No Child Outside the Classroom

CSLC, I completely agree with you! As a 22 year-old who really just wants to make a huge impact on the education system, this has been my argument for quite some time! Education is so much more than thinking in a certain way. It is developing a way of thinking that allows for creative solutions to problems, critical thinking strategies, and more. I certainly hope to be at the forefront of a movement that encompasses these things into general teaching methods, as well as figuring out a way to quantitatively measure the success of this.

Enter Your Comment

I'm an administrator at the Science & Technology Center and serve on a School Board. I have found that transportation is more costly then the actual fieldtrip. The transportaion dept is often a union and schools can not seek other avenues that would be more cost effective. Our local city bus transit agreed to transport children for only one dollar per child but the distric could not approve is because of the union. This is too bad because the arae I'm in the local school are unpriveldged and can not afford the cost of the unionized transportation. The majority of children our center serves are outside the county and come from more wealthy schools. Many of these school travel 1-2 hours to visit the center when our local school can travel 5-15 minutes.

I am a grandmother (and a vetran private school elementary educator) who has recently been volunteering in a local public primary school. Field trips are not the only casualties of NCLB, I believe we will find young minds strewn over a battlefield at the end of this decade. I have witnessed "test coaches" coming into the classroom to "review" children for the standardized tests RIGHT FROM THE TEST! Teachers are abandoning hands-on teaching for rote memorization of correct answers. There are second graders who have a very limited reading vocabulary because of the concentration on worksheets and answer circling. Send your investigative reporters into the elementary classrooms across small town America, into the poorer rural areas where teachers and school districts are desperately clinging to jobs and funding for their schools. If our public education is based primarily on test results, we are looking forward to a large generation of non-thinkers who can only answer the right questions with the designated answer.

Certainly NCLB has had a negative impact on field trips. However, the rising cost of gas has also had a dampening effect on trips off school campus. In the district where I teach every field trip must be directly correlated to a state Grade Level Expectation and be less that 100 miles round trip. When you live in a very small rural community finding a suitable field trip spot that meets those requirements because more than a bit of a challenge!