I’d heard a few years ago that celebrity chef Alice Waters had started a program at her local junior high school (in Berkeley, California) where the kids grow and cook their own vegetables. Here’s a description from a recent article by Caitlin Flanagan:
The Edible Schoolyard program was born when Waters noticed a barren lot next to the Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School in Berkeley. Inspired by the notion that a garden would afford students “experience-based learning that illustrates the pleasure of meaningful work, personal responsibility, the need for nutritious, sustainably raised, and sensually stimulating food, and the important socializing effect of the ritual of the table,” and spurred on by the school principal, Waters offered to build a garden and help create a curriculum to go along with it. . . . soon the exciting garden had made its influence felt across the disciplines. In English class students composed recipes, in math they measured the garden beds, and in history they ground corn as a way of studying pre-Columbian civilizations. Students’ grades quickly improved at King, which makes sense given that a recipe is much easier to write than a coherent paragraph on The Crucible.
This sounds pretty cool to me, a lot better than what we did in junior high (I don’t think we got to The Crucible until 10th grade), and I was just sad to hear that this gardening programming was happening at only one school.
But then I kept reading Flanagan’s article–a review of a book about Alice Waters by Thomas McNamee–and I learned that the school gardens program is happening all over:
In the 1990s, Waters found a powerful ally in Delaine Eastin, the newly elected state superintendent of instruction . . . Together, the bureaucrat and the celebrity paved the way for an enormous movement: by 2002, 2,000 of the state’s 9,000 schools had a garden, and by 2008 that number had risen to 3,849, and it continues to grow.
To Flanagan, though, this is not good news at all:
[The school gardening curriculum] is responsible for robbing an increasing number of American schoolchildren of hours they might other wise have spent reading important books or learning higher math . . . one manifestation of the way the new Food Hysteria has come to dominate and diminish our shared cultural life . . . a way of bestowing field work and low expectations on a giant population of students who might become troublesome if they actually got an education.
This last bit just seems silly–no, I don’t think that educational reformers are trying to keep the lower classes down on the farm!–but Flanagan is raising a real question, and a difficult one, regarding the cost-benefit calculation of starting a new curriculum.
Costs:
– Most obviously, time during the school day (according to Flanagan, “an hour and a half a week in the garden or the kitchen,” which represents a far-from-trivial 5% of a 30-hour school week.
– Beyond this, there is the work required to create the curriculum and to get it set up in each school.
– And then there’s the political effort that was needed to make this a statewide program–political effort that could perhaps have otherwise been spent on literacy, or math skills, or whatever.
Benefits:
– Kids learning about gardening. Not a major educational goal in our urban/suburban society, but it’s something..
– The gardening curriculum motivating students in their studies of English, math, and science.
– Kids being in a better mood because they’re getting outdoors and eating healthier food. (Do they still serve that “lunch lady” food in schools nowadays?)
Laying it out like this, it really seems like it will be be impossible to come to a firm conclusion about the desirability of such programs, and, indeed, Flanagan’s review suggests the evidence is unclear:
What evidence do we have that participation in one of these programs–so enthusiastically supported, so uncritically championed–improves a child’s chances of doing well on the state tests that will determine his or her future (especially the all-important high-school exit exam) and passing Algebra I, which is becoming the make-or-break class for California high-school students? I [Flanagan] have spent many hours poring over the endless research on the positive effects of garden curricula, and in all that time, I have yet to find a single study that suggests classroom gardens help students meet the state standards for English and math.
I haven’t read this literature myself–part of my privilege as an unpaid blogger is that I don’t have to do the research if I don’t feel like it (or if, in this case, I’m on the train with no internet access), so I’ll trust Flanagan on this. Gven the generally negative tone of her article, I think it’s safe to assume that, just as the above-cited studies found no positive effects of the garden curricula on passing rates for English and math, that they also found no negative effects either.
Now throw in the harder-to-measure judgment calls–Do you think it’s cool that the students get to grow their own food, or do you think it’s a distraction from classwork? Do you think it’s a good thing that the gardening movement has involved volunteers in the public schools or do you think it saps citizen energy that could be better used to help the schools in other ways? Do you think gardens in school will encourage these kids’ families to eat healthier, or would it be better, as Flanagan suggests, to have students “build the buses that will take them to and from school, or rotate in shifts through the boiler room”?
As a junior high student, I would’ve loved to build buses and work in the boiler room. All we ever did in shop class was build silly things out of wood, but even that was ok.
With the main evidence equivocal and plausible theories pointing in both directions, and with all these other issues floating around, it doesn’t look like there will be any easy answer in the short term to questions about the effects of school gardens. My inclination would be for different schools to do it different ways, with some having gardening during the school day and others after school–or maybe making it universal as an after-school program but keeping it out of the main 6-hour school day–maybe the gardening program is at a good level now in California with about half of the schools doing it–but, then again, that’s just my sketchy thinking. I don’t really have any more justification for my attitudes on this than Flanagan has for hers.
When I was in school, I liked the serious stuff–advanced English class, calculus, economics, French (in the years that we had serious teachers who actually expected us to learn), physics–and I liked the non-academic classes such as gym, chorus, shop, and home ec. I’m guessing that gardening would’ve been a plus, especially if it had replaced our U.S. history classes and the useless stuff they called “science”–that is, everything up to and including 10th-grade biology. Or maybe I would’ve found it really annoying, I don’t know. It might be interesting in a follow-up article for Flanagan to visit some garden classrooms and interview some students, teachers, and parents to see what they think about it. (Even if they think the programs are great, this doesn’t mean the programs really are great–learning isn’t always fun, after all–but it would be interesting to know more about what these programs are about.) A magazine article is sometimes the first step in a book, and if Flanagan is writing a book on the California schools, it would be great to have more of a sense of what’s happening on the ground.
Whassup?
The interesting question to me–after I got over my disappointment that the data appear too weak to evaluate the success of the school gardens program–is why Flanagan so strongly hates the program.
I can see how enthusiasts can be strongly in favor of school gardens, even if there’s no evidence they improve test scores. Some people just luuuve gardening. (Oddly enough, Flanagan quotes George Orwell in her anti-garden-curriculum argument (quoting the bit from The Road to Wigan Pier where writes that poor people prefer unhealthy food), but given Orwell’s own enthusiasm for gardening, I wouldn’t be surprised it he’d be a big supporter of the California program.) And I can certainly see the sense in opposing the program, if you take the reasonable position that it is diverting resources that could better be used elsewhere. If it was up to me, I’d radically strip down the elementary school curriculum and teach each kid 3 foreign languages–at that age, they could learn it! Others I’m sure will disagree with me on this one.
But to hate hate hate school gardens . . . What’s going on to explain such strong opposition?
Flanagan brings a diverse range of personal experiences to this article: she lives in the Los Angeles area, has taught in schools there, has kids in elementary school (it’s not clear whether private or public, but I’m guessing that there’s no garden in their school, or else Flanagan would’ve mentioned it, no?), and also has volunteered in schools and at a food bank. She’s interviewed a bunch of people, stopped by a couple of supermarkets in Compton (which seems to have changed a bit since the days of Eazy-E and the rest), and has even eaten a $95 dinner at Waters’s restaurant in Berkeley. (Quick summary: The food was delicious, the service was terrible, the people at the next table were yammering on about the political organization ACORN, and the $95 did not include the cost of wine or tax.)
I was struck by how Flanagan identifies herself as being in the bull’s-eye of Waters’s target audience:
The weird, almost erotic power she wields over a certain kind of educated, professional-class, middle-aged woman (the same kind of woman who tends to light, midway through life’s journey, on school voluntarism as a locus of her fathomless energies)–has widened so far beyond the simple cooking and serving of food that it can hardly be quantified.
I wonder if this is the source of so much of Flanagan’s irritation, that she resists the appeal of something that is aimed particularly at people like her.
Flanagan’s resistance has taken such a strong form as to lead her to contradict herself, at one point giving reasons why poor people don’t eat healthy food and then elsewhere taking a tour of low-income Compton where she finds “poor people living in an American inner city who desire a wide variety of fruits and vegetables and who are willing to devote their time and money to acquiring them,” at one point writing that if you “propel students into a higher economic class” then “they will live better and therefore eat better,” but elsewhere discussing low-income immigrants who come to America for economic opportunity and then eat unhealthily (in the manner described by George Orwell).
My point here is not to trap Flanagan in contradictions–we each contain multitudes, etc.–but rather to highlight the difficulty that any of us are in when we have strong feelings for something without a lot of evidence to back us up. If we’re not careful, we’re reduced to grabbing whatever arguments are close to hand. When done well, you’re Tom Wolfe and this works great. (Two of my favorite nonfiction books are Wolfe’s delightfully over-the-top The Painted Word and From Bauhaus to Our House; some of Wolfe’s others aren’t far down on this list; and I like lots of Paul Fussell too.) Flanagan fits in well with the Tom Wolfe tradition, and I suspect she’s well aware of his influences. (I’m thinking of touches such as the Aztec dance troupe, the framing of her article within an imaginary novel, and the strategic use of exclamation marks.) It was somewhere between the amused detachment and the overkill that Flanagan lost me. To put it another way, the place where I was ready to walk out of this particular movie was at this particular juxtaposition of quasi-statistical arguments:
Hispanics constitute 49 percent of the students in California’s public schools. Ever since the state adopted standards-based education (each child must learn a comprehensive set of skills and material) in 1997–coincidentally, at the same moment that garden learning was taking off–a notorious achievement gap has opened between Hispanic and African American students on the one hand, and whites and Asians on the other.
Is she really saying that there was no gap before 1997? Or that the gap was small before then? I find that hard to believe. To take the above paragraph literally, it would seem that Flanagan views garden learning as innocuous (she says “concidentally,” after all) and that she’s really saying the culprit is standards-based education. Reading the rest of the article, though, gives me the impression that Flanagan things standards are a good thing. So I don’t really know what to think.
In summary, perhaps Flanagan’s article served its purpose. It got me thinking, and I learned some surprising facts, including that California has 9000 schools–this surprised me, I’d have thought it was more, maybe she’s not counting all the elementary schools?–and nearly half have gardens. And, by revealing the near-impossibility of any sort of useful evidence-based evaluation of the school gardens program, coupled with her passionate opposition to what I’d always thought of vaguely as a good, if innocuous, idea, Flanagan made clear the strong political nature of this policy question (and, by implication, so many others).
P.S. Ever since my sister told me that it is Irish for “Kathleen,” I’ve never been sure how to say “Caitlin.” Should I pronounce it as it looks in English (“Kate-Lynn”) or just say “Kathleen” on the assumption that I’m supposed to go with the original language? (Along similar lines of pointless confusion, here in France they pronounce our last name with a soft G (“Jell-mann”), which seems wrong to me, but back in the old country it was probably pronounced “Hellman” (with a rough, guttural H), so “Gelman” isn’t quite right either. In any case, I’ve been told that these last names were all made up in the 1800s and aren’t really family names at all.)
P.P.S. I hate gardening. I sometimes helped out in the backyard as a kid and never liked it. The only time I had a garden of my own was when I lived in Berkeley (oddly enough). It was ok but I didn’t work very hard at it–I just bought some flowering plants–and then one day some snails came and killed everything. I tried again with some sort of snail repellent but the same thing happened. Gardening’s great, but I’d just as soon not do it myself. If we’d had a garden in our elementary school, though . . . who knows? Maybe I’d be producing more tomatoes and fewer blog entries.
P.P.P.S. This one took 2 hours also! Damn. And this one I do feel bad about, it really was a waste of time for me. At least the last blog was related to my work and might at some point make its way into one of my books. This one, all I can hope is that someone sends it to Caitlin Flanagan and maybe it will improve one of her books. Not the same thing at all!
So here’s the rule. From now on, no more blogging on the train. Ever. I’d rather spend two hours curled up with a good book.
P.P.P.P.S. I don’t get homesick very often, but the description of the tomatillos etc. in the surprisingly safe-sounding supermarket in Compton made me miss the U.S. a bit. You just can’t get that sort of thing over here. And just try to find a good tortilla or the masa to make one yourself.
Flanagan says this:
"… I have yet to find a single study that suggests classroom gardens help students meet the state standards for English and math."
But you summarize it as this:
"… the above-cited studies found no positive effects of the garden curricula on passing rates for English and math, that they also found no negative effects either."
Those aren't the same thing. I believe Flanagan is saying that anything that consumes a bunch of time but doesn't help you toward your goal is a bad thing.
After all, the priors on these kids' test scores at the beginning of the year are not passing scores, they're low scores that must be improved through learning. If we were talking about the kids' health or something, where the baseline is probably acceptable, your point would be valid. But most people want their kids' schools to be quite a bit better than a "do no harm" standard.
Coincidentally, it's exactly the same point you make in your "P.P.P.S." – you wasted your time (though from my perspective you didn't waste your time) & didn't advance in your career goals, so that's a bad thing & you won't be doing it anymore.
I'm sometimes a little surprised how little you pick up on culture war stories.
Caitlin Flanagan's last book is an anti-feminist manifesto for "discovering your inner housewife".
The riff against school gardens is in line with a whole conservative litany about losing "values" in education, about how the "canon" isn't taught anymore, about how kids are taught silly things like social skills instead of math and Shakespeare etc.
It's also in line with a specific trope of conservative writing that claims to have the same goals as liberals (e.g. the concern for the welfare of the undocumented immigrant's kid).
So when, as a good David Collier disciple, I ask myself "What is this a case of?" – I see the umpteenth repetition of a (as I find increasingly stale) conservative culture war theme. I doubt it has a lot to do with individual psychology.
Ken:
1. When Flanagan wrote "help students meet the state standards for English and math," I assume she was referring to passing rates on the relevant exams, or something similar (such as reaching certain minimum grades on some set curriculum). At least, that's what I'd mean were I to use that phrase.
2. I doubt that Flanagan found studies with negative effects. I could be wrong here but I'm guessing that if she found the preponderance of evidence showing that the garden curriculum actually lowered passing rates, she would've said so. Her "I have yet to find a single study" phrasing suggests strongly to me that the evidence was neutral or inconclusive but not actually negative.
3. One might, like Alice Waters, have the presumption that the garden curriculum should help (if for no other reason than that it can motivate students to learn other subjects during classroom time), or one might, like Caitlin Flanagan, have the presumption that the garden curriculum should hurt (if for no other reason than it can take time away from academic subjects).
But the point of a study of its effects is to see what is actually happening. Such a study, I assume, will compare schools with the garden curriculum to schools without, controlling for systematic differences between the treatment and control groups. I think Flanagan is much much better informed about these studies than I am, and I'm taking her (implicit) word for it that the evidence from such policy-analysis studies is inconclusive.
At this point, as I wrote above, if the evidence is inconclusive, it's a judgment call. Regarding your point, "most people want their kids' schools to be quite a bit better than a 'do no harm' standard": Yes, definitely. But it's an open question whether (or, maybe more to the point, where and for whom) the gardening curriculum helps or hurts the kids' education.
4. Regarding my P.P.P.S., I wouldn't really call it an issue of career goals but rather of time management. If I blog on something and then use it in a book, that's one thing. But if I blog and it doesn't otherwise reduce my workload, that's less time that I have for relaxation. That said, communication is one of my goals–hence my writing of this comment.
Sebastian:
I don't know enough about the inner housewife thing to comment, and, sure, maybe she's doing a bit of shtick in the P. J. O'Rourke style–here I'm thinking of the bit where she mocks Chez Panisse for being elitist and then complains about the service in the classic "the peasants are revolting" style–but regarding the schools issue, maybe you're being a bit unfair to Flanagan. If she's really spend decades working and volunteering in schools, then, sure, maybe she's a bit burned out, but I'd guess that she probably does have concern for the welfare of the undocumented immigrant kid. Beyond this, one reason I'm picking up on the psychological/biographical angle is that Flanagan emphasizes it herself, both in her discussion of her own experiences with schools and in commenting that Alice Waters is a guru to a group of people who are demographically identical to Flanagan. I'm taking her at her word that these are key parts of the story.
One thing I found interesting about the article was the acceptance of the view that the purpose of schools is to teach kids to score well on standardized tests. I think it is important to do well on standardized tests — I wish I had done better on mine, and I'm glad I didn't do worse — but there's a lot more to life than that. I can't remember if it's Seth, Andrew, me, or someone else (or some combination) who have pointed out that there are lots of skills most people never get trained on, but that have a big effect on their lives: how to buy a used car, how to choose an apartment, how to fix the brakes on your bike, how to design an exercise program, I could go on and on. In high school, we spent weeks in English class learning how to diagram sentences — something I have never used since, and have never seen the point of (except for linguists, perhaps) — but no time at all on, for example, how long you can keep various types of leftovers in the fridge, something that I wrestle with at least once a month. I've chosen a deliberately trivial-sounding example, but seriously, if we had spent two weeks in high school learning some rules of thumb about storing tomato sauce vs. soup vs. garbanzo beans or whatever, I think it would have improved my life more than spending that time diagramming sentences.
I don't know what, if anything, kids get out of gardening, or whether it's good or bad for them later in life. (One thing that might be worth doing is tracking down a bunch of these kids ten years after they go through the program, and asking them if they're glad they did it). I will comment on the famous Edible Schoolyard in Berkeley, though, which I sometimes pass through on my way to jog at a nearby track: it's pretty cool. It's pretty big, and planted with a wide variety of plants…sort of the outdoor, living equivalent of a well-stocked supermarket produce section: you just have the impression of the enormous bounty that the world provides. And they have chickens! And sometimes a big pile of steaming compost. I don't know if kids appreciate it, but I'm sure parents do, it just looks and feels like a wholesome, healthy place to be. Of course, as Flanagan would (and does) point out, just because it feels wholesome and healthy doesn't mean it improves your test scores!
That was a whole lot of text, both the post and in the comments, that I probably cannot do justice. But I can say not-so-briefly:
When I taught at a Title I middle school, we tried to make a garden. It sounded like a fantastic idea. But all of the cons are definitely very real. It's a lot of hard work and takes a lot of time. Our kids were so far behind that even though we were on block scheduling (4 classes a day instead of 7 or 8, & you go to a certain class only every other day), the students still went to both math and english every single day. Only 30% of our 8th graders passed the state science test. So how could we justify the time spent on making a garden? We couldn't. Sure, we could have integrated some of the garden stuff in the curriculum, but as it was, our classes were over crowded, discipline was a constant struggle (as it is in many middle schools), and the teachers were tired. When I moved into 8th grade science, I had to teach the 6th, 7th, and 8th grade curricula in order to make up for previous years. Even fitting in regular ole labs was a struggle. This is the very real situation a lot of schools are in, unfortunately.
I think a school garden is a great thing for those places that can afford to do it. But for many inner city schools, they're still just playing catch-up. There are other priorities a school can sink money into — getting horrible food out of the cafeterias, for example. My students literally lived on that stuff, and it was not even close to healthy food. (Sure, a garden can get the kids some vitamins on occasion, but there's no way it would produce enough food for an entire school.) Or, flexible after school transportation. My students, even if they wanted to stay after school to get extra help, couldn't because they had to catch the school bus home and the school bus left then and only then, and often picked up at other schools along the way, resulting in kids not getting home until 5 or 6pm (after leaving school at 3:30).
All that being said, I wouldn't exactly consider school gardens to be a threat..
By the way, Caitlin Flanagan's father Thomas Flanagan wrote "The Year of the French," one of the biggest sellest literary novels, or most literary bestseller of the last quarter of the 20th Century.
Personally, Alice Waters is a cultural heroine to me, but Flanagan's point is that the social class that makes up Water's constituency makes up a vastly larger fraction of influential adults in California than they do of California public school students. So, there is a huge disconnect between what the Chez Panisse crowd (who, if they have children, tend to send them to private schools or elite magnets) theorizes would be good for California's public school students (e.g., locally grown organic produce!), and the meat and potatoes curriculum that actual California public high school students need (e.g., memorizing the times tables).
It's worthwhile to spend a few minutes poking around on the National Assessment of Educational Progress test scores comparing the two superstates of California and Texas:
http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/
In general, Texas's whites, blacks, and Hispanics average higher scores on the federal tests than do their respective co-ethnics in California. No one piece of data is conclusive, but a lot of evidence points toward Texas public schools doing a better job with the students they have than do California public schools.
To extend your analysis in Red State, Blue State, in states with conservative elites, like Texas, the elites tend to be more in touch with the actual needs of Hispanic and black and working class white students than in states with liberal elites, such as California.
By the way, I would add that much of the educational and social commentary in The Atlantic is provided by a small group with roots, like myself, in the San Fernando Valley: I believe Caitlin Flanagan used to work at Harvard-Westlake in Studio City, the premiere private school in LA, with Atlantic literary editor Benjamin Schwarz's wife, and Sandra Tsing-Loh lives in Van Nuys.
They are from elite backgrounds — Tsing-Loh's father is a Cal Tech professor, Flanagan's father wrote "The Year of the French," one of the most celebrated historical novels of recent decades. But, they are more in touch with changes on the ground than most pundits of their level. That's because in terms of demographic and social change, the San Fernando Valley is a couple of decades out ahead of where the rest of the country is going. Here's Schwarz's elegy from a recent issue of the Atlantic on how Southern California was once the paradise for the common man dreamt of by liberal thinkers of the New Deal:
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200907/california
So, I think the Atlantic's SF Valley coterie does a much better job with social/cultural commentary than one would expect.
Sorry to post so many comments, but here's an extract from Flanagan's editor at the Atlantic, Benjamin Schwarz that gives a good picture of where Flanagan, Schwarz, and Loh are coming from as old-fashioned ideological egalitarians living in the anti-egalitarian reality of 21st Century California. This is from Schwarz's review of Kevin Starr's latest volume of the history of California: "Golden Dreams: California in the Age of Abundance: 1950-1963."
It was a magnificent run. From the end of the Second World War to the mid-1960s, California consolidated its position as an economic and technological colossus and emerged as the country's dominant political, social, and cultural trendsetter. … In 1959, wages paid in Los Angeles's working-class and solidly middle-class San Fernando Valley alone were higher than the total wages of 18 states.
It was a sweet, vivacious time: California's children, swarming on all those new playgrounds, seemed healthier, happier, taller, and — thanks to that brilliantly clean sunshine — were blonder and more tan than kids in the rest of the country. For better and mostly for worse, it's a time irretrievably lost. …
Starr consistently returns to his leitmotif: the California dream. By this he means something quite specific — and prosaic. California, as he's argued in earlier volumes, promised "the highest possible life for the middle classes." It wasn't a paradise for world-beaters; rather, it offered "a better place for ordinary people." That place always meant "an improved and more affordable domestic life": a small but stylish and airy house marked by a fluidity of indoor and outdoor space … and a lush backyard — the stage, that is, for "family life in a sunny climate." It also meant some public goods: decent roads, plentiful facilities for outdoor recreation, and the libraries and schools that helped produce the Los Angeles "common man" who, as that jaundiced easterner James M. Cain described him in 1933, "addresses you in easy grammar, completes his sentences, shows familiarity with good manners, and in addition gives you a pleasant smile."
Until the Second World War, California had proffered this Good Life only to people already in the middle class — the small proprietors, farmers, and professionals, largely transplanted midwesterners … But the war and the decades-long boom that followed extended the California dream to a previously unimaginable number of Americans of modest means. Here Starr records how that dream possessed the national imagination … and how the Golden State — fleetingly, as it turns out — accommodated Americans' "conviction that California was the best place in the nation to seek and attain a better life." …
This dolce vita was, as Starr makes clear, a democratic one: the ranch houses with their sliding glass doors and orange trees in the backyard might have been more sprawling in La Canada and Orinda than they were in the working-class suburbs of Lakewood and Hayward, but family and social life in nearly all of them centered on the patio, the barbecue, and the swimming pool. The beaches were publicly owned and hence available to all — as were such glorious parks as Yosemite, Chico's Bidwell, the East Bay's Tilden, and San Diego's Balboa. Golf and tennis, year-round California pursuits, had once been limited to the upper class, but thanks to proliferating publicly supported courses and courts (thousands of public tennis courts had already been built in L.A. in the 1930s), they became fully middle-class. This shared outdoor-oriented, informal California way of life democratized — some would say homogenized — a society made up of people of varying attainments and income levels. These people were overwhelmingly white and native-born, and their common culture revolved around nurturing and (publicly educating) their children. Until the 1980s, a California preppy was all but oxymoronic. True, the comprehensive high schools had commercial, vocational, and college-prep tracks (good grades in the last guaranteed admission to Berkeley or UCLA — times have definitely changed). But, as Starr concludes from his survey of yearbooks and other school records, "there remained a common experience, especially in athletics, and a mutual respect among young people heading in different directions."
To a Californian today, much of what Starr chronicles is unrecognizable. (Astonishing fact: Ricky Nelson and the character he played in that quintessential idealization of suburbia, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, attended Hollywood High, a school that is now 75% Hispanic and that The New York Times accurately described in 2003 as a "typically overcrowded, vandalism-prone urban campuse.") Granted, a version of the California Good Life can still be had — by those Starr calls the "fiercely competitive." That's just the heartbreak: most of us are merely ordinary. For nearly a century, California offered ordinary people better lives than they could lead perhaps anywhere else in the world. Today, reflecting our intensely stratified, increasingly mobile society, California affords the Good Life only to the most gifted and ambitious, regardless of their background. That's a deeply undemocratic betrayal of California's dream …
It's not just gardening. There's this report from my favorite middle school teacher [my daughter]:
"When asked what subjects we should teach during the ISAT [Illinois Scholastic Aptitude Test] during today's PD [Professional Development], my director said we should focus on full time for reading and writing, math if there's time, and "don't worry about what I like to call, for lack of a better term, the stupid subjects, science and social studies." Yes he called science and social studies stupid. No I am not exaggerating. My heart sank."
Andrew – thanks for the reply – I'm afraid you're still to charitable, though.
About her as an educator. I don't know where she volunteered – but considering that she had a nanny for her children and considers California public schools broken, I think chances are good they go to a private school. I do know where she taught before becoming a full-time writer (and housewife as she'd insist) and I'm pretty sure – not so many migrant kids there: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard-Westlake
Also she is just not honest about the evidence for school gardening.
Take here claim that there were no claims of improvements in English or Math – that might be technically true (although there are studies that at least _claim_ overall improvements in test scores)
But I hope everyone would agree that science is important?
http://horttech.ashspublications.org/cgi/content/…
there are a bunch of others as far as I can tell – but contrary to what she seems to suggest, the empirical literature is actually quite small and mostly focused on
nutritional benefits, the declared central goal of the school gardens.
The whole article is filled with such half-truths and innuendos.
And she readily makes my point about her political agenda at the beginning of the article:
So no, I'm not willing to give her the benefit of the doubt. I don't buy that her 'anger' at school gardens is anything else than a general 'anger' (real or marketed) at progressives. An anger that is all the more regrettable as it turns her into a dishonest, careless writer.
Steve:
Interesting background. 1950s California sounds a bit like Australia, or maybe Australia with defense contractors.
It's funny to think of this as associated with political conservatism because I associate this sort of nostalgia for the past era of middle-class equality with liberal economists/pundits such as Paul Krugman and Robert Reich and, before that, to Galbraith. I suppose the debate involves causes and consequences. Liberals blame Proposition 13 and, more generally, the selfish, I've-got-mine society; conservatives blame the permissive society and the decline of the family.
Whatever you think of Galbraith's take on the specifics (wage/price controls and all that), I think his distinction in The Affluent Society between private and public spending is important. In the 1950s the residents of the San Fernando Valley were happy in their small houses with one car per family. Now they want three cars, big houses, and gourmet vegetables in their massive refrigerators. Do we simply take people at their revealed preferences and say they prefer a master bedroom suite to a quality education for their (and others') kids? I'm more ready to believe that people want it all, but it's not always clear what can be done about the schools (especially for the vast majority of parents who send their kids to public schools).
Sebastian:
Interesting. That makes sense that the literature would focus on nutritional benefits. But it also makes sense to look at academic outcomes to address the concern that the time being spent in the garden is being taken away from other pursuits.
In some ways, I find Flanagan's report on the literature to be encouraging sign for the garden curriculum: even though it takes time away from other school activities, there still appears to be no evidence that it's hurting.
Beyond this, yes, I definitely agree that close reading can be helpful. Given that Flanagan mentioned that she had kids in school but didn't say they were in public school, it does make sense to guess that they're in private schools. That said, I'm the last person to criticize someone for teaching at and sending kids to private schools. After all, I teach at a private school myself!
On the question of motivations, I'm sure there are some general culture-war sorts of attitudes going on, but I was still struck by Flanagan's comment about Waters being a guru to people just like Flanagan herself.
apropos the P.S. on your name: how about Gell-Mann? You'd be in pretty good company.
"Liberals blame Proposition 13 and, more generally, the selfish, I've-got-mine society; conservatives blame the permissive society and the decline of the family."
Both explanations for what has happened to California ignore the elephant in the living room.
Personally, I'm a follower of Benjamin Franklin's 1751 essay, Observations on the Increase of Mankind, which ought to be the foundation work for all social science in America, but has been pretty much shoved down the Memory Hole.
Franklin's reductionist view was that America was a happier place than Europe not because Americans were morally or ideologically better than Europeans, but because Americans enjoyed more land per person, and thus, due to the workings of supply and demand, higher wages and lower land costs, allowing earlier and more universal marriage. Following this logic, Franklin called for immigration restriction.
None of the changes in Southern California over the last half century away from egalitarianism to inequality described by Schwarz would have surprised Ol' Ben, if you told him that 41% of the population of LA County is now foreign-born.
Steve says "In general, Texas's whites, blacks, and Hispanics average higher scores on the federal tests than do their respective co-ethnics in California. No one piece of data is conclusive, but a lot of evidence points toward Texas public schools doing a better job with the students they have than do California public schools."
I'll say! California's public schools — or at least, the state's public school students — are famously terrible compared to other states. To choose one example, the National Center for Education Statistics says that in 2007, California 8th graders averaged 251 and 270 points on reading and math standardized tests. The corresponding figures for New York are 264 and 280. Texas: 261 and 286. Among the 10 biggest states, none are anywhere near as bad as California.
Steve also says "To extend your analysis in Red State, Blue State, in states with conservative elites, like Texas, the elites tend to be more in touch with the actual needs of Hispanic and black and working class white students than in states with liberal elites, such as California."
This sounds like a talking point, not a conclusion based on data. In spite of living in California, I know very little about how public education here is run, but I'm pretty sure the individual school districts have lots of control. I doubt the school districts in, say, the Central Valley are controlled by "liberal elites."
Also, Steve seems to be stretching a single comparison (Texas to California) a very long way. Other than Texas, the only "red" states in the top 10 in population are Georgia and North Carolina…which are 8th and 9th, ahead of only California, in reading scores. Georgia is 9th, again ahead of only California, in math; North Carolina is near the middle of the pack. (I'm counting Florida and Ohio as "purple" states.)
There are enough educational statistics out there that you can prove just about anything (unless you want to prove that California's public school students are getting a good education on average ;) but as far as the claim that those do-gooder liberals are messing up education for the working class, I'm just not buying it.