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)

Introduction

Bob Stevenson’s 1987 essay, ‘Schooling and Environmental Education: Contradictions in Purpose and Practice’, helps explain many of the problems still associated with getting environmental education on the schooling agenda, and of making schooling more responsive to the ecological and cultural contexts of learning. In many ways, the purposes of schooling, its governing structures and processes, as well as most teachers’ pedagogical practices (and the theories and tacit assumptions on which they are based), remain fundamentally at odds with the cultural and pedagogical goals of environmental education.

In the 1990s, several landmark texts were published that examined deeper aspects of this dilemma. In Ecological Literacy (1992) and Earth in Mind (1994), David Orr elaborated on ‘the problem of education’, or how our institutions of education continue to train skilled workers and thinkers who contribute to the environmental problem. In Education, Cultural Myths, and the Ecological Crisis (1993), The Culture of Denial (1997) and other books, C. A. Bowers examined the deeper assumptions, or ‘root metaphors’, underlying modern industrialised cultures—namely individualism, anthropocentrism, and a faith in progress—and argued that the process of education will continue to produce ‘pre‐ecological’ thinkers as long as such ‘root metaphors’ are taken for granted. During the same period, several key texts on education and sustainability were published in Australia and Britain, including John Fien’s Environmental Education: A Pathway to Sustainability (1993) and John Huckle & Stephen Sterling’s Education for Sustainability (1996). These books developed a critical understanding of sustainability and sustainable development and reasserted the position that comprehensive environmental or sustainability education will essentially require a change in worldview, and thus needs to be the concern of all educators. It is the enormous scope of the issues around environment and sustainability that prompted David Orr (1992) to claim in Ecological Literacy that ‘all education is environmental education’ (p. 90). Other prominent texts in the 1990s that considered the scope of environmental, ecological, and sustainability education and why these are so difficult to implement through schooling included Roger Hart’s Children’s Participation: The Theory and Practice of Involving Young Citizens in Community Development and Environmental Care (1997), Edmund O’Sullivan’s Transformative Learning (1999) and Gregory Smith and Dilafruz Williams’ Ecological Education in Action (1999).

This is a sampling of powerful texts that reinforce the claims Stevenson made in 1987. Together, these texts develop a comprehensive and often damning critique of the social, cultural, political, economic, epistemological and ecological contexts of schooling, and the role that schools play in legitimising and reinforcing an unsustainable, and unjust, consumer society. Each of these texts also echoes Stevenson’s earlier critique of the ideological, structural, pedagogical and curricular practices of schooling that many have commented work against the goals of environmental education. A brief list of these pillars of schooling would include: school purposes that are geared for uncritical participation in the growth economy; school structures that are isolated from communities and that cut learning up into small chunks of time; standards‐based and teacher‐centred pedagogies that frustrate the process of inquiry; curricular fragmentation that works against holistic or systems thinking; and the assumption that school success or student achievement should be measured by content‐area test scores or other indicators such as the rate of university attendance.

We believe that today, despite the growth in the diverse and international environmental education community, the situation with respect to schooling in the United States is in many respects no different than it was in 1987. In fact in some ways, we will show, the situation is worse. Environmental education continues to be marginalised, misunderstood as mainly about science, and in many places totally neglected; while the structure of schooling, or what Tyack & Cuban (1995) called ‘the grammar of schooling’, remains resistant to the transformative agenda of environmental education or education for sustainability. Though there are of course exceptions, the direction of education in the United States continues to move away from the ecologically literate and culturally critical citizenry that writers like Bowers, Orr, and O’Sullivan described in their influential books.

Over the past decade, however, there have been several key developments in general education discourse, in environmental education discourse, and in the wider realm of international environmental politics. Considering these developments along with Stevenson’s earlier assertions helps reveal the continuing drama of a contested relationship between environmental education and schooling in the United States, as well as in other Western industrialised nations with neo‐liberal political leadership. Our article is divided into three parts. First, we review the recent discourse of achievement and accountability in general education, as exemplified by the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. Second, we describe 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, we explore 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.

NCLB and the accountability climax

The purpose of [the No Child Left Behind Act] is to ensure that all children have a fair, equal, and significant opportunity to obtain a high‐quality education and reach, at a minimum, proficiency on challenging State academic achievement standards and state academic assessments. This purpose can be accomplished by—(1) ensuring that high‐quality academic assessments, accountability systems, teacher preparation and training, curriculum, and instructional materials are aligned with challenging State academic standards so that students, teachers, parents, and administrators can measure progress against common expectations for student academic achievement. (NCLB, 2001, Sec. 1001.1)

‘No child left behind’ is a phrase frequently recited by nearly every educator associated with public schooling in the United States. Formally known as the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (hereafter NCLB), this legislation is the centrepiece of President George W. Bush’s agenda for public education and was, indeed, Bush’s top domestic priority in his election campaign (DeBray, 2005). Much of what happens in terms of educational policy, practice, research and rhetoric in the United States is now, to a significant degree, viewed through the lens of this Act. The Act and the agenda it represents, however, must not be misunderstood as a partisan plan pushed and defended mainly by Bush supporters or Republican‐majority branches of federal and state legislatures. NCLB was passed and continues to be supported with overwhelming bipartisan support. Many of its key features, such as its tightening regime of standards, testing and accountability, were actually borrowed from Democratic President Clinton’s proposal for Goals 2000. According to DeBray’s (2005) review of the federal policy environment around NCLB, ‘Bush took the core of Clinton’s education proposals and claimed success for them’ (p. 38). NCLB is only the current climax of a reform agenda that has for about twenty years been focused squarely on measuring student achievement in traditional content areas and on holding teachers and schools accountable for results.

To say that NCLB totally dominates schooling is not to say that all educators and policymakers agree on all the particulars of the law. Indeed, in 2005 school districts in three states—Michigan, Vermont, and President Bush’s own home state of Texas—took President Bush’s former Secretary of Education to court over the law that threatens federal cuts in funding as well as government‐sanctioned boycotts, shutdowns, and takeovers of schools that do not show annual yearly progress (AYP) on increasingly frequent standardised test scores. Yet the lawsuit, which was joined by the once‐powerful teachers’ union, the National Education Association (NEA), officially took little issue with the policies and practices associated with the law and its central focus on accountability through test scores in fragmented content areas. Instead, the plaintiffs contended that the federal government was mandating policies and practices (including threats and punishments) without sufficient funds for implementation. The mandate represented by NCLB, in other words, was not seriously questioned, though the lack of money was. As it happened, the federal judge who presided over this first major court case against NCLB ruled against the plaintiffs, arguing that the federal government has already appropriated significant funding (tens of billions of dollars) to meet the law’s requirements (and to assure its legitimacy and its continuing dominating presence). Margaret Spellings, current Education Secretary, responded to the ruling:

This is a victory for children and parents across the country. Chief Judge Friedman’s decision validates our partnership with states to close the achievement gap, hold schools accountable and to ensure all students are reading and doing math at grade‐level by 2014. (Spellings, cited in Lucy, 2005, 13A)

In the language of competition familiar to legal battles, sporting rivalry and war, Spellings neatly equated educational achievement to success on tests and promoted an educational agenda focused with laser‐like precision on ‘reading and doing math at grade level by 2014’ (ibid.).

The insatiable jaws of the achievement gap

The following is the opening sentence of the lead paper in a recent Educational Researcher, one of the most influential and respected journals in the field of education at large: ‘The achievement gap on standardized tests is increasingly viewed as the most significant educational challenge facing American society in the 21^st century’ (Kim & Sunderman, 2005, p. 3). NCLB, which is the reauthorisation of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 that provided Title I funding to schools, aims specifically to close ‘the achievement gap between high‐ and low‐performing children, especially the achievement gaps between minority and non‐minority students, and between disadvantaged children and their more advantaged peers’ (NCLB, 2001, Sec. 1001.3). In their article, Kim & Sunderman, in an echo of the court case described above, take little issue with the substance of the law. However, unlike the lawyers who cried foul because of insufficient funds, these educational researchers complain that the statistical processes (e.g. the use of ‘mean proficiency’ and ‘subgroup accountability’) for measuring annual yearly progress (AYP) have ‘a disparate impact on schools serving low income children and … can over‐identify racially diverse schools as failing to make AYP’. The researchers go on to claim, as Secretary Spellings suggested, that ‘Few Americans disagree with the ultimate objective of the No Child Left Behind Act—to eliminate achievement disparities in reading and mathematics by the 2013–2014 school year’ (Kim & Sunderman, 2005, p. 10).

The discursive power of the rhetoric associated with NCLB, and the power of this rhetoric to eclipse (and, as we argue below, absorb) the discourse of environmental education is the current manifestation of the problem Stevenson described in 1987: the purposes of environmental education and the purposes of schooling (as manifested in policy and practice) are to some degree contradictory and incommensurate. Since the early 1980s and the publication of A Nation at Risk, trends toward standards, testing and accountability have been linked to the perceived need to keep pace with other nations in the global economic competition. More recently, the discourse of standards, accountability and excellence has been linked to efforts to close the historic achievement gaps between different racial, cultural and economic groups. Thus, NCLB is invoked both as policy aimed at ending inequality of educational (and thus economic) opportunity and at strengthening the economic advantage of the entire nation. When the narratives of economic opportunity, global competition, and equity and social justice are conflated in one slick phrase—‘no child left behind’—the policy environment and practices behind the rhetoric become increasingly difficult to challenge.

Selling environmental education to schools: a Faustian bargain

While [NCLB] presents an opportunity for the field, it may also present an unprecedented threat. If [environmental literacy] does not find its way into these standards, [NCLB’s] focus on ‘teaching to the tests’ could push [environmental literacy] further out of the daily curriculum, losing much of the gains made over the past 30 years. (Elder, 2003, p. 94)

The policy and practice environment under NCLB has effectively married the discourse of accountability and control with the discourse of redressing historical and persisting inequities in school outcome. In the United States, ‘closing the achievement gap’—as measured by standardised tests devoid of environmental content—is now almost everywhere touted as the most significant moral mandate of schooling. During the 1980s and 1990s, developing achievement standards and tests in traditional content areas, and developing reporting and accountability practices like publishing disaggregated test scores in newspapers (e.g. reporting results by race or socioeconomic class), emerged as a huge growth industry in the institution of American schools. Under NCLB, each state continues to refine and struggle with its practices for setting standards, measuring and reporting outcomes, and feeding these assessments back into the increasingly prescriptive process of teaching and learning at all levels, including teacher education.

During the same period, especially the 1990s, environmental education discourse in the United States, as evidenced in such parent organisations as the North American Association of Environmental Education (NAAEE), began to exhibit the characteristics of school discourse under the pressures of accountability (see, for example, NAAEE, 1999; Gruenewald, 2004a). The logic of this persisting trend of accommodation is straightforward: if educational leaders, teachers and parents are to support environmental education, they have to be shown that environmental education fosters measurable student learning in the tested content areas. Thus, just as setting standards and scoring tests have become growth industries, so has the business of correlating environmental education goals with state standards (and standards from other professional education organisations). Though many educators committed to the goals of environmental education dislike this practice, many also believe this kind of accommodation to be the best hope for getting more environmental education on the schooling agenda. Below, we describe this particular practice of accommodation as a Faustian deal of ‘playing the achievement game’; we then describe an alternative form of resistance that directly challenges the narrow thinking behind the culture of accountability.

Accommodation: playing the achievement game

As environmental educators, we have been involved in the development and delivery of numerous environmental education projects, and in many more conversations about environmental education, where practitioners lament the perceived need to package environmental education in the language of student achievement in the basic content areas. Gruenewald (2004a) argued that the practice of aligning environmental education with conventional education mandates is a form of self‐regulation that works against the goals of social transformation suggested in the works mentioned above of Orr (1992, 1994), Bowers (1993, 1997), Huckle & Sterling (1996) or O’Sullivan (1999). This common practice is evidence of the power of accountability discourse to influence the thoughts and actions of even those outside the formal system of schooling. ¹ Many environmental educators who work mainly outside of schools see this practice as the only way to get environmental education into the schoolhouse door; others view it as way to promote environmental education as a professional field (NAAEE, 1999). We believe that it helps to explain how environmental education gets muted, distorted and absorbed by the culture of schooling.

The most well‐known and obvious example of ‘playing the achievement game’ is Lieberman & Hoody’s Closing the Achievement Gap: Using the Environment as an Integrated Context for Learning (1998). ² This was the first well‐publicised effort to demonstrate through research that environmental education may be related to gains in conventional measures of student and school achievement. The title and subtitle of the publication locates the study in what can be considered an instrumentalist genre of environmental education discourse. That is, environmental education is promoted as a vehicle (using the environment) for closing the achievement gap, rather than as a pathway to ecological literacy or to a more sustainable society. In an introduction to their research report that reads like a strategic disclaimer against undue emphasis on environmental knowledge, Lieberman & Hoody write that using the environment as an integrating context for learning ‘is not primarily focused on learning about the environment, nor is it limited to developing environmental awareness’ (1998, p. 1). The authors go on to claim:

The observed benefits of EIC programs are both broad‐ranging and encouraging. They include: better performance on standardized measures of academic achievement in reading, writing, math, science, and social studies; reduced discipline and classroom management problems; increased engagement and enthusiasm for learning; and, greater pride and ownership in accomplishments. (Lieberman & Hoody, 1998, p. 1)

These ‘observed benefits’ attenuate and even omit the aims of environmental education and redirect its use and purpose toward closing the achievement gap—and even toward reducing classroom management problems. From an instrumentalist perspective, this can be described as a practical strategy. Teachers and administrators, especially under the pressures of NCLB, often need to be convinced that whatever curricular approach they adopt will enhance student achievement. This is especially true if the approach represents a departure from the familiar setting of delivering instruction in fragmented content areas. However, from the transformative perspective of ecological literacy (e.g. Orr, 1992) or education for sustainability (e.g. Huckle & Sterling, 1996), playing the achievement game can also be described as a self‐defeating strategy that confuses the purpose of environmental education and that reinforces the legitimacy of conventional school practices and assessments, such as using standardised test scores as the sole measure of school or student achievement.

Further analysis of Lieberman & Hoody’s (1998) Closing the Achievement Gap and its subsequent use would make an especially productive case study of the relationship between schooling and environmental education under the ever‐present gaze of NCLB. For now, one additional point helps to advance our current discussion. Closing the Achievement Gap precipitated a persistent and problematic trend of attempting to legitimise environmental education with the same outcome measures (e.g. higher test scores in fragmented content areas) as those sought under No Child Left Behind. The perceived need to legitimise environmental education through these conventional measures has distracted many environmental educators from the work of assessing progress toward the actual aims of ecological literacy or education for sustainability. Such an opportunity cost is easily identified in the research questions and sampling methods apparent in Closing the Achievement Gap. Schools eligible for the study had to report a significant history of and commitment to using the environment as an integrating context for learning. Rather than designing research questions that would assess outcomes associated with the aims of environmental education (and neglected in the practice of general education), Lieberman & Hoody sought to examine test data in reading, writing, mathematics, science and social studies, and teacher attitudes about classroom management. More studies that correlate traditional school achievement measures with environmental education may be necessary to advance environmental education in schooling; however, such efforts at playing the achievement game can become missed opportunities to catalogue and define outcomes that might help to ‘change the rules’ of accountability.

Resistance: changing the rules of accountability

Critical postmodern literature frequently describes the pervasive presences of power and domination and their limiting effects on human agency. However, the effects of power are rarely absolute and are usually met with multiple forms of resistance. Accommodation—‘playing along’ or ‘playing the game’—is itself often a form of resistance that Scott (1990) calls part of the ‘public transcript’, that is, a public performance of ‘keeping up appearances’ so as not to incur punishment from those in power. When the subordinate performs or plays the game (as, for example, in the case of a slave smiling in his master’s face), she does so for the sake of survival. Scott (1990) uses the term ‘hidden transcript’ to describe that discourse that takes place ‘“offstage”, beyond the direct observation by powerholders’ (p. 4).

The ‘grammar of schooling’ (Tyack & Cuban, 1995) is a powerful and, under NCLB, even a dominating force, one that many have commented works against the aims of environmental education. Accommodation through ‘playing the achievement game’ is in many cases seen as a necessary performance by environmental educators attempting to survive in a hostile political space. As mentioned earlier, our own experience in acts of accommodating to the forces of standards and testing has also let us in on the ‘offstage’ discourse of environmental educators. These hidden (and unpublished) transcripts are most often full of critique for a system of schooling that reduces learning, achievement and success to test scores and prescriptions. The practice of aligning environmental education with standards and testing continues because it is, in part, a form of resistance that creates space within the dominant discourse for environmental education. However, ‘playing the game’ is only one of several possible strategic responses that environmental educators might pursue. To mount an effective resistance to the dominant practices of schooling, we argue, ‘playing the game’ may sometimes be necessary, but it is an insufficient and potentially counterproductive strategy.

Despite the increases in the level of scrutiny over the teaching profession that have come with NCLB, many teachers still experience a great deal of autonomy in their work. Teaching has often been described as a potentially subversive (Postman & Weingartner, 1969), transgressive (e.g. hooks, 1994), and radical intellectual act (e.g. Giroux, 1988). There have been and will continue to be spaces within formal schooling for creative teachers to resist the external policy environment and to develop pedagogies and curricula that reflect the aims of environmental education, education for sustainability, or any number of educational agendas. Many teachers who practice environmental education in schools have learned to de‐centre the discourse of standards and tests and to focus instead on creating quality learning experiences for themselves and their students. Experienced teachers do not find it difficult to justify their decisions about curriculum and pedagogy with reference to student learning outcomes typical to accountability discourse. However, these teachers, and we consider ourselves part of this group, are also committed to teaching and learning things excluded from mandates and standardised tests. That is, we often hold ourselves accountable to a different or additional set of standards and purposes than those codified by NCLB.

We believe that most environmental educators are likewise committed to aims that go unmentioned in the discourses that govern educational policy. While we recognise that political pressure sometimes makes accommodation necessary, we also advocate a form of collective, non‐violent resistance we call ‘changing the rules’. We strongly believe that teachers and schools do need to demonstrate accountability, and that environmental educators can influence the conversation about what educators need to be accountable for. As former classroom teachers ourselves, we wish we would have had access to discourses of accountability that expressed our actual convictions about the value of environmental education.

Environmental educators have been setting noble standards and guidelines for the field for three decades. In the 1970s and 1980s, these guidelines stemmed from an international movement for environmental education and were associated with the discourse of environmentalism. In the United States, such an association helped marginalise environmental or sustainability education as the political discourse of a special interest group on the fringe of education and society. In the 1990s, environmental educators began to align their discourse more closely with the discourse of accountability. We are suggesting that today’s work is to help to reinvent the discourse of accountability for environmental education so that it can neither be dismissed as environmentalism nor be absorbed by the machine of standards and testing.

In Ethics, Place and Environment: A Journal of Philosophy and Geography, Gruenewald (2005) analyses accountability discourse as both an ‘institutional barrier’ and a ‘strategic pathway’ for environmental education. The Rural School and Community Trust’s Place‐Based Education Portfolio Rubric, the Alaska Native Knowledge Network’s Standards for Culturally Responsive Schools, and the American Educational Research Association’s Social Justice, Peace, and Environmental Education Standards Project are analysed as three recent examples of efforts to redefine the meaning of accountability. Gruenewald (2005) notes:

Unlike the efforts of environmental educators to include EE [environmental education] goals and objectives alongside the conventional standards, or to show how EE practice satisfies conventional standards, the examples … reflect comprehensive rethinking of the role of accountability in education. A key characteristic of each of these systems of accountability is a shift from individual achievement as the sole focus of assessment, to a broader view of the institution of school and the larger community. That is, instead of focusing on and judging only narrow measures of student, teacher, or school performance, each of these systems of accountability focuses also on the larger contexts in which learning takes place. The shift in focus does not represent a move away from high expectations for student learning, but toward institutional responsibility for making education relevant to students and to the quality of community life. Taken together, the three examples … suggest a question that the current accountability movement overlooks: that is, to what are we really accountable now and in the long run? (p. 275)

Standards are not likely to disappear any time soon. At issue here is the need to challenge conventional thinking about standards, and to demonstrate diverse ways of thinking about and practicing accountability. Significantly, none of the approaches to accountability mentioned above focuses exclusively on environmental education as a subfield; rather, each locates the aims of environmental education in a broader movement for social and educational transformation. The issue is more than one of semantics. Place‐based education or culturally responsive schooling, for example, potentially appeal to a much wider audience than environmental education per se, and this is especially the case when social justice is a central educational concern.

Casting a wider net

While we agree with David Orr (1992) that ‘all education is environmental education’ (p. 90), we also recognise that many educators with socially transformative, subversive, transgressive or radical agendas have been struggling for a long while with the problematic associations connected with the field (e.g. environmental education as middle‐class, white, privileged, science‐focused, advocacy‐focused, green‐focused). Recent annual conferences of the North American Association for Environmental Education reflected these concerns with a focus on diversity, becoming more inclusive, or, in the language of its 2004 conference, ‘Casting a Wider Net for Environmental Education’. The NAAEE conference theme for 2006 was ‘Building EE in Society’. The conference webpage states: ‘The EE profession has much to offer society. In striving for standards of excellence in our work, we must connect with a wider circle of people to win broader support for EE. To do so, we must demonstrate our relevance to today’s challenges in both our education system and natural resource conservation’ (NAAEE, 2006, n.p.). What role language plays in the work of creating broader networks of support remains a serious issue.

While we do not believe in a single‐answer response to this dilemma, it is significant to note how several prominent authors have distanced themselves from the language of environmental education. In his book, Place‐Based Education: Connecting Classrooms and Communities, David Sobel (2004) urges, ‘Many are ready to move beyond environmental education’ (p. 8). Almost a decade earlier, in John Huckle & Stephen Sterling’s seminal edited volume, Education for Sustainability, Peter Martin (1996) wrote:

having become institutionalised, environmental education is a lost cause and should be phased out as soon as possible … the ultimate challenge is to remove all adjectival adjuncts … to education and develop the conventional notion that the education system must … prepare all people for their role as well‐informed, skilled and experienced participators in determining the quality and structure of the world. (p. 51)

C. A. Bowers, one of the leading theorists connecting ecological, cultural and educational thinking, has just written a book that argues why environmental education must be replaced in favour of ‘commons education’ (Bowers, 2006).

The intentional move away from environmental education by those who strongly support its traditional aims signals an enduring crisis in the field. We have argued that the attempt to legitimise and institutionalise environmental education as a professional field contributes to this crisis, most notably by accommodating to the culture of accountability. We have also argued that redefining or changing the rules of accountability represents a possible line of resistance. The question is, what specific strategies might those committed to environmental education pursue in order to truly ‘cast a wider net’ and respond to the need for accountability, while at the same time resisting the narrowing discourses of NCLB?

One possible response is to de‐centre and de‐institutionalise the language of environmental education in favour of ‘democratic participation’, ‘civic engagement’ or analogous terms. This is not to suggest, as Martin did in 1996, that ‘environmental education is a lost cause and should be phased out as soon as possible’ (p. 51), but to develop a rhetorical strategy that appeals to a much broader constituency. If there is an emerging counterpoint to NCLB, it is the widespread acknowledgement that we have in the United States not only an ‘achievement gap’, but a potentially much more serious ‘participation gap’. One consequence of the ‘high‐stakes’ environment surrounding NCLB is that the pressure to prepare for tests inhibits the development of outdoor, experiential, project‐based learning, or community‐based learning. In an era where even recess is being eliminated from the curriculum in schools across the nation, there are fewer opportunities to participate in collaborative inquiry projects, to contribute to community problem‐solving, or to be initiated into the political process of local democracy. While it is unlikely that the general public will be concerned with the ‘ecological literacy gap’ endemic to schooling, demonstrating a ‘participation gap’ may work to raise questions about the appropriate role of schools with respect to local communities. Opportunities to experience diverse ecological and cultural contexts, and to identify and solve environmental and cultural problems, are measurable. Such opportunities are either being developed and supported to a measurable extent or they are not. Developing a mechanism for holding schools accountable for providing these opportunities and for demonstrating results (e.g. through portfolio documentation, as in the Rural Trust’s rubric) ‘changes the rules’ of accountability and de‐centres the discourse of standards and testing.

Again, this does not mean that environmental education is ‘a lost cause’ (Martin, 1996, p. 51), or that civic engagement automatically leads to ecological literacy. The point is that widespread support for environmental education in schools has not been realised in the last thirty years. Too often environmental educators find themselves ‘preaching to the choir’ and unable to impact fundamental school cultures. Developing ‘communities of resistance’ (hooks, 1990) with other constituencies concerned with the narrowing discourse of NCLB is one strategic pathway that environmental educators might pursue with as much vigour as accommodating to the culture of accountability. Besides the three organisations named above, another promising example of such a community or resistance is the Coalition for Community Schools. Their recent publication, Community‐Focused Learning: Engaging Students for Learning and Citizenship, names environmental education as one pedagogical pathway to an engaged and knowledgeable citizenry along with civic education, place‐based learning, service learning and work‐based learning. The Coalition document states:

We believe Community‐Focused Learning engages students because it:

• Gives voice to young people’s innate sense of wonder and makes them active agents of their own learning;

• Begins in the reality of their own communities;

• Encourages young people in a difficult world to take hopeful action;

• Offers multiple feedback about the impact of their efforts; and

• Brings more caring adults into young people’s lives. (Berg, 2005)

These are some the kinds of outcomes for which No Child Left Behind lacks a vocabulary and that need to be pursued through schooling.

The Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (DESD): participation and accountability at local and global levels

The primary goal for the DESD is laid out in the United Nations General Assembly resolution 59/237, in which the General Assembly ‘encourages Governments to consider the inclusion … of measures to implement the Decade in their respective education systems and strategies and, where appropriate, national development plans’. Furthermore, the General Assembly ‘invites Governments to promote public awareness of and wider participation in the Decade, inter alia, through cooperation with and initiatives engaging civil society and other relevant stakeholders, especially at the beginning of the Decade’ (UNESCO, 2005).

As stated in our introduction, we see the contradictions Stevenson (1987) identified between schooling and environmental education as mainly unchanged in the United States today. What has changed is the degree to which school discourse is being held hostage to the discourse of standards and testing, and the way in which the field of environmental education has responded by accommodating to this culture of accountability. Another significant development is the recent strong showing of educational movements that parallel and often overlap with environmental education: place‐based education (e.g. Gruenewald & Smith, in press ; Sobel, 2004); community‐focused education (e.g. Berg, 2005); culturally responsive schooling (e.g. Alaska Native Knowledge Network, 1998); action research (e.g. Hart, 1997); and other approaches that focus on local context and participation. We have described these movements as examples of resistance to NCLB and as examples of reframing the problem of accountability. We have also noted that many educators who are committed to ecological literacy have in the last two decades recognised the need to ‘cast a wider net’ for environmental education, and that some, because of the problem with language and with professional institutionalisation, see the need to ‘move beyond’ (Sobel, 2004), ‘abandon’ (Martin, 1996), or ‘replace’ (Bowers, 2006) the field. To conclude our article, we would like to comment on one more development in environmental education that both highlights the challenges facing the field and offers some possibility for cautious hopefulness: the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development.

Troubling paradoxes between the Decade and NCLB

There is a stark and obvious contrast between the student achievement goals of NCLB and the sweeping cultural goals in environmental and sustainability education discourse. ³ How to make sense of and respond to these competing and contradictory goals is the main purpose of our article. Of interest here is the paradoxical parallelism between NCLB’s target date of 2014, by which time Secretary Spellings (cited in Lucy, 2005) claims ‘all students [will be] reading and doing math at grade‐level’, and the timing of the United Nations’ Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (hereafter ‘the Decade’), which is planned for the years 2005–2014. While the Decade has only recently been ‘launched’, it has, like other international efforts for environmental education before it (e.g. Tbilisi, Agenda 21), yet to make any significant impact on the general climate of schooling in the United States. Indeed, the Decade is unlikely to be seen or heard at all by most educators and it has been totally ignored by an increasingly powerful federal educational bureaucracy. On the other hand, all educators in the United States have felt real pressure to respond to the mandates of NCLB. In the contest of rhetoric, NCLB has no peer. It has been and continues to be followed by constant media coverage and it has proven remarkably immune to critique. Further, unlike the Decade, NCLB is much more than rhetoric: it is policy. The power of its rhetoric lies in the fact that its goals, such as all children scoring at grade level in mathematics and reading by 2014, are actually being pursued and funded on a large scale with specific changes in policy, practice and perception among educators. Progress toward these goals is constantly being assessed, and the results of these assessments continue to alter what and how people teach and learn in schools.

By drawing this comparison between NCLB and the Decade, we neither mean to diminish the promise of the Decade as a bold and broad strategy for raising environmental awareness locally and globally, nor do we mean to imply that all hopes for environmental education should rest in the comprehensive strategy that we believe the Decade could come to represent. Many observers have pointed out how the language and assumptions behind international calls for ‘sustainable development’ tend to reinforce a ‘one world’ vision of development predicated on problematic patterns of economic globalisation. In their review of 29 international documents related to environmental education and education for sustainable development, Sauvé et al. (2005) found that ‘“environment‐related education” is jostled or shoved aside by the globalisation “tidal wave”’ (p. 273). Clearly, renaming ‘environmental education’ ‘education for sustainability’ is not a panacea for the diverse people and places of the earth who are facing environmental, social and economic dis‐ease. We simply wish to reassert that in the United States, national school policy is fundamentally and even obsessively concerned with the mandates of NCLB and fundamentally mute about environmental education or education for sustainable development. ⁴ While one could argue that before and since 1987, many inroads have been established to bring environmental education into the process of schooling, there can be no argument that the discourse that makes this difficult is stronger than ever.

Another troubling paradox between the rhetoric of NCLB and that of the Decade has to do with perceived scale and temporal feasibility. Though ultimately directed to the local well‐being of individuals and communities, the Decade, or environmental and sustainability education generally, is about the biggest picture one could possibly imagine: the whole planet—human communities, cultures, natural communities, biological and physical systems—everything. Sustainable development, again, is a poorly understood and contested concept, even among the minority of educators who are familiar with it. Like Black History Month or even Earth Day in the United States, the Decade can easily be perceived as a slogan distant from the concrete realities of daily life. NCLB, on the other hand, is a brilliant rhetorical success in part because of its simplicity and concrete (if reductionist) specificity: leave no child behind. ⁵ Who would want to leave a child behind? Who wouldn’t want their children reading at grade level? While the Decade is focused on the most complex and biggest picture possible, NCLB is ostensibly concerned with every individual child. Compared with the global idealism and seemingly far‐off futurism of the Decade, NCLB seems so reasonable and doable here and now. After all, how can we save the world if kids—especially those disadvantaged kids who have been left behind—can’t read and do their sums?

From the perspective of schooling in the United States, however, perhaps the most instructive paradox between these two educational movements is that the Decade identifies the need for international collaboration and NCLB focuses on individualistic and nationalistic competition. If sustainable development ultimately needs to be pursued through cooperation among people and nations, federal educational policies explicitly seeking educational and economic advantage are clearly a move in the wrong direction. This is why, in the current political climate, it is unlikely that the Decade, like Agenda 21 before it, will influence schooling in the United States. The current Bush administration has openly scorned other international agreements such as the Kyoto protocols or the UN Security Council’s resolutions on Iraq; the same administration simply ignores the Decade. The reason for flouting international law and opinion is always to protect the interests of the United States. As long as these interests are perceived by government leaders to be economic and military in nature, and disconnected from ecological issues, educational policy will continue to be guided by economic and military, rather that ecological, concerns.

Reaching outside US educational policy for a beacon of hopefulness

Despite the inherent conflicts between federal education policy and education for sustainable development, and partly because of these conflicts, we view the recent launch of the Decade with a sense of hopefulness. Though international treaties and proclamations can be viewed as mere rhetoric or misleading rhetoric, the fact that the Decade exists is evidence of changes in how people across the world see the purpose of education. These changes, like the Decade itself, have been slowly incubating in the international dialogue since the early 1970s and parallel the rise of environmental education as a professional field. We agree with other sceptics that ‘sustainable development’ needs to be critiqued and clarified in order to avoid its cooptation by policymakers aiming chiefly at ‘sustainable’ economic growth or a ‘one world’ vision for humanity. We also urge the same degree of cautious scepticism around the meaning of more taken‐for‐granted concepts, such as ‘educational achievement’, ‘democracy’, ‘justice’, ‘human rights’, ‘environmental quality’ and ‘community wellbeing’. The unresolved and creative tensions between ‘environmental education’ and ‘education for sustainability’ are likely to cultivate the field for some time to come. Meanwhile, from where we sit in the United States, we are desperately in need of support for shifting the moral purposes of schooling from individual competition to something more sustainable. An international movement for education for sustainability may help expand the realm of the possible for those educators who are currently looking for something more than closing the achievement gap through high‐stakes competition.

The value of a United Nations (UN) proclamation as a legitimising force definitely needs to be questioned in a country whose leadership is often at odds with international opinion. In this the early years of the Decade, we find that we have a choice: 1) reach critically toward the Decade and its supporters and make a collective effort to shape it as a beacon of hopefulness for our own environmental and cultural work at local, regional and national levels; or 2) critique and reject the Decade as an instrument of global thinkers who fail to appreciate the ‘true’ meaning of environmental education. Because so few educators are familiar with the concept of education for sustainable development, and because so many citizens of the United States are aware of this country’s poor reputation surrounding issues of international cooperation, we have found that invoking the UN Decade can be a powerful tool for starting and legitimating conversations about sustainability and the purposes of education generally. We embrace the Decade as one in a set of tools needed to interrupt and resist the single‐minded dominance of NCLB.

Specifically, the Decade has the potential to offer American educators and policymakers an enlarged way of thinking about accountability. What measures besides standardised test scores in fragmented subject areas, in other words, indicate quality education? Indicators of sustainability have begun to be incorporated in government planning at all levels. In the United Kingdom, for example, the government has published a national strategy called Securing the Future: UK Government Sustainable Development Strategy (Great Britain Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, 2005). Here, 68 sustainability indicators are outlined to measure progress on a wide range of social and environmental issues from greenhouse gas emissions and renewable energy, to community participation, employment, and housing conditions. If social and environmental goals are related to educational goals, it follows that social and environmental indicators should inform educational planning. In his initial work to develop indicators for education for sustainable development in the United Kingdom, John Huckle notes that an indicator ‘should measure the extent to which all learners have developed the skills, knowledge and value base to be active citizens in creating a more sustainable society’ (J. Huckle, personal communication, 6 January 2006). UNESCO is also currently working to develop indicators for the Decade that correspond with the diverse and complex goals associated with sustainability at global, regional and local levels.

Because the discourse of accountability is unlikely to loosen its hold on educational policy in the United States, we are eager to see if indicators for education for sustainable development, under the legitimising banner of the United Nations, can be used to influence what is measured and what is taught. We do not hope for a new set of sustainability rules to replace the current set of achievement rules epitomised by NCLB. Rather, we hope that the Decade can help to introduce the contested concept of sustainability to people who have never heard of it, and that the Decade can help push the meanings of sustainability into current thinking about educational purpose, practice and outcome.

Notes on contributors

David Gruenewald is an associate professor at Washington State University. He is the author of many academic papers, and one forthcoming book, on place‐based and environmental education. His research and teaching focus on the intersection of environment, culture and education.

Bob Manteaw is a doctoral candidate at Washington State University. His research examines the discourse of sustainability education in ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ countries. His home is in Ghana, Africa.

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).