I've wondered before whether the time students spend in school gardens is the best use of classroom time. It was very interesting to read this Atlantic piece that presents a view on school gardens that seems to go against the mainstream thinking.

Imagine that as a young and desperately poor Mexican man, you had made the dangerous and illegal journey to California to work in the fields with other migrants. There, you performed stoop labor, picking lettuce and bell peppers and table grapes; what made such an existence bearable was the dream of a better life. You met a woman and had a child with her, and because that child was born in the U.S., he was made a citizen of this great country. He will lead a life entirely different from yours; he will be educated. Now that child is about to begin middle school in the American city whose name is synonymous with higher learning, as it is the home of one of the greatest universities in the world: Berkeley. On the first day of sixth grade, the boy walks though the imposing double doors of his new school, stows his backpack, and then heads out to the field, where he stoops under a hot sun and begins to pick lettuce.

It’s rare for an immigrant experience to go the whole 360 in a single generation—one imagines the novel of assimilation, The White Man Calls It Romaine. The cruel trick has been pulled on this benighted child by an agglomeration of foodies and educational reformers who are propelled by a vacuous if well-meaning ideology that 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 (attaining the cultural achievements, in other words, that have lifted uncounted generations of human beings out of the desperate daily scrabble to wrest sustenance from dirt). The galvanizing force behind this ideology is Alice Waters, the dowager queen of the grown-locally movement. Her goal is that children might become “eco-gastronomes” and discover “how food grows”—a lesson, if ever there was one, that our farm worker’s son might have learned at his father’s knee—leaving the Emerson and Euclid to the professionals over at the schoolhouse. Waters’s enormous celebrity, combined with her decision in the 1990s to expand her horizons into the field of public-school education, has helped thrust thousands of schoolchildren into the grip of a giant experiment, one that is predicated on a set of assumptions that are largely unproved, even unexamined. That no one is calling foul on this is only one manifestation of the way the new Food Hysteria has come to dominate and diminish our shared cultural life, and to make an educational reformer out of someone whose brilliant cookery and laudable goals may not be the best qualifications for designing academic curricula for the public schools.

School gardens are very popular among educators. I think in many ways it is similar to the discussion of the value of arts and music in schools. They, like the school gardens, enrich the educational experience and perhaps for some students are an important part of the school experience. I guess the question is whether it is more important to focus a school's limited instructional time on a garden than on instruction in basic skills such as reading, writing and mathematics. For students who are struggling, does the garden provide an important relief from the pressure of classroom instruction or is it simply a diversion that takes up valuable classroom time?

This article provides some perspectives on school gardens that are not widely present in the education world.

I started to ask Michael Piscal, founder and CEO of the Inner City Education Foundation Public Schools, which runs 15 successful charter schools in South Los Angeles, what he thought about the Edible Schoolyard and school gardens in general, but he cut me off. “I ignore all those e-mails,” he told me bluntly. “Look,” he said, when pressed, “there’s nothing wrong with kids getting together after school and working on a garden; that’s very nice. But when it becomes the center of everything—as it usually does—it’s absurd. The only question in education reform that’s worth anything is this: What are you doing to prepare these kids for college? If I can get a kid to read Shakespeare and laugh at the right places, I can get him to college. That’s all that matters to me.”

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So why not give these troubled kids a bit of engagement and excitement out in the nourishing gardens, which if nothing else might slim them down and thus extend their lives? Really: How can that hurt?

Last October, we lost the greatest educational reformer of the late 20th century, Theodore Sizer, the founder of the Essential Schools movement, who was brave enough to say that when a school is in crisis, its leaders should strip away every program and resource that is not essential to the mission of schooling. He wrote in his classic 1984 book, Horace’s Compromise:

If students have yet to meet the fundamental standards of literacy, numeracy and civic understanding, programs should focus exclusively on these. Some critics will argue that the school must go beyond these subjects to hold the interest of the pupils … but a fourteen year old who is semi-literate is an adolescent in need of intensive, focused attention.

My state is full of semiliterate 14- year-olds. Let their after-school hours be filled with whatever enriching programs the good volunteers and philanthropic organizations of California care to offer them: club sports, choruses, creative-writing workshops, gardens. But until our kids have a decent chance at mastering the essential skills and knowledge that they will need to graduate from high school, we should devote every resource and every moment of their academic day to helping them realize that life-changing goal. Otherwise, we become complicit— through our best intentions—in an act of theft that will not only contribute to the creation of a permanent, uneducated underclass but will rob that group of the very force necessary to change its fate. The state, which failed these students as children and adolescents, will have to shoulder them in adulthood, for it will have created not a generation of gentleman farmers but one of intellectual sharecroppers, whose fortunes depend on the largesse or political whim of their educated peers.

Our state's system of public education has huge problems. By the time our students reach the 11th grade (the last year of testing) only 40% of them are at grade-level in Language Arts. And those are the students who haven't dropped out. Even at 4th grade, where students seem to score the highest, only 61% of students are at grade-level. The scores decline each year from then on. Math scores are similar with only 28% of students taking Algebra I, including those taking it late in high school.

For minority students and students who live in poverty, the results are even worse, with only 26% of socioeconomically disadvantages students being at grade level in Language Arts in the 11th grade. Language Arts and Math scores are similarly worse at other grade-levels. Can these students afford the loss instructional time in basic skills to allow them time to work in a school garden?

Remediation rates in college show us that we're not adequately preparing even the students with the best grades for college level work. Even though NCLB haters have been complaining that we've already narrowed the curriculum too much, maybe we haven't narrowed it enough. Perhaps it is time for research on whether school gardens and other distractions from instruction in basic skills are providing the benefits that we think they provide. With dwindling instructional time, we need to be sure we're putting it to the best use. Our students need to be prepared for college and the world of work. If we're not doing that, knowing how to grow snap peas isn't going to serve as a substitute for those basic skills.