Children & Nature network

No Child Left Behind in the Woods

By Richard Louv

MILWAUKEE, Wisc. -- A few weeks ago, Paul Zettel, a health education instructor at Riverside University High School, attended a conference held in California; the purpose of the meeting was to train teachers in the finer points of the No Child Left Behind version of education reform.

As Zettel tells it, teachers were told, point blank, that they were not to question, not to doubt and certainly not to look for alternative approaches beyond the classroom. Dismayed, he flew home to his school, which takes a less literal approach.

"If you want true learning, you've got to give kids space to wonder," he says. "Every week, we take kids fishing, down on the Milwaukee River, in those woods there," he said when I met him last week at the century-old brick building in one of Milwaukee's older neighborhoods.

To sponsor these and other outings, Riverside partners with a pioneering inner-city program, the Urban Ecology Center, which annually hosts over 18,000 student visits from 22 schools located within a two mile radius of the city's Riverside Park.

I followed a dirt path down to the river, and found students with their teachers on the bank of the lazy, brown river -- inner city youngsters casting and giggling, with no room in their eyes for fashionable cynicism. After ducking a few back-casts, I walked along a path through the woods to the two-story Urban Ecology Center, made of recycled, well, everything.

From its four-story lookout tower, you can view the entire expanse of Riverside Park, which was designed in 1890 by Frederick Law Olmsted, the founder of American landscape architecture.

When this park was first established, it was a tree-lined valley, with a sledding hill, a waterfall, skating, swimming, fishing and boating. But when adjacent Riverside High School was expanded in the 1970s, some of the topography was flattened to create sports fields (much as the San Diego School District would like to do to one of our major urban canyons). Pollution made the river unfit for human contact; maintenance declined; and crime grew. Then came a tipping point.

In the early 1990s, a retired biophysicist started a small outdoor education program in the abandoned park. A dam was removed in 1997, and the return of natural flow flushed out contaminants. "Crime in the park went down -- thanks, in part, to a growing number of dog walkers, who weren't supposed to bring their pooches there but got winks from the police," writes Milwaukee Journal Sentinel architecture critic Whitney Gould. The creation of the non-profit Urban Ecology Center was the crowning achievement, illustrating how environmental education can not only help students, but a whole city as well.

For example, the tower creates the sense that someone is watching out for the kids -- sometimes literally. "From up there, I tracked and gave phone reports to the police about a driver who was trying to hit people on the bike path," says Ken Leinbach, the former science teacher who directs the Center. Except for that incident, no serious crime has occurred in the park in the past five years. "One of the keys to our success is that many teachers would like to use outdoor classrooms, but they don't feel they're trained adequately. When the schools partner with us, they don't have to worry about training," Leinbach says.

Proving educational value is another barrier. While Paul Zettel may not be fond of California -- especially after the "no child left behind" conference -- he and Leinbach can look to our state for the kind of statistical evidence that has yet to be gathered by any Milwaukee study.

Yesterday, the California Department of Education and the American Institutes for Research revealed the results of a major study, partly funded by the Sierra Club, of environment-based school programs in Fresno, Los Angeles and San Diego (specifically, the San Diego County Office of Education's Cuyamaca Outdoor Residential Science program).

Among the findings: sixth grade kids in these programs improved their math and science scores 27 percent; they were also more cooperative, more engaged in the classroom, and more open to conflict resolution.

Martin LeBlanc director of the Sierra Club's Inside the Outdoors Project, says the statistics are impressive, but the number of California schools with outdoor education programs is not. "The fact that only 15 percent of California's young people get a chance to participate in an outdoor environmental education program is truly pathetic -- and most of these students come from high income areas; so low income children are getting no exposure whatsoever to the outdoors," he says.

Still, the study results are impressive, suggesting that other urban regions would do well to replicate the San Diego Office of Education program, which should be expanded.

And other cities, as they look to preserving their urban wildlands -- which offer perfect outdoor classroom space - - should send a fact-finding delegation to old Milwaukee.

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