Oil and water still: how No Child Left Behind limits and distorts environmental education in US schools

Abstract

This article explores the problematic tensions between schooling and environmental education in the United States, with a special focus on the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. Today in the United States, this powerful federal legislation dominates the discourse and practice of schooling, and works against the aims of environmental education in many ways. The article is divided into three parts. First, it reviews the recent discourse of achievement and accountability in general education, as exemplified by the No Child Left Behind Act. Second, it describes the impact of achievement and accountability discourse on environmental education by outlining two responses from environmental educators to the general climate of schooling: 1) accommodation or ‘playing the achievement game’; and 2) resistance or ‘changing the rules’. Third, it explores how related tensions between nationalistic federal education policies and the sweeping global challenges suggested by the United Nation’s Decade of Education for Sustainable Development present additional dilemmas for promoting and implementing environmental education. Begun and held at the City of Washington on Wednesday, the third day of January, two thousand and one An Act To close the achievement gap with accountability, flexibility, and choice, so that no child is left behind. (NCLB, 2001, Sec. 1)