San Diego Union Tribune -- May 2, 2004

First of two columns on environment-based education

For more effective education reform, teachers should free kids from the classroom.

That's the message from Gerald Lieberman, director of the State Education and Environmental Roundtable, a national effort headquartered in Rancho Bernardo. Lieberman is a proponent of environment-based education. Over the past few decades, the approach has gone by many names: community-oriented schooling, bioregional education, experiential education, and most recently, place-based or environment-based education.

The basic idea is to use the surrounding community, including nature, as the preferred classroom. "Since the ecosystems surrounding schools and their communities vary as dramatically as the nation's landscape, the term 'environment' may mean different things at every school; it may be a river, a city park or a garden carved out of an asphalt playground," according to the roundtable's report, "Closing the Achievement Gap" – issued in 2002 but largely ignored by the education establishment.

The roundtable has worked with 150 schools in 16 states for 10 years, identifying model environment-based programs and examining how the students fared on standardized tests. The roundtable's findings are stunning: environment-based education produces student gains in social studies, science, language arts and math; improves standardized test scores and grade point average; and develops skills in problem-solving, critical thinking and decision-making.

Among the programs the roundtable studied:

• In Florida, Taylor County High School teachers and students use the nearby Econfina River to team-teach math, science, language arts, biology, chemistry and the economics of the county.
• In San Bernardino, students at Kimbark Elementary School study botany and investigate microscopic organisms and aquatic insects in an on-campus pond and vegetable garden and in a nearby greenhouse and a native plant arboretum.
• In Glenwood Springs, Colo., high school students planned and supervised the creation of an urban pocket park, and city planners asked them to help develop a pedestrian mall and park along the Colorado River.
• At Huntingdon Area Middle School, in Pennsylvania, students collect data at a stream near the school. Teacher Mike Simpson uses those data to teach fractions, percentages and statistics, as well as interpreting charts and graphs.

"I don't have to worry about coming up with themes for application problems anymore. The students make their own," says Simpson.

David Sobel, co-director of Antioch University's Center for Environmental Education and author of the short, brilliant new book, "Place-Based Education: Connecting Classrooms & Communities," did an independent review of such studies, including one by the National Environmental Education and Training Foundation, which reported findings similar to Lieberman's.

When it comes to reading skills, "the Holy Grail of education reform," says Sobel, environment-based education should be considered "one of the knights in shining armor." Students in these programs typically outperform their peers in traditional classrooms.

For example, at Hotchkiss Elementary School in Dallas, passing rates of fourth graders in an environment-based program surpassed by 13 percent those of students in an earlier, traditional class. The Texas Education Agency's Division of Student Assessment called Hotchkiss' gains "extremely significant" when compared to the statewide average gain of one percent during the same period.

Achievements in math are similar. In Portland, Oregon's Environmental Middle School, teachers employ a curriculum using on local rivers, mountains and forests; among other activities, they plant native species and study the Willamette River. At that school, 96 percent of students meet or exceed state standards for math problems solving – compared to only 65 percent of eighth graders at comparable middle schools.

Environment-based education can amplify more typical school reform efforts. For example, in North Carolina, raising standards produced a 15 percent increase in the proportion of fourth graders scoring at the "proficient" level in statewide math scores. But fourth graders at an environment-based school in Asheville, N.C., did even better – with 31 percent increase in the number of students performing at the proficient level.

As an added bonus, the students in these programs demonstrate better attendance and behavior than students in traditional classrooms. Little Falls High School in Little Falls, Minnesota, reported that students in the environment-based program had 54 percent fewer suspensions than other ninth graders. At Hotchkiss Elementary, teachers made 560 disciplinary referrals to the principal's office. Two years later, as the environment-based program kicked into gear, the number dropped to 50.

"Both the principal and teachers attribute these decreases in behavioral problems to students' increased engagement in learning," according to Lieberman.

David Sobel tells a charming story of a physics teacher at one school who was teaching mechanical principles "by involving students in the reconstruction of a neighborhood trail where they had to use pulleys, levers and fulcrums to accomplish the task." On what the school called Senior Skip Day, when seniors are free to skip any classes they want, one of the students told the physics teacher, "I want you to know, Mr. Church, that I skipped all the rest of my classes today, but I just couldn't miss this class. I'm too committed to what we're doing to skip this."

Lieberman cautions that the research is young, and thin. Still, with such indications that this kind of school reform works, why aren't more school districts adopting it, or at least considering it? That's a good question, unlikely to appear on any standardized test.

Next Sunday: Environment-based education in San Diego and around the world. Louv's column appears on Sundays.

He can be reached via e-mail at rlouv@cts.com or via www.thefuturesedge.com.