Students returning to schools across America are entering very different classrooms. In some, the climate crisis will be downplayed or even no longer taught. In others, climate will be front and center, and school environmental clubs are booming. What your child is taught depends largely on where you live.
School districts from Texas to New Mexico to Idaho may not have outright bans on teaching students climate science, but subtle and intentional tweaks in curriculum and guidelines have resulted in removing references to human-caused climate change. The Prager University Foundation, known as PragerU, a nonprofit advocacy group that creates content promoting conservative points on a wide range of topics, has succeeded in getting some of its controversial educational videos, which question climate change and even criticize renewable energy, approved for public school use in Arizona, Florida, Montana, New Hampshire, and Oklahoma.
Even schools teaching accurate climate science are not immune to missteps. School groups, including parent-teacher organizations and associations, can be so eager to help students take positive environmental actions that they wind up overdoing it.
Take school recycling initiatives. Well-intentioned schools have been embracing recycling programs linked to fundraising for impossible-to-recycle items, usually random plastics. They outsource to companies and set up bins and congratulate the kids who bring in items for a job well done. Unfortunately, these aren’t items that can be recycled, and they usually wind up in landfills. This school-sanctioned greenwashing, almost universally unintentional and based on not understanding the fundamentals of recycling, means students in schools still educating about the climate crisis are, essentially, going back to school with oil and gas propaganda.
“A lot of teachers, shockingly, know very little,” says Uli Nagel, Co-founder and Director of the Cooler Communities Climate Education Program at the Harold Grinspoon Charitable Foundation. “It would be fascinating to let people know about greenwashing in schools and actually alert teachers to this is a real thing, this is not.”
What to do?
If you live in a place that has abandoned climate education, you can join forces with other families who want it reinstated and push the administration and the Board of Education alike to teach science. And for parents and students interested in learning about climate but not venturing into group activities that hurt rather than help the environment, there’s help. A number of climate organizations, including Cooler Communities Climate Education Program, provide (mostly free) trusted and vetted curriculum, ready-to-use learning resources, lab activities, and videos. This Is Planet Ed, an initiative of the Aspen Institute, is one example; they provide strategic frameworks, early childhood materials, and K-12 climate action roadmaps.
“We’re trying to steer action in the schools toward things that matter and are nonpartisan, but also actually they’re for real,” says Uli. In Massachusetts, where Uli is based, the organization offers curriculum as well as grants to support classroom teaching on climate, for example. “And we host and help put on events around what the kids learn. We support the schools in letting the kids become the teachers of their communities. They choose things like sustainable fashion or pollinator gardens.”
Help comes in many forms
Beyond grants and lesson frameworks, climate education organizations are offering innovative ways to work climate into classrooms. Cooler Communities Climate Education Program, for example, has a book program called Energy Detectives. Currently, they have three books on a variety of topics (energy efficiency, solar, different people doing different things like food waste reduction) in Spanish as well as English. And there are more to come. Future topics are likely to include methane reduction and regeneration, but not recycling. It’s just too complicated.
The organization is mostly restricted to sending books to New England and places in New Jersey. “We can’t blanket the country just yet because we don’t have the funding. But any teacher, within those parameters, can order the books for free for every student to take home,” she says.
To get the word out about these free books, the organization sends invitations to teachers and mails books to principals. “People love the books. A lot of kids don’t even have that opportunity to own books.”
This seems to be the key to getting Energy Detectives out far and wide. “West Virginia just ordered a huge amount of books compared to the number of kids. A lot of people don’t have resources.” She dreams of getting books—and their curriculum—into states that aren’t already over-resourced. “Kansas, maybe Missouri, Minnesota. Those are the places where I would love to go.”
In the meantime, she’s working to share as much trustworthy information as the organization can afford to schools in need. Which, this school year, appears to be a whole lot.
Tell Congress: The Climate Clock Is Ticking. Act Now for Our Kids’ Future.