more on school gardens

**j* e* m* s* <h*@sbcglobal.net>**

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT: Lisa Bennett, Communications Director
Center for Ecoliteracy
510.845.4595/415.439.3511
lisa@ecoliteracy.org

The School Garden Debate: To Weep or Reap?
By Lisa Bennett

I was speaking today with a mom at my sons? 
school. She was concerned about a teacher who was 
doing such a poor job that even his students were 
complaining that they weren?t learning enough.

?We?re all worried about the economy,? she said. 
In this climate, any sign that a school (even an 
excellent or basically good one) may be failing 
to absolutely and definitively prepare our 
children for whatever the future will bring is 
likely to provoke greater anxiety than usual.

This collective economic angst, I believe, is 
what Caitlin Flanagan played into in ?Cultivating 
Failure,? an article that lambastes school 
gardens in the January/February 2010 Atlantic. 
But to separate the angst from the facts, it is 
necessary to first look at the angst and then the 
facts.

Flanagan opens the article by asking the reader 
to imagine being a young and desperately poor 
Mexican who has made the dangerous and illegal 
journey to California to work in the fields to 
give his or her child the chance at a better 
life. An entirely different life. A life that 
embodies the American dream. A life made possible 
by education.

But, ironically, it turns out this child is 
forced to spend hours tending a garden at school 
so he may learn what his parents could easily 
teach him about how food grows. He is effectively 
robbed, Flanagan argues, of the time he should be 
spending reading important books and learning 
math-the things he actually needs to lift himself 
out of poverty. In the end, he is likely to be 
relegated to an "uneducated underclass" while his 
better educated peers prepare to pass him by.

With the growing trend of school gardens, ?the 
idea of a school as a venue in which to advance a 
social agenda has reached rock bottom,? she 
concludes. And who is to blame? An ?agglomeration 
of foodies and educational reformers who are 
propelled by a vacuous if well-meaning 
ideology?-in other words, by unexamined 
assumptions that spending time in school gardens 
will give children a better chance at getting an 
education and a high-school diploma.

To some, this may have appeared (at least on 
first blush) to be a devastating critique. 
Moreover, it pitted the more advantaged in our 
society against those desperately counting on 
school to help them raise themselves out of 
poverty. And this invocation of class 
differences, as well as racial and ethnic ones, 
beckons the reader into the terrain of charged 
emotions, where it can be challenging to keep 
one?s focus on the facts.

In truth, the first time I read Flanagan?s 
article, I too felt a paroxysm of worry. Was this 
growing trend in education actually robbing our 
most vulnerable students of more basic and 
important learning experiences? Were school 
gardens, more broadly, ill-suited to the central 
task of nurturing what we all want for our 
children, that they grow up to be happy and 
well-rounded young people who can successfully 
make their way in the world?

Or, as one Berkeley resident commented on an 
Atlantic blog: ?No one is opposed to gardens. No 
one is opposed to healthy eating. Just don?t put 
it in the schools.? What if he and Flanagan were 
right? What if school gardens are not part of the 
solution to the problem of bad schools, but 
rather, part of the problem?

In Search of Answers
With these questions in mind, I called Michelle 
Ratcliffe, one of few people in the United States 
who has a doctorate in agriculture, food, and the 
environment.

?She?s right about two things," said Ratcliffe. 
?One is that not everyone learns from 
experiential place-based education,? which is 
often a feature of school gardens.

?The other thing is that school gardens are not a 
fringe element anymore, but are becoming a social 
norm,? said Ratcliffe, farm-to-school program 
manager for the Oregon State Department of 
Agriculture. ?I must have received 1,000 calls 
this past year from people asking me to help them 
start a school garden or farm-to-school program.? 
There are, as Flanagan cites, already nearly 
4,000 school gardens in California alone and many 
more nationwide.

But what about Flanagan?s main argument-or, 
rather, the rationale on which she rests her 
criticism of school gardens-that there is not 
?one bit of proof? that spending time in a school 
garden will result in kids? getting an education 
or a high-school diploma?

?She is so wrong about that,? said Ratcliffe, 
echoing the sentiment of numerous other experts 
who have been writing on the subject in recent 
weeks.

To be sure, school gardens are still relatively 
new in the world of education, which means that 
there has not yet been time to develop a robust 
body of peer-reviewed quantitative controlled 
studies on the topic. But there is research and a 
significant body of teacher experience to 
consider, as evidenced by many of the educators 
who have written responses to this article.

But here is the larger and more insidious point: 
Flanagan suggests that because there has not yet 
been significant research to show that school 
gardens advance reading and math, they are a 
distraction from a school?s central mission.

This reflects a jump in logic that would make 
most teachers? heads spin. School gardens are not 
in the same category as after-school electives, 
such as chess, cooking club, or chorus. Schools 
use gardens not to give their students a chance 
to develop a hobby but to enhance their overall 
instruction. They see gardens as laboratories 
where students apply what they have learned in 
the classroom and where a fragmented curriculum 
can become unified through hands-on experience 
that draws on math, science, and social science. 
They are places where students can explore the 
living environment and be challenged to consider: 
What is the web of life? How do organisms 
interact with each other and the physical 
environment? How do we get and use the food 
energy all living organisms need to survive and 
begin to understand the effect of human 
activities on the biosphere?

Moreover, Flanagan ignores an enormous body of 
research (on social and emotional learning, 
project-based learning, and student health and 
academic achievement, as well as the study of 
science and ecological literacy.)<>[1] She also 
ignores nearly a century of educational 
philosophy and practice that makes one basic 
point very clear: If you want students to perform 
well in school and beyond, you have to consider 
the whole child and whole-school experience.

Social and emotional learning. The whole student, 
of course, includes the student?s social and 
emotional learning, something that can be 
naturally cultivated in the garden. And as a 
recent meta analysis published by the 
<http://www.casel.org/downloads/PackardES.pdf>Collaborative 
on Emotional and Social Learning reported, 
schools with social and emotional learning 
programs lead on average to a:

·       11 percent improvement in achievement test scores
·       9 percent improvement in school and class behavior
·       9 percent decrease in conduct problems, 
such as classroom misbehavior and aggression.

Project-based and place-based learning. School 
gardens can create opportunities for what is 
called project-based and place-based learning; 
and on this there is a growing body of research 
that highlights benefits, including:

·       Higher scores on standardized reading, 
writing, math, science, and social studies tests
·       Improved behavior in class
·       Increases in self-esteem
·       Improved conflict resolution, problem 
solving, and higher-level thinking

Research also shows that teachers become more 
excited and motivated, more engaged with 
students, and more able to collaborate 
effectively with other educators. (For a sampling 
of some of the research, see the 
<http://www.promiseofplace.org/Research_Evaluation>Center 
for Place-Based Learning and Community Engagement 
and the 
<http://www.bie.org/about/does_pbl_work>Buck 
Institute for Education.

Student health and academic achievement. After 
decades of epidemic rates of childhood obesity, 
Type 2 diabetes, and other diet-related 
illnesses, the health of young people has 
recently become the focus of a new initiative led 
by Michelle Obama (who, yes, planted an organic 
garden with school children on the White House 
lawn in 2009).

Given this trend, it is not surprising that more 
schools have planted gardens, where students have 
the opportunity to gain first-hand knowledge of 
fresh and healthy food; where, as garden 
educators nearly universally report, students are 
more likely to try fruit and vegetables they have 
never tried before; and where, as research 
published in the American Journal of Clinical 
Nutrition shows, they may develop the habits that 
make them more likely to eat healthier foods as 
adults.

It is also not surprising, as reports from the 
<http://www.cdc.gov/HealthyYouth/health_and_academics/index.htm>Centers 
for Disease Control and Prevention have stated, 
"The academic success of America?s youth is 
strongly linked with their health.? Children who 
eat well are more likely to perform well and have 
fewer behavior problems (a finding that might 
resonate with any of us who have ever noticed the 
impact of food on our own performance.)

The only surprising thing is that The Atlantic 
published an article that failed to make these 
basic connections.

Science and ecological literacy. While Flanagan 
narrowed her look at school gardens down to 
whether they promote reading and math, she 
ignored the field that has been the focus of most 
research-namely, science.

For example, one 2005 study, 
?<http://www.cababstractsplus.org/abstracts/Abstract.aspx?AcNo=20053167335>Growing 
Minds: The Effect of a School Gardening Program 
on the Science Achievement of Elementary 
Students," found that students who participated 
in school gardening activities scored 
significantly higher on science achievement tests 
compared to students who had no garden-based 
learning.

She also ignores the fact that gardens are an 
ideal, right-sized place for students to develop 
the ecological literacy they will need to address 
the coming environmental challenges and be 
leaders and citizens who understand how the 
natural world works, see the patterns that 
connect human activity to nature, and have the 
knowledge and values to act effectively on that 
understanding.

As Dorothy Blair, an assistant professor at Penn 
State University, concluded in a review of the 
research on the benefits of school gardens in the 
Winter 2009 issue of 
<http://www.eric.ed.gov:80/ERICWebPortal/custom/portlets/recordDetails/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true&_&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=EJ822027&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=no&accno=EJ822027>The 
Journal of Environmental Education: ?Gardens can 
improve the ecological complexity of the 
schoolyard in ways that promote effective 
experiential learning in many subject areas, 
particularly the areas of science, environmental 
education, and food education.?

Where Are We Now?
Flanagan?s critique deeply upset many educators 
who have reason, experience, and, it turns out, 
the research to support their belief that school 
gardens have a positive influence on students and 
the whole schooling experience.

In times when so many truly serious challenges 
face us-in education, the economy, and the 
environment-that is unfortunate. It serves no 
discernable social purpose to take sweeping 
potshots at people doing good, creative, and 
heartfelt work on behalf of students. Instead of 
tilting at windmills, one wonders: Why not bring 
such skillful and passionate writing to the real 
problems that plague schools, including 
inadequate funding, bureaucracies that stifle 
teacher independence, and a system which 
continues to put test performance above actual 
learning and, perhaps more important, above 
cultivation of a love of learning?

Still, in the end, perhaps Flanagan has done the 
school garden movement a great service. Anyone 
who loves education, after all, ought to love a 
good debate. So let?s thank her for raising the 
tough questions-for while she may have failed to 
answer them, she provided a fine platform for 
others to do so.

A shorter version of this essay originally 
appeared in 
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lisa-bennett/to-weep-or-reap-the-flap_b_443231.html>The 
Huffington Post.

Lisa Bennett is the communications director for 
the Center for Ecoliteracy and a former fellow at 
Harvard University's Center on Press, Politics, 
and Public Policy in the John F. Kennedy School 
of Government. She is a contributor to the 
Center's book, Smart by Nature: Schooling for 
Sustainability (Watershed Media/University of 
California Press, 2009). 

- END -

<>[1] For an overview of the research on school 
gardens, see the 
<http://childrens.wcroc.cfans.umn.edu/pages/links/researchLinks1.php>University 
of Minnesota, the 
<http://www.csgn.org/research.php>California 
School Garden Network, and the 
<http://datadorksunite.ning.com>Farm to School 
and School Garden Research Consortium. For a 
meta-analysis report on the advantages of 
environment-based learning, more generally, see 
the State Education Environment Roundtable?s 
report, entitled 
<http://www.seer.org:pages:research:CSAPII2005.pdf>?The 
Effects of Environment-Based Education on Student 
Achievement." It concludes, "Students in the 
environment-based study schools scored higher 
than their traditionally educated peers on 
standardized test scores in the content areas of 
reading, math, language and spelling."

-- 
Jo Ellen Meyers Sharp
The Hoosier Gardener
Director Garden Writers Association
Writer * Editor * Speaker * Garden Consultant
Co-author,The Indiana Gardener's Guide
Editor, Indiana Living Green magazine
P.O. Box 20310, Indianapolis, IN 46220
E-mail: hoosiergardener@sbcglobal.net
http://www.hoosiergardener.com
http://www.IndianaLivingGreen.com
E-mail: editor@IndianaLivingGreen.com
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