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Garrett M. Broad, Fordham University

It’s back-to-school time in the United States, and for countless children across the nation, it’s also time to get back into the school garden.

For centuries, educators and philosophers have argued that garden-based learning improves children’s intelligence and boosts their personal health. In recent years, concerns related to childhood obesity and young people’s disconnection from nature have led to a revitalized interest in the topic.

Tens of thousands of American schools have some form of school garden. Many are located on school grounds and others are run by external community partners. Most are connected to the school’s curriculum. For instance, seeds are used in science class to explain plant biology, fruits are used in social studies to teach world geography and the harvest is used in math to explore weights and measures. Some even incorporate food from the garden into the school lunch.

As a researcher and an activist, I’ve spent the better part of the last decade working to promote a healthy, equitable and sustainable food system. Through this process, I have heard bold claims made about the power of garden-based learning to meet these challenges.

School gardens claim a variety of benefits.

Given the enthusiasm that surrounds garden-based learning today, it’s worth taking stock of their overall impacts: Do school gardens actually improve the education and health of young people?

Promoting school gardens

School gardens have become a favorite strategy of prominent advocates in the “Good Food Movement.” Both celebrity chef Jamie Oliver and First Lady Michelle Obama have been vocal supporters.

An elementary school garden with six raised beds is meant to help kids learn. U.S. Department of Agriculture

Nonprofit and grassroots groups, who see these gardens as a way to provide fresh produce for the food insecure, have forged partnerships with local schools. Then there are service-based groups, such as FoodCorps, whose members spend one year in a low-income community to help establish gardens and develop other school food initiatives.

Philanthropic organizations like the American Heart Association have also sponsored the construction of hundreds of new school garden plots.

Taken together, upwards of 25 percent of public elementary schools in the United States include some form of garden-based learning. School garden projects are located in every region of the country and serve students of all ages, ethnic backgrounds and socioeconomic classes.

Transforming kids lives through gardens?

Advocates argue that gardening helps kids make healthier eating choices. As the self-proclaimed “Gangsta Gardener” Ron Finley put it in his popular TED Talk,

“If kids grow kale, kids eat kale.”

Does garden-based learning help school kids?UGA College of Ag & Environmental Sciences – OCCS, CC BY-NC

Many proponents go even further, suggesting that garden-based learning can inspire a variety of healthy changes for the whole family, helping to reverse the so-called obesity epidemic.

Others, like Edible Schoolyard founder Alice Waters, argue that experience in the garden can have a transformative impact on a child’s worldview, making sustainability “the lens through which they see the world.”

Sure, gardens can help

There is plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest that garden-based learning does yield educational, nutritional, ecological and social benefits.

For example, several published studies have shown that garden-based learning can increase students’ science knowledge and healthy food behaviors. Other research has shown that garden-based learning can help students better identify different types of vegetables as well as lead to more favorable opinions on eating vegetables.

In general, qualitative case studies of garden-based learning have been encouraging, providing narratives of life-changing experiences for children and teachers alike.

Do gardens improve the intake of fresh foods and fruit? RubyDW, CC BY

However, when it comes to actually increasing the amount of fresh foods eaten by young people, improving their health outcomes or shaping their overall environmental attitudes, quantitative results have tended to show modest gains at best. Some of the most highly developed school garden programs have been able to increase student vegetable consumption by about a serving per day. But the research has not been able to show whether these gains are maintained over time.

A lack of definitive evidence has led some critics to argue that school gardens are simply not worth the time and investment, especially for lower-income students who could be concentrating on more traditional college prep studies.

The social critic Caitlin Flanagan has gone so far as to say that garden programs are a distraction that could create a “permanent, uneducated underclass.”

There are no magic carrots

There is no doubt that the power of garden-based learning is sometimes overstated.

Particularly when describing garden projects in low-income neighborhoods and communities of color, popular narratives imply that a child’s time in the garden will rescue her from a life of poverty and chronic disease.

I call this the “magic carrot” approach to garden-based learning. But as we all know, there are no magic carrots growing in the school garden.

Gardens alone will not eliminate health disparities, close the educational achievement gap, fix unemployment or solve environmental injustice.

When is a garden successful?

For gardens to effectively promote learning and health, they must be supported and reinforced by the community as a whole. Surveys of school garden practitioners show that garden programs have serious potential to enhance school and neighborhood life – but only if certain conditions are met.

Notably, school gardens are most successful when they are not held afloat by a single dedicated teacher. Instead, multiple involved stakeholders can ensure that a garden doesn’t dry up after only a season or two.

If kids grow kale, do they eat it? U.S. Department of Agriculture, CC BY

For example, participation from administrators, families and neighborhood partners can turn a school garden into a dynamic and sustainable community hub.

Many experienced practitioners have also shown that garden-based learning is more powerful when its curriculum reflects the cultural backgrounds of the young people it serves. When children of Mexican descent grow indigenous varieties of corn, or when African-American youth cultivate collard greens, the process of growing food can become a process of self-discovery and cultural celebration.

In other words, if kids grow kale, they might eat kale, but only if kale is available in their neighborhood, if their family can afford to buy kale and if they think eating kale is relevant to their culture and lifestyle.

Creating valuable green space

As my own research has highlighted, there are organizations and schools across the country that incorporate garden-based learning into broader movements for social, environmental and food justice.

These groups recognize that school gardens alone will not magically fix the problems our nation faces. But as part of a long-term movement to improve community health, school gardens can provide a platform for experiential education, create valuable green space and foster a sense of empowerment in the minds and bodies of young Americans.

Garrett M. Broad, Assistant Professor of Communication and Media Studies, Fordham University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Aaron Kupchik, University of Delaware

Children across the U.S. have now returned to school. Many of these children are going to schools with sworn police officers patrolling the hallways. These officers, usually called school resource officers, are placed in schools across the country to help maintain school safety.

According to the most recent data reported by the Department of Education, police or security guards were present in 76.4 percent of U.S. public high schools in the 2009-2010 school year.

In many of these schools, police officers are being asked to deal with a range of issues that are very different from traditional policing duties, such as being a mental health counselor for a traumatized child. This is an unfair request.

Days after the recent tragedy in Dallas, for example, as he grieved for the five slain officers, Dallas Police Chief David Brown referred to this problem when he said,

“We’re asking cops to do too much in this country… Every societal failure, we put it off on the cops to solve. Not enough mental health funding, let the cops handle it. … Schools fail, let’s give it to the cops. … ”

For the past decade I have been studying how we police schools and punish students. My recent book, “The Real School Safety Problem,” and a growing body of other studies point to the fact that, indeed, schools ask police to do too much in schools.

Not only is it unfair to the police, it can be harmful for children.

Policing schools

Though there are no national data collected on exactly how many police officers are in schools, estimates suggest that the practice became popular in the early 1990s, as society began to rethink policing and punishment in the community outside of schools. That resulted in more rigorous policing practices and expansion of our prison system.

In 1999, following the Columbine school shooting, when two teens went on a shooting spree, policing practices grew further: Federal funding was increased to have more police officers in schools.

However, for over 20 years, school crime has been plummeting. Between 1993 and 2010 the number of students who reportedly became victims of a violent crime at school decreased by 82 percent. Since most schools are now safe places, officers in them aren’t needed to respond to many crimes.

So they are being asked to do many other tasks.

Most schools are safe places, so officers are asked to do other tasks. Eduardo Munoz/Reuters

There are no national data on what officers do while at schools. But studies in specific schools find that officers are being asked to deal with mental health problems, family crises, self-injurious behavior and manifestation of childhood trauma. They also mentor students and teach law-related courses.

Every jurisdiction makes its own decision about what officers should do in schools, and the training that they should receive to work in schools. The National Association of School Resource Officers does offer a week-long basic training course. That training does include a component on counseling and mentoring youth, but it is not clear how comprehensive the sessions are. Moreover, not all officers are required to take the course.

But students’ mental health and other problems are, not surprisingly, often beyond the skills gained from a week-long course. Even if they are trained, police officers are not mental health professionals whose years of training and practice teach them how to calm youth down, assess mental health needs and address the underlying causes of student misbehavior.

What are the consequences?

I have found in my prior research that the presence of officers can change the school environment in subtle ways – from one that focuses on children’s social, emotional and academic needs to one focusing on policing potential criminals.

For example, in one school I observed what happened when a student overdosed on multiple bottles of cough syrup. Rather than the school seeing this as a mental health issue or suicide attempt, the school turned to its “go to” person for handling difficult student issues: the officer.

After dealing with the initial emergency and ensuring the child went to the hospital, the officer’s (and thus the school’s) only response was to investigate what crime the child could be charged with, not what help he needed.

Other research, too, shows that the presence of police in schools can result in increased arrests of students for minor behaviors. For example, a 2013 study by criminologists Chongmin Na and Denise C. Gottfredson found that schools that added police officers subsequently saw more weapons and drug crimes, and a larger number of minor offenses reported to the police.

A 2016 study by University of Florida law professor Jason P. Nance found that the presence of a police officer predicted greater likelihood that student misbehaviors would result in an arrest.

Who gets hurt?

Childhood trauma is often a cause of serious childhood misconduct. Black and Latino students are at a greater risk than white students of having experienced childhood trauma. Youth of color are also more likely than white youth to attend schools with police officers. This means that students of color, who may have greater need for mental health care than white youth, are instead dealt with by police officers who are untrained or insufficiently trained in responding to trauma.

African-American boys are arrested at school more often than other students. North Charleston, CC BY-SA

It is therefore not surprising that recent research from the University of Chicago Consortium found that the arrest rate in Chicago for African-American boys was twice as high as that for students in the school district, overall.

Policing can be counterproductive

Police officers in schools often serve as mentors and role models. For example, the officer I described above – who looked to charge a potentially suicidal student with a crime – had volunteered to work in a school because of his desire to help kids. He took time to advise youth and be a positive influence in the lives of many. Often students would come to his office to ask for advice, and just “check in.” He would respond with care and compassion.

Though there is no sound evidence that police officers in schools prevent crime, it would be reasonable in my view to place officers in those few schools where there is violence. Despite steep declines in school violence, nationally, there are some schools where teachers and students face frequent threats of violence.

Having said that, the cost of the daily presence of police outweighs the benefit in the majority of schools. For example, the officer I describe above as a caring counselor and role model switched roles dramatically when he thought a crime might have been committed.

Then he would act like any traditional officer focused only on law and order. In those moments, he failed to address the underlying cause of the problem. By relying on him as the primary responder to student problems, the school replaced a focus on social issues and mental health with a focus on law enforcement.

The result is that children do not receive the help they need, and officers are placed in a no-win position by being asked to respond to students’ needs as if they had the same training as a mental health professional.

The fact is, policing alone cannot solve all societal problems.

Aaron Kupchik, Professor of Sociology & Criminal Justice, University of Delaware