Project Overview
The inequities of educational outcomes, which in turn lead to inequities in other long-term outcomes, have long been issues of concern for policymakers and educators. For decades, academic programs and policies have been developed to address achievement gaps, yet disparities persist. However, districts and educational policymakers have not fully appreciated how the school environment (a school’s culture, policies, and practices, along with the attitudes of its staff) and the non-school environment differentially affect students’ social and emotional well-being, which in turn contributes to inequities in educational outcomes.
Research in neuroscience has offered important insights into how students’ social and emotional well-being is inextricably linked to learning. Students’ brains are continuously shaped by their environment, and students can better engage in school when their learning environments provide supportive conditions and attend to the needs of the whole child. There is growing recognition that schools must specifically address existing inequities in the provision of supportive learning conditions, particularly for students of color, immigrants, English language learners, and lesbian, gay, transgender, and queer students. District leaders who are making equity a priority are realizing that to create sustainable, system-level change, they need to comprehensively change the way schools interact with students. To do so, district leaders are learning that they should make coordinated changes at three levels: the structural and policy level, the staff level, and the program level.
With support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and in partnership with the All4Ed and The Education Trust, MDRC’s “Educational Equity: Solutions Through Social and Emotional Well-Being” shares lessons through a series of practitioner briefs. Combining research and interviews with district staff members, the briefs present strategies that education leaders can use to increase equity by building supportive learning environments that aim to meet all students’ social and emotional needs.
Publications
05/2022 | Jean Grossman, Ximena PortillaThis is the fifth in a series of briefs highlighting strategies to increase educational equity by addressing students’ social and emotional needs. It describes strategies that school systems are using to increase students’ sense of school belonging and connectedness.
04/2022 | Ximena PortillaAn accompanying brief describes how three school systems are moving toward whole-system approaches focused on healing, prevention, and cultivating psychologically safe and supportive environments. This companion brief provides advice from leaders in two of those systems for others who may want to a develop a system-wide vision for such practices.
04/2022 | Ximena PortillaThis is the fourth in a series of briefs highlighting strategies to increase educational equity by addressing students’ social and emotional needs. It describes how three school systems are moving toward whole-system approaches focused on healing, prevention, and cultivating psychologically safe and supportive environments for all.
12/2021 | Susan Sepanik, Kevin Thaddeus Brown, Jr.School-community partnerships are one strategy leaders can use to increase equity in education by building supportive environments that meet students’ social and emotional needs. A recent brief on school-community partnerships included some advice from three leaders of successful district-level partnership programs. This companion brief focuses specifically on these leaders’ suggestions.
11/2021 | Susan Sepanik, Kevin Thaddeus Brown, Jr.Schools and school districts are being asked to provide more and more services to students while being given few additional resources. This brief discusses how school districts can use partnerships with outside organizations and agencies to help provide those additional services.
10/2021 | Ximena Portilla, Michael Lamb, Kevin Thaddeus Brown, Jr.A previous brief from this series summarized the experiences and recommendations of leaders who are working to reexamine their districts’ systems, structures, and policies to ensure they support the well-being and learning of all students. This accompanying brief provides those leaders’ thoughts in their own words.
08/2021 | Ximena Portilla, Michael Lamb, Kevin Thaddeus Brown, Jr.This is the second in a series of briefs highlighting strategies to increase educational equity by addressing students’ social and emotional needs. This brief shares the experiences and recommendations of leaders who are working to reexamine districts’ systems, structures, and policies to ensure they support all students.
07/2021 | Jean Grossman, Nancy DuchesneauThe COVID-19 pandemic has hurt many students, but many have also grown tremendously from the events they experienced in 2020. This brief discusses service learning as a practice that draws on the skills and community awareness students have developed through the past year, and that also can help them rebound.
07/2021 | Jean Grossman, Susan Sepanik, Ximena Portilla, Kevin Thaddeus Brown, Jr.This is the first in a series of briefs highlighting strategies to increase educational equity by addressing students’ social and emotional needs. It describes how environmental and structural factors cause disparities in social and emotional well-being that affect learning, then lays out three levels of change to address this inequity.
