A School Administrators Framework for Evaluating Any Soft Skills Provider, Including Us
- Vendor one-pagers all claim to be "evidence-based," but that phrase can mean a peer-reviewed study or a forty-student survey run by the vendor itself — the label alone tells you nothing.
- Five criteria predict outcomes across any soft skills provider: dosage (total instructional minutes), the evidence base and its limits, coach or teacher training standards, fully loaded cost per student, and fit with what's already running in the building.
- A short list of direct questions — total minutes, sample size, training requirement, all-in cost, and whether you can talk to reference schools without the vendor on the call — gets past the pitch faster than any glossy proposal.
- Boost's own pilot was small: roughly 30 students over 8 weeks, and 87% could clearly articulate that life is skill-based by the end, up from a small handful at the start — self-reported data from one cohort, not an independent study.
- This framework is built to hold up against any provider, Boost included — if it doesn't survive the questions in this piece, that's information worth having before a pilot, not after.
A curriculum director we spoke with last year had a folder on her desktop called "Vendors." Eleven PDFs sat in it — glossy one-pagers from SEL publishers, character education nonprofits, workforce-readiness startups, and Boost. Every single one used the same three words somewhere on page one: evidence-based, comprehensive, transformative. None of the eleven made it easy to compare against the other ten. That's not an accident. Vendor materials are built to make a pitch, not to survive a side-by-side.
If you're the person who has to bring a recommendation to a curriculum committee or a board, that's the actual problem: not finding a soft skills provider, but finding a way to evaluate the ones already in front of you that doesn't just come down to whoever presented best. So here's a framework — five criteria, not thirty — that predicts whether a program will actually change behavior in your building, plus the exact questions to ask any vendor to get past the pitch. We built it to be useful against any provider, ours included. If you finish this piece and don't ask us these questions, something went wrong.
Why "Evidence-Based" on a One-Pager Doesn't Tell You Much
Every vendor in that folder claimed to be evidence-based. Almost none of them meant the same thing by it. "Evidence-based" can mean a randomized controlled trial published in a peer-reviewed journal, or it can mean a pre/post survey of forty students filled out by the vendor's own coaches. Both get printed on a one-pager in the same font.
CASEL's Program Guide exists largely to solve this problem for the SEL market — it independently reviews programs against a defined rubric rather than taking a vendor's word for it. That's the standard to hold any claim to: not "do you have evidence," but "what kind, collected how, and can I see the raw numbers, not just the summary slide." A provider that gets defensive when you ask for the underlying data is telling you something. A provider that hands it over, limitations and all, is telling you something better.
The Five Criteria That Actually Predict Outcomes
Strip away the marketing language and most soft skills programs differ from each other on five things. These are the ones worth spending your evaluation time on, roughly in the order they matter.
Dosage. How much actual instructional time does a student get, and over what span? A single 45-minute assembly and a 40-session, 8-week structured course are both marketed as "soft skills programming," and they produce nothing alike. Researchers who study SEL implementation have pushed back for years on programs that promise change from a handful of touchpoints — as Education Week's coverage of SEL time allocation has noted, the field still lacks consensus on a minimum effective dose, which means the burden is on you to ask the vendor directly: how many total minutes of instruction, spread across how many weeks, and is that consistent across every classroom that runs it or does it vary by coach?
Evidence base, and its limits. Ask for the actual study or dataset, not the summary. Ask what the sample size was, whether it was the vendor's own students or an independent evaluation, and what the comparison group looked like, if there was one. A small pilot with honest limitations is more trustworthy than a big claim with no methodology attached. If a vendor can't tell you their sample size without checking, that's a real answer too.
Coach or teacher training standard. Who actually delivers the curriculum, and what's their training requirement before they're in front of a class? A packaged curriculum handed to a homeroom teacher with a 20-minute onboarding video produces wildly different results than one delivered by someone certified against a defined standard. Ask what the certification process involves, how long it takes, and whether there's ongoing coaching or fidelity checks once a coach is running sessions solo.
Cost per student, fully loaded. The number on the proposal is rarely the number you'll actually pay. Ask what's included — materials, training, coach time, platform access, renewal terms — and what isn't. A program that looks cheaper per-student on the cover page can end up costing more once you add mandatory annual recertification or per-classroom licensing fees that weren't in the initial quote.
Fit with what you're already running. A soft skills program that duplicates your existing SEL curriculum, or contradicts your discipline framework's language, creates confusion for staff and students rather than reinforcement. Ask how the provider expects the program to interact with what's already in place, not just whether it can be "layered on."
Questions Worth Asking Every Provider
Bring these into any vendor conversation, in this order, and don't move to the next until you get a specific answer to the one before it.
- How many total instructional minutes does a student receive, and across how many sessions?
- What's your evidence for outcomes, what was the sample size, and is the data self-reported or independently verified?
- What's the certification or training requirement for whoever delivers this, and how long does it take?
- What is the fully loaded cost per student, including materials, training, and any renewal or recertification fees?
- How does this integrate with, rather than duplicate, what we're already running?
- What does a school do if a coach or teacher isn't delivering the program with fidelity?
- Can we talk to two current school partners without you on the call?
That last question tends to be the most revealing. A provider confident in their outcomes will connect you directly. One that insists on joining every reference call is worth a second look.
Where Boost Fits Against This Framework
We'd rather you run this checklist against us than take our word for anything, so here's how Boost answers it plainly.
Dosage: an 8-week structured course delivering the 26 Boost Skills across three pillars — People Skills, Character, and Healthy Mindset — with a defined session count, not a variable number left to the coach's discretion.
Evidence base: our own pilot cohort was small, roughly 30 students over 8 weeks, and we say so. Using a simple before-and-after self-assessment called Striving to 100, 87% of students could clearly articulate that there's a specific, learnable set of skills behind getting what they want in life by the end of the course, up from a small handful at the start. That's self-reported data from one cohort, not an independent study — and being upfront about that distinction is part of what should make it usable, not a reason to hide it.
Coach training: delivered by certified Boost coaches or trained staff members who go through a defined certification process before running a session, not a curriculum dropped on a homeroom teacher with no onboarding.
Cost: structured as a straightforward vendor relationship, quoted per student with materials and coach training included in the number we give you up front, not added on later.
Fit: built to sit alongside existing SEL infrastructure rather than replace it — Boost is explicitly not a therapy substitute or an SEL add-on, it's a dedicated course built around the idea that life is skill-based, so students learn why a skill matters before they practice it, then build it through repetition.
That's the honest version, limitations included. If a category we didn't score well on matters most to your building, that's useful information for you, not a reason for us to reframe the question.
The Takeaway for Your Committee
You don't need thirty criteria to make a good recommendation. You need five, asked consistently, of every vendor on the list — including the one whose one-pager is already sitting in your folder. A program that can answer dosage, evidence, training, cost, and fit specifically, with numbers instead of adjectives, is one worth piloting. One that can't is a marketing document, not a curriculum.
Frequently Asked Questions
What Criteria Should Administrators Use to Evaluate a Soft Skills Provider?
Five: instructional dosage (total minutes and session count), the evidence base and its limitations, coach or teacher training standards, fully loaded cost per student, and fit with existing SEL or discipline frameworks already running in the building.
What Questions Should You Ask Every Vendor?
Ask for total instructional minutes, the sample size and source of their outcome data, the training requirement for whoever delivers the program, the all-in cost per student, how it integrates with current programming, and whether you can speak to reference schools without the vendor on the call.
How Does Dosage Affect Outcomes in Soft Skills Programs?
A single assembly and a multi-week structured course are both marketed as soft skills programming, but the field has no agreed minimum effective dose, which means low-dosage programs can look similar to high-dosage ones on a one-pager while producing very different results in practice.
How Much Does a Soft Skills Program Cost Per Student?
It varies widely by vendor and what's included. The number that matters is the fully loaded cost — materials, coach training, platform access, and renewal or recertification fees — not just the headline per-student figure on the initial proposal.
Should a Soft Skills Program Replace an Existing SEL Curriculum?
Not necessarily. The stronger question is whether a new program duplicates or reinforces what's already running. A soft skills course built to sit alongside existing SEL infrastructure, rather than compete with it, creates less confusion for staff and students than swapping one framework for another.
