Oil and water still: how No Child Left Behind limits and distorts environmental education in US schools

Abstract

This article explores the problematic tensions between schooling and environmental education in the United States, with a special focus on the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. Today in the United States, this powerful federal legislation dominates the discourse and practice of schooling, and works against the aims of environmental education in many ways. The article is divided into three parts. First, it reviews the recent discourse of achievement and accountability in general education, as exemplified by the No Child Left Behind Act. Second, it describes the impact of achievement and accountability discourse on environmental education by outlining two responses from environmental educators to the general climate of schooling: 1) accommodation or ‘playing the achievement game’; and 2) resistance or ‘changing the rules’. Third, it explores how related tensions between nationalistic federal education policies and the sweeping global challenges suggested by the United Nation’s Decade of Education for Sustainable Development present additional dilemmas for promoting and implementing environmental education.

Begun and held at the City of Washington on Wednesday,

the third day of January, two thousand and one

An Act

To close the achievement gap with accountability, flexibility, and choice, so that no child is left behind. (NCLB, 2001, Sec. 1)

Notes

1. For detailed discussion, see Gruenewald (2004a), ‘A Foucauldian analysis of environmental education’, along with responses by C. A. Bowers (2004) and Andrew Stables (2004), and a rejoinder by Gruenewald (2004b).

2. The North American Association for Environmental Education’s publication, Excellence in EE—Guidelines for Learning (K‐12) (NAAEE, 1999) is another high‐profile example of the trend of aligning environmental education with the official, high‐status content‐area standards of general education. See Gruenewald (2004a).

3. The U.S. Senate’s version of NCLB originally included some provision for environmental education, but this was rejected by the U.S. House of Representatives (Elder, 2003, p. 69).

4. The National Environmental Education Act was signed into law by President Nixon in 1970. Eliminated in 1981 and resurrected in 1990, the Office of Environmental Education remains under threat and outside of the Department of Education. In 2002, the Bush administration proposed shifting its limited funding for environmental education from the Environmental Protection Agency to the National Science Foundation on the grounds that environmental education is ‘ineffective’ and that it supports ‘advocacy’, not education (Elder, 2003). The point is not that the federal government has never supported environmental education, but that federal education policy is separate from it and silent about it.

5. An interesting counterpoint to the phrase is Robert Michael Pyle’s (in press) essay, ‘No Child Left Inside: Nature Study as a Radical Act’; a more common parody of NCLB is ‘No Child Left Untested’ (see DeBray, 2005).