Environmental studies classes are offered in most colleges in a variety of different forms, including the scientific, engineering, political, and economic dimensions of the environment. However, environmental studies are very rarely offered before college, in elementary, middle, or high schools. There’s a growing population that argues that this should not be the case.

Incorporating environmental education into our public school system would provide an important opportunity to educate our population on an issue that’s shrouded in confusing and debated science–at least in the United States where more Americans than ever believe in climate change but 91 percent still don’t view it as a threat. Beyond this, it would help students to understand the fundamental systems of the world around them, including where and how they get clean water, electricity, and food. Environmental education is also often presented as an opportunity to explore alternative teaching methods, including hands-on, experiential forms of learning.

Of course, even as support for this idea grows, there are just as many people who oppose it vehemently, and the issue is handled differently state to state and region to region. Read on to learn about the way environmental education is handled as well as its proven benefits and disadvantages.

Environmental Education: The Door to New Potential Career Paths

Those who oppose environmental education often do so on the grounds that its purpose is simply to indoctrinate a generation with the idea that climate change as a scientific fact. However, the environmental sector is also a multifaceted job market and early exposure to the field can open up new pathways to potential jobs for American students.

While there’s plenty of disagreement on whether climate change is real, most people would likely agree that it’s good that we have a clean and regular water supply. However, most people don’t even know how a watershed (the geographical space that feeds rainwater into an area’s water source) functions, let alone that there are jobs that they could seek to positively impact watershed management. Likewise, environmental jobs include seismologists who predict earthquakes, climatologists who study the weather, agricultural scientists who plan sustainable permacultures to ensure long-lasting food supplies, and urban planners who figure out how different areas can be built to ensure affordability, sustainability, and security against disaster.

“View Across the Garden Bed Area” courtesy of Billie Greenwood via Flickr

While many see environmental studies as a largely humanities-based discipline and to an extent that’s true–there are many careers within environmental policy, business, journalism, etc.–there are also plenty of opportunities for scientific education. Environmental science and engineering are huge fields that could be taught to American students in ways that would align with our increased desire for STEM studies and careers. These are not “hard” sciences such as chemistry, biology, and physics but rather applied sciences, which directly pertain to certain aspects of natural life. Education in these disciplines can lead students to jobs like those listed above, which have a clear and concrete benefit to our society as a whole. Regardless of your position on climate change, the environment around us is a functional system that requires maintenance and oversight from experts, and education in these fields will create a generation of people equipped and motivated to do these jobs.

Alternative Teaching Pathways

One of the central reasons so many people have decided to join the environmental education wave is that it allows for new and alternative teaching methods. Our current lecture-based, rote memorization system of public school education often leaves many students feeling bored or uninterested. Hands-on education has been explored as a way to lift this boredom while still imparting important information to American students. Because environmental education largely ties into the world surrounding us, lessons can be effectively taught in ways that allow students to directly work with nature. Environmental education provides a valuable opportunity to integrate a variety of academic disciplines into this hands-on style of education. This both allows students to process information in new and novel ways and connects their lessons to a real-world context.

How better to understand water quality than to actually go to a water source and do the testing? How better to gain an understanding of geological processes than to use the actual geographical area where you live as an experimental site? One of the most interesting avenues for environmental education is the use of school gardens, a movement that has been steadily growing in popularity. Most American youth (and to a larger extent American adults as well) only connect to their food via a grocery store and have little to no understanding of where and how that food is grown. School gardens bridge this psychological gap both by helping students understand the fundamental processes of agriculture while also providing a source of healthy and nutritious food within American schools, which have had difficulty providing effective diets to combat obesity. This kind of hands-on connection to agriculture and the presence of a local source of food are increasingly important when huge areas of earth known for producing food are experiencing severe water scarcity (in America, see: California).

While this may sound largely like hippie preaching, the numbers also agree with the advantages of experiential learning. Students who take part in hands-on learning often achieve higher overall test scores in other disciplines, including STEM classes, than those who learn through traditional lecture systems. This suggests that the addition of environmental education to a learning curriculum doesn’t take away from important time spent studying other subjects but enhances overall performance by exposing students to novel and exciting learning methods.

Educational Reform Policy

Increasingly, more people are starting to realize these benefits of environmental education and lawmakers have started to respond. This has led many states to begin implementing environmental education requirements into their educational policies. The initial push behind this came from the No Child Left Inside Act. Initially introduced in Congress in 2007, the effort passed in the House in 2008 but was not voted on in the Senate. The bill has been reintroduced in several sessions of Congress but has yet to become a law. The act sought to provide incentives for states to implement environmental education in elementary and secondary public school levels. States that participate would be eligible for grants to upgrade their curriculum, with the only requirements being a strong focus on environmental STEM studies and the use of outdoor field work. In this way, the act supports both the inclusion of environmental based learning and effectively opens the door for new experiential learning methods.

Although the No Child Left Inside Act failed to gain traction in Congress, the final version of the 2015 Every Child Succeeds Act contained some important aspects of the No Child Left Inside Act to encourage states to expand environmental education. The Every Child Succeeds Act was created to reform a Bush Administration law known as No Child Left Behind. It requires each state to make accountability plans for both short and long term goals to improve a series of different indicators of success, including test scores, English proficiency, and indicators the states pick for themselves. Special attention in the act is also given to low-performing schools, which are required to work together with state and district departments to increase test scores and graduation rates.

The Every Child Succeeds Act also amounts to a significant effort to expand states’ use of environmental education. It makes environmental education programs eligible to receive grants from a $1.6 billion fund for well-rounded education programs. It also makes environmental literacy programs eligible for grants from the $1 billion fund for Community Learning Centers. Finally, the law prioritizes outdoors and hands-on field work being incorporated into STEM education, which provides a unique opportunity for environmental education to flourish.

Going Forward

There’s little benefit to adding environmental education to our public schools if it detracts from other subjects that we’ve already agreed are important, and herein lies the challenge of educational reform. Incorporating environmental education into a standard curriculum can be tricky, especially because No Child Left Behind tightened up academic schedules throughout the nations and put an increased emphasis on boosting test scores. In the 15 years since the No Child Left Behind Act, our test scores haven’t seen any real improvement and interest in STEM has steadily dwindled. The Every Child Succeeds Act is a response to this current academic stagnation; a chance to restructure our curricula in order to boost our test scores by diversifying our educational tactics.

It’s important to note that the act does not make environmental education mandatory, and it’s up to each state to decide whether to use the funds made available by the act for that particular purpose. The states that do will have to carefully create Environmental Literacy Plans, the central goal of which is to figure out how to incorporate new forms of environmental information into students’ schedules in a way that does not detract from their other studies and instead enhances their overall performance. This is a very serious challenge, but the result of a successful ELP will be a generation that’s more aware and informed of the world around them. These plans will educate students on the environment’s most important issues and ensure that they are both motivated and equipped to make a positive difference.

Conclusion

The issue of environmental education for many people largely comes down to whether or not you believe it’s relevant for students to spend their time studying and learning about environmental concerns. Many simply don’t see any advantage of adding an entirely new field of learning to the schedules of overloaded students. In a sense, this is an ideological question about whether parents think the environment is of real relevance to their children’s lives, and many, many (millions) of people already have their minds made up on this issue. However, many do see the advantages of environmental education as a tool both to impart new and important information but also to open new doors to careers and improve our education system with novel teaching styles.

As time passes and more concrete results come out of states that have implemented environmental education, it will become possible to see benefits of educational reforms. While some states simply don’t have the right mix of lawmakers to ever approve adding environmental learning to the curriculum, others may shift toward approving it as they see higher test scores and happier students with a greater variety of job options.

Resources

Environmental Science: Environmental Science Careers

Campaign for Environmental Literacy: National Overview: State Level EE Legislation/Policy

Tampa Bay School Gardening Network: Benefits of School Gardening

Julie Ernst & Martha Monroe: The Effects of Environment-Based Education on Students’ Critical Thinking Skills and Disposition towards Critical Thinking

Monmouth University: Public Says Climate Change is Real

National Environmental Education Foundation: Benefits of Environmental Education

National Wildlife Federation: Green STEM: How Environmental Based Education Boosts Student Engagement and Academic Achievement in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math

No Child Left Inside Coalition: No Child Left Inside Act

United Nations: Water Scarcity

World Resources Institute: World’s 36 Most Water-Stressed Countries

YouGov: Global Survey: Britain Among Least Concerned in the World About Climate Change

Kyle Downey

Kyle Downey is an Environmental Issues Specialist for Law Street Media. He graduated from Skidmore College with a Bachelor’s degree in Environmental Studies. His main passions are environmentalism and social justice. Contact Kyle at Staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post The Importance of Environmental Education in America appeared first on Law Street.

This holiday season is bringing much more than gifts and cheer for children as the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), a graduated, more sophisticated, and polished version of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), was passed by the House of Representatives. The much-needed update was passed by a 359-64 majority in the House and will be voted on by the Senate in the coming week. The overwhelming bipartisan support for the bill reinforces the likelihood that it will ultimately be signed into law by President Barack Obama.

The overhaul and revision of NCLB, which resulted in the creation of ESSA, comes as a welcomed and advocated-for change to remove the federal grip over the requirements and implementation of public education and move it toward a state-based ideology that narrows the focus and tailors implementation to resources and needs within a specified state. Additionally, ESSA seeks to evolve past the sole focus on standardized testing and opens up consideration for other factors such as student/teacher engagements, success in advanced coursework, and career readiness. The main goal is a holistic approach to standardize primary education through a variety of measurable and functional factors through a more tailored, state-focused lens.  Read on to learn more about the evolution of measurable standards within primary education, what ESSA holds for future generations, and the potential impact of the pending legislation.

The Evolution of Standardized Primary Education

Education is a cornerstone in a progressive, self-sustaining society. It provides for the social and economic advancement, as well as the stability of people that allows for growth, development, creativity, and forward movement and innovation. Education is the bedrock of a society and its importance has been highlighted throughout the history of the United States in a variety of ways as evidenced by its evolution in law and implementation.

In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson sought to mend the “achievement gap” in the United States by implementing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). ESEA allocated a substantial amount of federal funding into bridging the gap in the educational disparity based on race and poverty–a disparity highlighting that minorities, low-income students, immigrant students, and those from rural/neglected areas were not receiving the same level of quality education and therefore were not achieving at the same levels or percentage rates as students outside of those statistical and categorical confines. While ESEA shifted focus onto a federally controlled education policy and allowed the government involvement in implementation through funding, it also provided “Title I” designation to schools with over 40 percent of students designated low-income through federal standards. Such a designation provided schools, mainly elementary schools, with federal-based funding to make education more accessible to low-income families and to increase resources available to schools. The Act gave young students a pathway out of institutionalized poverty through encouraged and standardized academic advancement, which was monitored through testing benchmarks and requirements.

ESEA underwent several reauthorizations, none more prominent and controversial than the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB), which was signed into law by President George W. Bush on January 8, 2002. NCLB was authored and instituted out of concern that the United States was losing academic advantage on an international scale and applied testing standards and progress tracking to all students, not just the low-income students identified by ESEA. While NCLB sought to bring academic progress and responsibility as applied to all students, it carved out specific standards and a focus on students with special needs, those learning English as a second language, and those below the poverty line, as well as minorities, as these groups of children in primary schools tended to test lower than their classmates. The law provided required benchmarks for academic achievement, testing students from the third grade through high school. It also marked the 2013-2014 school year as the goal year to have all schools testing at a “proficient level,” marked by results and scores defined by each individual state. It is important to note that by the end of the 2015 school year, no school had gotten all 100 percent of its students above the required proficient level. Additionally, teachers were required to have certain qualifications and schools were required to reach specific testing goals and provide yearly progress reports that would subject them to serious sanctions if the goals set were not met.

While NCLB was a positive step and evolution from the outdated versions of ESEA, it was laced with great controversy and consequently, great criticism. One of the major criticisms of NCLB was the heavy focus on standardized testing in math and reading, which ultimately resulted in less investment on subjects such as social studies that were not empirically tested and measured, as well as an increase in cheating in order to meet required results. The desire to increase educational standards ironically did the opposite in order to meet them. The focus on test scores also created an “educational marketplace” out of federal funding, forcing schools to compete in a survival-of-the-fittest atmosphere, rather than a collegiate and collective one. Another criticism of the law was that remedies for the low performing students–free tutoring and the opportunity to transfer to a better performing school–were completely underutilized by the students and facilities they were available to. When given the free choice and the transportation to get a better education, families opted to keep their children in what was familiar, even if what was familiar was not performing at an acceptable level. Finally, NCLB was criticized as being underfunded. Although annual funding for Title I was supposed to rise to $25 billion, it had only reached $14.5 billion by 2015 highlighting the fact that federal funding never reached the lofty goals it had set for the law as well.

In 2011, in recognizing the failure of NCLB, President Obama instituted waivers that allowed states struggling to meet the standards outlined by the law to set their own standards in an effort to adequately prepare students for higher education and the workforce. The need for reform in education policy was crystal clear. It was up to Congress to take action.

Every Student Succeeds Act: What is in Store

Last week, the House of Representatives got the ball rolling in Congress on education policy and the support for the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) was overwhelming. While the Senate will be voting on the bill within the week, the support strongly suggests that it will be signed into law following the vote.

ESSA aims to address the concerns, criticisms, failures, and restrictions highlighted by NCLB by primarily honing in on a state-centered emphasis, which would allow for more flexibility in the implementation and assessment of academic achievement. Rather than just analyzing test scores and graduation rates, ESSA will take a more holistic approach to assess educational success by looking at additional factors such as “student and teacher engagements, success in advanced coursework, and school climate and safety,” as well as performance on college prep and Advanced Placement (AP) courses, career readiness, and specialized certificates.

However, the shift back to a more state-based system of control and implementation will not be without federal regulation. States will still have to test students and report findings in order to be held accountable for the way the programs are being instituted, absorbed, and utilized, still tracking positive academic achievement benchmarks. ESSA still provides safeguards by integrating the availability of waivers for schools performing below desired levels and grant programs that will offer schools more resources to meet goals if they qualify. The bill initiates additional programs that focus on over-testing research, the importance of effective and quality early childhood education practices, and the equal distribution of funding within districts.

While ESSA is certainly a more polished and advanced version of its predecessor, it is subject to its own criticisms. The main critique this early in its life is the fact that it is silent in terms of upgrading, updating, and elevating the status quo for the profession of teaching. Although authors of the bill did not utilize this opportunity to address the modernization of teaching, qualification requirements, and experience of the individuals working within its confines–teachers, the bill successfully sets out to update a largely outdated system that has failed the children and teachers in the United States.

Conclusion: A Welcomed Change That’s Long Overdue

No Child Left Behind had officially expired in 2007. It is now December 2015. Surprisingly, despite its eight-year expiration, NCLB had maintained its grip on implementation control as no alternative methods and bills had been proposed and implemented with success in Congress. In an effort to circumvent the failing aspects of NCLB and loosen the regulatory grip over state implementation, most states were working under waivers granted by President Obama, providing them with the necessary flexibility to implement more successful educational policy options for their specific circumstances. States have had temporary and remote control over educational policy following NCLB’s expiration.

And while critics are emphatic that ESSA’s authors dropped the ball in addressing a refocused lens on increasing and updating teaching standards as well as standardized education, the bill did take big steps in initiating additional programs to reform education policy, elevated expectations and implementation of a revitalized policy, and works to ensure fair and equally distributed system of federal funding. Additionally, the bill provides the opportunity for volunteer partnerships, but prohibits any state to be influenced, provided incentives, or coerced into accepting and adopting Common Core principles. While criticisms will exist on both political sides, particularly within the idea that the federal government is simply punting the education problem to the states to fix, the overwhelming bipartisan support for the Every Student Succeeds Act shows the importance of quality education in this country for all students alike.

The steps taken to eliminate NCLB and reinvent the bill in a new form is a commendable and welcomed progression in education policy.

Resources

Primary

House of Representatives: Every Student Succeeds Act

107th Congress: No Child Left Behind

Additional

 U.S. News: Leaving Behind No Child Left Behind

LAWS: Elementary and Secondary Education Act

 Education Week: No Child Left Behind: An Overview

National Public Radio (NPR): Former ‘No Child Left Behind’ Advocate Turns Critic

 CBS DFW: A Major Overhaul of No Child Left Behind is in the Works

Ajla Glavasevic

Ajla Glavasevic is a first-generation Bosnian full of spunk, sass, and humor. She graduated from SUNY Buffalo with a Bachelor of Science in Finance and received her J.D. from the University of Cincinnati College of Law. Ajla is currently a licensed attorney in Pennsylvania and when she isn’t lawyering and writing, the former Team USA Women’s Bobsled athlete (2014-2015 National Team) likes to stay active and travel. Contact Ajla at Staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

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