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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Thoughts on The AtlanticÂ’s attack on school gardens
  • Date: Tue, 19 Jan 2010 20:24:25 -0700


Thoughts on The AtlanticÂ’s attack on school gardens
http://www.grist.org/article/2010-01-13-atlantic-attack-edible-schoolyard
13 Jan 2010 10:13 AM
by Tom Philpott

For several years starting in the early ‘90s, I worked as a remedial math and
writing teacher at Austin Community College. At that time—and, for all I
know, now—the Texas public education system was mercilessly stratified:
high-income districts lavished resources on schools, while their counterparts
in low-income districts scraped by on bare-bones budgets. Predictably,
college acceptance rates were much higher in the high-income districts.

That brazenly unequal system churned out plenty of customers for our remedial
services. What struck me about many of my students was that they seemed to
have never really been engaged before in a classroom: they expected rote,
mechanistic, abstract assignments. And they expected to do poorly on them.

So I tried to engage them—cast around for topics they were interested in,
concrete things, and use them to explain math concepts, or inspire an essay.
And, more often than not, it worked—the students and I would hit upon
something, amid much back and forth, that sparked genuine interest, and then
they would be off and running, giddy in the pursuit of ideas. Which, of
course, is exactly the kind of teaching that goes on in lots of private
schools—the ones that routinely send students to esteemed universities, and
not remedial programs at community colleges.

ItÂ’s not exactly a radical idea. Teaching is a form of communication; and
focusing on concrete things has long been a favored communication strategy.
In their celebrated guidebook to writing The Elements of Style, Strunk and
White advise, “use definite, specific, concrete language.” The advice seems
impeccable.

The Edible Schoolyard program, launched in Berkeley public schools by Alice
Waters, is an attempt at putting that principle in action. It makes food, a
material reality that everyone interacts with daily, an object of hands-on
study. See that lettuce on your plate? Where did it come from? How do seeds
germinate? What variety of lettuce is it? Why this variety and not another
one? Why are only one or two available at the grocery store? Who owns grocery
stores—and who decides what they offer. What makes plants grow? And so on.

The idea of having kids grow and cook food as part of the curriculum seems
brilliant: a way to make concrete such potentially abstract topics as
biology, chemistry, history, economics, and botany. It also promises leverage
in another direction: in an age of de-funded, low-quality school lunches and
surging diabetes rates among children, Edible Schoolyard has the potential to
transform kidsÂ’ dietary habits.

Has it worked in practice? ThatÂ’s a fair question. The program has been
around for nearly 15 years now—it started in 1995 at Martin Luther King
public middle school in Berkeley, and has expanded to affiliates in New
Orleans, among other places across the country. Similar programs have
sprouted up elsewhere, inspired by its example. Has it succeeded in catching
studentsÂ’ interest and making them better learners? Has it helped them
develop healthier eating habits?

In a scathing piece in The Atlantic, the writer Caitlin Flanagan raises those
questions but doesnÂ’t answer them. Or, more properly, she declares the
program a disaster—the piece is titled “Cultivating Failure”—without even
coming close to driving home her case.

In her 3500-word polemic, the only hard evidence she brings to bear for her
verdict of failure is this:

Indeed, Hispanic students do particularly poorly at King Middle School.
According to the 2009 Federal Accountability Requirements, statewide, more
than 39 percent of Latinos are proficient in English and 44 percent in math,
but at the King school, those numbers are a dismal 30 percent and 29 percent,
respectively. Where do BerkeleyÂ’s African American and Hispanic
middle-schoolers do well? At a gardenless charter school called Cal Prep,
where 92 percent of the students are black or Latino, where the focus is on
academic achievement, and where test scores have been rising steadily.

So at King, Latinos are underperforming on standardized tests, while over at
Cal Prep, “test scores have been rising steadily.” You don’t need to be a
social-sciences graduate student to marvel at the logical gymnastics on
display here. Correlation does not show causation; students could be
underperforming at King because of the garden program—or because of some
other reason. And so on. The numbers she cites may call into question the
efficacy of Edible Schoolyard, but they by no means settle the case.

And thatÂ’s her last nod to bringing empirical evidence to bear. (In another
jaw-dropping section, she seeks to debunk the concept of food deserts—the
idea that residents of low-income areas tend to have less access to fresh
food—not by scrutinizing the considerable academic research on the topic, but
rather by making a 20-mile trip to “the most famous American hood [sic],
Compton,” to check out the grocery scene.)

Her point seems to be this: working the land and cooking are lowly tasks,
work that should be fled and not aspired to. ItÂ’s unconscionable to urge
Latino students, some of whose parents may work as migrant laborers, to
garden as a form of learning. Students, particularly those struggling with
basic reading and math, should be forced to hit the books, not weed the
carrots.

That line of reasoning seems brutally reductionist—and certainly doesn’t
reflect my own experience as a remedial teacher. More importantly, Flanagan
makes no effort to actually engage the program she is trashing (or, indeed,
the book she’s ostensibly reviewing—her piece is ludicrously packaged as a
review of Thomas McNameeÂ’s 2008 biography of Alice Waters).

And the idea that farming and cooking—and even getting one’s hands dirty in
the garden—are beneath respectable middle-class aspiration is deeply
problematic. Such thinking reinforces an unjust food system that exploits
cheap labor as a matter of course, propped up by a largely invisible army of
migrant workers who do the dirty work of tending fields, slaughterhouses,
and kitchens.

The sustainable-food movement has matured enough and gained enough force that
itÂ’s coming under withering criticism from a variety of quarters. ThatÂ’s good
for the movement—hard questions need to be asked, assumptions questioned,
received ideas reconsidered. And authors who perform those tasks will find a
market from editors desperate to generate attention with contrarian poses.

But I wish we could expect more thoughtfulness, and less hack work, from such
critics.





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