district leaders’ most immediate priority was to ensure that students have access to regular meals. However, efforts to provide a range of other social services must follow close behind. As a start, superintendents can look to their data systems to help them identify those students and families that are most likely to need social services to make it through this phase and beyond. But even while racing to ensure students’ health and safety, they cannot afford to ignore the longer-term challenges that their districts will face, given not just the need to move instruction online but also given that COVID-19 is all but guaranteed to do serious damage to state and local economies.

Across the country, many school districts are now creating new staff positions with titles like Chief Equity Officer and Director of Equity and Diversity, notes PDK’s CEO Joshua Starr. That’s a positive step, suggesting a new level of commitment to meeting the needs of all students. However, serving as a school system’s equity leader can be difficult and lonely work, and it’s important that superintendents define the job, and its scope of responsibilities, in ways that allow people to succeed in the role.

A longtime advocate for social and emotional learning, Phi Delta Kappa’s CEO, Joshua Starr, shares his concerns about the current state of the SEL movement, particularly the fuzziness of its terminology, the simplistic ways in which it is often commercialized and implemented, and its uncertain implications for racial and economic equity. He closes with a number of suggestions for school and district leaders.