CRT and SEL are two distinct concepts in education that have become linked in public debate, even though they originated separately and serve different purposes. CRT most commonly refers to Critical Race Theory, an academic framework analyzing how laws and institutions perpetuate racial inequality. SEL stands for Social Emotional Learning, a teaching approach focused on helping students develop skills like self-awareness, emotional regulation, and relationship building. The two became tangled in political discourse around 2021, when critics began arguing that SEL programs were being used to introduce CRT concepts into K-12 classrooms.
What Social Emotional Learning Actually Covers
SEL is the older and more established presence in schools. The term was formally coined in 1994, when a group of educators, researchers, and advocates met under the Fetzer Institute to address what they called the “missing piece” in education: children’s social and emotional development. That meeting led to the founding of the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL), which remains the field’s central organization.
CASEL organizes SEL around five core competencies. Self-awareness involves recognizing your own emotions and how they influence behavior, along with an honest sense of your strengths and limitations. Self-management covers emotional regulation and goal setting. Social awareness is about perspective-taking and empathy. Relationship skills focus on communication, cooperation, and conflict resolution. Responsible decision-making addresses ethical choices and considering consequences.
In practice, SEL looks fairly simple in the classroom. Teachers might start the day with a structured morning meeting where students share how they’re feeling. Journaling exercises help younger students put emotions into words. A “shout-out board” lets students write positive notes about their classmates’ actions, building a culture of recognition. Group challenges teach cooperation. None of these activities involve political content. They’re designed to build the interpersonal and self-regulation skills that help kids function in a school environment.
What the Research Shows About SEL
SEL has a strong evidence base. Students who participated in SEL programs that addressed all five core competencies scored 11 percentile points higher on academic measures than students who didn’t participate. Even more striking, follow-up research found that years after students went through SEL programs, their academic performance was an average of 13 percentile points higher, suggesting the benefits compound over time rather than fading.
The field’s research focus has shifted across decades. Early studies in the 2000s and early 2010s concentrated on violence prevention, aggression, and behavioral development. From 2015 to 2019, the emphasis moved toward mindfulness, curriculum design, and teacher training. Since 2020, research has increasingly centered on mental health, the effects of the pandemic, and school-wide implementation rather than individual classroom programs.
What Critical Race Theory Actually Is
Critical Race Theory originated in legal scholarship, not in K-12 education. It provides a framework for examining how laws, policies, and institutions can perpetuate racial inequality, even when they appear neutral on the surface. CRT holds that racism is not only the product of individual prejudice but is embedded in systems and structures. It emphasizes concepts like power, privilege, and discrimination, and it creates techniques for advocacy and institutional change.
CRT is not a curriculum or a set of classroom activities. It’s an analytical lens, primarily used in law schools and graduate-level academic settings. There is no standardized K-12 CRT program the way there are standardized SEL programs with lesson plans and measurable competencies.
It’s worth noting that “CRT” in educational circles sometimes also refers to Culturally Responsive Teaching, a separate concept introduced by Gloria Ladson-Billings in the 1990s. Culturally Responsive Teaching is an instructional approach that connects students’ cultural backgrounds to the curriculum to improve engagement and outcomes. It shares initials with Critical Race Theory but is a distinct practice focused on pedagogy rather than legal analysis.
How CRT and SEL Became Connected
The link between the two is largely a product of political debate rather than educational design. In 2021, conservative media outlets began suggesting that SEL could serve as a “Trojan horse” for teaching children about Critical Race Theory and gender diversity. The concern, as framed by critics, was twofold: that SEL programs were part of a broader effort to introduce progressive ideas into schools, and that they distracted from academic instruction.
Parents who pushed back on SEL generally argued either that teaching emotional and social skills wasn’t the school’s role, or that SEL was a gateway to instruction on racial inequality, gender identity, and sexual orientation. Jordan Posamentier, vice president of policy at Committee for Children (one of the country’s largest SEL providers), identified these as the two main currents driving opposition.
Tammy Hughes, a professor of school psychology at Duquesne University, has pointed out that a segment of the public conflated the SEL goal of “working well with others” with something politically charged, even though SEL programs are not focused on diversity and equity content.
Where They Genuinely Overlap
There is one area of real intersection. Historically, SEL programs took what researchers describe as a “race- and culturally neutral” approach to teaching social and emotional skills. In recent years, some scholars have argued this is a limitation. A concept called “transformative SEL” emerged, which explicitly aims to address educational equity by fostering more equitable learning environments and examining how power structures affect students’ emotional well-being.
Transformative SEL does draw on CRT as an analytical lens. Researchers in this space argue that emotional well-being is affected by discrimination and privilege, and that SEL programs should account for those realities rather than treating all students’ social-emotional experiences as identical. This version of SEL is more politically charged than traditional SEL, and it’s the version critics point to when arguing the two concepts are connected.
However, transformative SEL represents one strand of academic thinking within the broader SEL field. The vast majority of SEL programs used in schools focus on the five core competencies (self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making) without incorporating CRT frameworks.
The Legislative Response
State legislatures have responded to the debate with concrete action. Nine states, including Idaho, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Arizona, and North Dakota, passed legislation restricting CRT-related instruction. Arizona’s law was later overturned by its state supreme court. State school boards in Florida, Georgia, Utah, and Alabama introduced guidelines barring CRT-related discussions without passing formal legislation. Montana and South Dakota issued official denunciations. Nearly 20 additional states introduced or planned to introduce similar bills.
These laws mostly ban instruction that frames the United States as inherently racist, along with discussions of conscious and unconscious bias, privilege, discrimination, and oppression. The restrictions extend beyond race to include gender-related content in some states.
SEL has faced its own legislative challenges. Proposed bills in North Dakota, Oklahoma, Maine, Iowa, and other states sought to ban or limit SEL instruction specifically. Oklahoma’s SB 1027, for instance, attempted to prevent schools from providing instruction on self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, responsible decision-making, and related attributes like grit, resilience, and self-regulation. That bill essentially tried to prohibit the entire CASEL framework by name.
There are no federally mandated standards for SEL in the United States, though the CASEL competencies have been crosswalked with the National Health Education Standards, giving them a foothold in existing educational frameworks. Whether SEL continues to expand or contracts under legislative pressure varies significantly by state and district.