First Lady Obama and Bancroft Elementary Students harvesting vegetables from the White House lawn. Courtesy of the Baltimore Sun
In this month’s edition of the Atlantic, author Caitlin Flanagan wrote a less-than-flattering article on the current school garden movement entitled “Cultivating Failure.” Her venomous critique of Alice Waters, founder of the Edible Schoolyard, and California’s “Garden in Every School” Initiative essentially blames school gardens for the failing state of California’s public schools. In addition to baring responsibility for failed schools, Flanagan stops just short of calling Waters and other pro-garden progressive education reformers racist for what she claims is their attempt to “bestow field work and low expectations on a giant population of students who might become troublesome if they actually got an education.” Those are pretty bold words. Luckily, many people have come out swinging in the days since the Atlantic published Flanagan’s article. Two great responses can be found on the blogs of Civil Eats and The Center for a Livable Future. They do a wonderful job of debunking a number of Flanagan’s myths and misuse of statistical concepts. However, I’d like to put my two cents in about what I found to be some of the gross misrepresentations in Flanagan’s article from an urban planning perspective.
As an urban planning student, I spent last semester intensely researching school gardens for a class I took on New York City food systems, as well as reading and writing about food systems planning in the larger urban and metropolitan context. One of her claims that jumped out at me was her assertion that poor people buy junk food because they are somehow less able to resist it than those who are wealthier and more educated. She invokes George Orwell, stating that:
“The peculiar evil is this: that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food … When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don’t want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit ‘tasty.’”
She then goes on to tell readers about how she drove to two lovely grocery stores in Compton, proving that people in poverty have access to fresh produce, if only the poor slobs were educated enough to buy it. Aside from being highly offensive, Flanagan’s assessment of access to produce in low income urban areas is downright wrong. Her drive to Compton is, in statistical terms, merely anecdotal evidence. Her assertions are especially ironic since she spends a good amount of her article lambasting school gardens because there is no empirical evidence to prove that they boost test scores (test scores are-by Flanagan’s definition-what it means to be educated). Here she makes a classic error of calling on “the facts” only when it suits her argument. Food deserts are very real, and there is a whole host of reasons why. The fact that she drove to these supermarkets is just one example- many low income residents don’t own cars and have to navigate public transit systems often designed to accommodate patterns of workforce commuting, not individuals trying to access basic needs like grocery stores. If you are interested in an actual, thoughtful assessment of food deserts and their impacts on food choices/options for individuals living in poverty, I would suggest Mark Winne’s book Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty.
However, that isn’t Flanagan’s only misuse of statistics. She blames the poor graduation rates and failing test scores of students (specifically minority students) on the existence of school gardens and other learner-centered education programs. In statistics, this is called correlation without causation. It’s like when health professionals once upon a time blamed polio on eating ice cream. Just because two things are happening at the same time does not mean that they are related. It also doesn’t mean they are not, but correlation by itself doesn’t prove anything.
The one point I did take away from Flanagan’s article is the critical need to have an honest discussion about where education in the U.S. should be headed (although, she didn’t exactly articulate this point in the most open-minded way). This is the whole idea behind President Obama’s Race to the Top, an initiative designed to foster innovative ideas about how to effectively educate America’s youth. It is clear that education reform is needed, and every possible option should be on the table in the discussion of how to make America’s schools better. With the First Lady weighing in by planting a vegetable garden on the White House lawn with a class from a local elementary school for the first time since World War II, it appears that school gardens may have a seat at the new-education table.
I happen to not be an advocate of a garden in every school. I came to this conclusion after months of researching school gardens and interviewing school garden coordinators. I have tremendous respect for garden coordinators and all the hard work they do (often with little support) to bring these opportunities to their schools, and I do believe (despite Flanagan’s assertions) that they benefit the students who work in them. I also think that any one-size fits all model, whether standardized testing or school gardens, inevitably forces educators into a box that may or may not be appropriate for their school. School gardens should be one of many options for educators to use to engage their students in the process of learning. However, this goes far beyond the issue of classroom learning into the very core of the debate over the role of schools and their responsibilities to their students. And that, I am afraid, is a topic for an entirely different blog.