By Christy Merrick

The No Child Left Behind Act has made standardized testing a central feature in American public schools.

Every year, millions of students in American public schools file into testing rooms, pick up their number-two pencils or log on a computer, and begin. When time is called, the answers they have given on their standardized exams will determine not just their own standing in the public school system, but also how their teachers and schools are evaluated.

Preparing students for standardized tests is now the central focus of many teachers in American schools. To help teachers incorporate environmental education into their curriculum, Project Learning Tree (PLT) ensures its materials are aligned with and support the educational standards that these standardized tests evaluate.

“PLT materials supplement existing curricula to help teachers teach what they’re supposed to teach,” says Kathy McGlauflin, Director of Project Learning Tree.

Standards-Based Reform
America’s educational system has long provided teachers with guidance about the kinds of knowledge and skills their students should be developing each year. But in 1983, when the National Commission on Excellence in Education published its landmark report on the state of American schools, A Nation at Risk, America began to question whether that system was working.

Students were not performing as well as their counterparts in other industrialized countries, achievement on standardized tests was declining, illiteracy rates were alarmingly high, and other indicators suggested that America was not producing citizens that would be able to compete in the global economy.

Hoping to raise the bar for students by setting clear goals for learning across the grades, and then requiring standardized tests to demonstrate competency, education leaders ushered in a wave of standards-based reforms.

In an effort to increase accountability for meeting standards, former President Bush signed into law the No Child Left Behind Act in 2002. No Child Left Behind has raised the stakes in standards-based education by spelling out clear expectations for how students and schools should perform on standardized tests, and metes out consequences when benchmarks are not met.

For better or worse, standards-based reform has created a major emphasis on standardized testing. Teachers’ jobs, school funding, and even the future of schools themselves rest on how students perform on tests. In response, teachers have developed a razor-sharp focus on test preparation. And in this climate, environmental education (EE) can seem like a diversion.

EE Is a Natural Fit
Netosh Jones, a third grade teacher at Washington D.C.’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Elementary, knows well how important standards are for teachers today. “Standards drive the teaching. It’s the heart,” she explains. "But standards are just the beginning. Then you have all the different strategies you use to help kids master the standards.”

Jones and her school’s principal, Dr. Valoria Baylor, partnered with PLT to bring new teaching strategies to their school.  “PLT applies the same standards and pacing as the school system does, so that helps me a lot in my planning,” said Jones.  “I can go to my PLT activity guide and get stories, ideas, and projects on specific standards—like on energy issues, for example.” 

PLT helped teachers and students plant trees and gardens to green their otherwise cement-filled, urban school yard, and provided all teachers at the school with professional development and lesson plans to help them utilize their new outdoor learning spaces. 

A planting day at Martin Luther King, Jr., Elementary in Washington, D.C.

“We’re now seeing that the classroom alone is not enough for students” says Jones. “That’s why environmental studies is so important.”  The students get outside often to use inquiry-based learning to build the literacy skills the standards require. Activities like working in the butterfly garden help the students build skills in reading, questioning, observing, and “using all the steps of the scientific method,” says Jones.  “We use the environment as an outdoor laboratory.”

Jones is using PLT’s environmental education program as a natural extension of the curriculum, providing engaging opportunities to learn required concepts and skills. With its emphasis on inquiry-based approaches, hands-on learning, real-world problem solving, and multi-disciplinary approaches, EE has much to offer teachers looking for ways to engage their students in the standards-based curriculum.

EE Guidelines Address Standards Recognizing that the natural connections between EE and the standards-based curriculum were not always obvious to teachers and administrators, in 1996 the North American Association for Environmental Education (NAAEE) formally entered the era of standards-based reform with a set of guidelines designed specifically for EE materials. The document, Excellence in Environmental Education Guidelines for Learning (Pre K-12), define what students should know and be able to do in order to be environmentally literate.

PLT materials were used as model curricula in the development of the guidelines and PLT continues to play a key role in NAAEE’s Guidelines for Excellence program.

Dr. Bora Simmons, with the National Project for Excellence in Environmental Education, played a key role in the development of the guidelines. She explains, “We felt it was important to develop a widely agreed upon framework for environmental literacy that linked directly to the national (and state) standards movement. By referencing the traditional subject area standards in our guidelines, we demonstrate that environmental education is standards-based and can be used to teach a standards-based curriculum.”

Still, PLT and other environmental education providers hear it over and over again: teachers can’t use environmental education materials, can’t attend workshops, and can’t schedule field trips unless they can demonstrate that the materials, training, and experiences will help them address their state standards. The need for EE materials to clearly and plainly show how they connect to standards has become so central to EE that the Environmental Education and Training Partnership (EETAP) (a consortium of PLT and other leading national EE programs and organizations that deliver environmental education training and support) has made the effort to make those curriculum connections a priority.

Making Connections with Correlations
The main tool that EE providers use to demonstrate how their materials support learning standards is correlations. Correlations can be made to national or state standards.

In every state, teachers and students are held accountable for standards that their own state has developed, and every state’s standards are different. While correlations to national standards can provide some benefits, most educators agree that correlations to their own state’s standards are what they need most.

PLT materials, for example, are aligned with several national guidelines, including those for science, social studies, environmental education, and guidelines developed by the Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts of America.  More importantly, in most states, PLT activities are correlated with state science, social studies, language arts, and mathematics education standards and assessments for learning.

Correlations are always specific to a subject area and grade level or range of grade levels. In some cases, correlations can distinguish how closely an activity aligns with a particular learning standard, noting whether a particular activity directly addresses a standard, indirectly addresses it, addresses a part of it, or connects to a standard in some other way.

Correlations can be organized by activity or by standard.  Most PLT state correlations provide both of these approaches, so that a teacher can find what he/she needs, whether he/she’s looking for activities that can support a particular standard, or he/she wants to know what standards an activity he/she wants to use can help address.  Many PLT state programs have taken the extra step of developing a searchable database that allows users to search either by activity or standard.

To date, PLT has produced correlations in 38 states.  But, as Al Stenstrup, Director of Education Programs at PLT, notes, “Change is the challenge.  For a variety of reasons, states can overhaul their standards every few years, and they tend not to make changes to different subject areas in the same year.  For PLT, keeping our correlations up to date requires constant vigilance.”

Correlations in Practice
At least one large-scale evaluation of the correlations effort has been completed, and the results are helping to clarify its impact. EETAP partners PLT, Project WILD, and Project WET used post-workshop surveys and follow-up surveys one to three months after their workshops to track the impact of the correlations work done in Florida, New Hampshire, and Oregon.

The research, together with anecdotal information from teachers, reveals that correlations play an important role in getting materials into the classroom. Over 70 percent of participants agreed that they had used more PLT, Project WET, or Project WILD activities because they were correlated to state standards.  That’s encouraging news, and suggests that correlations play an important role in getting materials into—and used—in the classroom.

For some teachers, correlations simply lend credibility to materials or programs that they already plan to use. Teachers who are dedicated to the principles of EE, familiar with EE curriculum or programs, or who particularly want to provide their students with access to a field trip destination, often use correlations to get the go-ahead to pursue their passion. When asked in a survey how he or she planned to use the correlations in the classroom, one teacher revealed, “To justify my lessons!”

At the other end of the spectrum are teachers who use the correlations to help plan and build lessons and other activities. One teacher who participated in the EETAP evaluation indicated that the correlations were useful in “Searching for activities that cover benchmarks I have not covered this year.”

The schoolyard gardens at Martin Luther King, Jr. Elementary provide students with innovative opportunities for standards-based learning.

A bigger research question that remains is whether providing the correlations translates to better results on standardized tests. For now, current research and experience confirms for PLT that the more we can align our materials with state standards, the more they will be used by teachers, who are under enormous pressure for their students to perform on tests. Washington, D.C. teacher Netosh Jones says PLT has become a partner in her students’ education. She says, “It takes the pressure off teachers. They [PLT] say, ‘We can help you. We can relieve you of some of that pressure.’”

Christy Merrick is a freelance writer and consultant in environmental education and communications.  This Branch feature is an excerpt from an article published by the Environmental Education and Training Partnership (EETAP).
Read the full article here.