No Child Left Behind has been all over the news for years. We’ve all heard about the legislation’s impact on testing and schools. But some educators think there’s an unintended consequence, for a childhood ritual.

Sound of field trip

Field trips to see dinosaur bones, art museums or a performance of Peter and the Wolf are a staple of childhood. Like these kids figuring out to work a water wheel at the Chicago Children’s Museum.

Sound of field trip

WORKSHOP LEADER: Where does our water come from? Where did you get your water from this morning?
STUDENT: The sink.
WORKSHOP LEADER: And where does that water come from?
STUDENTS: Oooh.

This particular workshop on water, meets state language arts goals 4 and 5, science goals 11 and 12, and social science goal 17A. That’s the information many principals and teachers need, to justify field trips these days.

Elizabeth Babcock heads the Field Museum’s education department:

BABCOCK: They say, you know, I would love to come see your exhibition, but we have to show a certain percentage of improvement on our standardized tests, and that means we need to drill and practice in our classroom, and I’m not sure I can take a day out of school, to come on a field trip.

The legislation lets each state set its own standards for what kids need to learn. Although Illinois includes the fine arts and social science in its goals, kids only get tested on math, reading, science and writing. So field trips involving history or the arts are seen as expendable. Babcock says that’s a shame.

BABCOCK: Learning from a textbook is not the same at coming and looking at a 2,000-year-old sandal made by somebody who was actually one of your ancestors.

The number of field trips to Chicago’s major museums dropped 17 percent since the year 2000, according to Museums in the Park.

Museum educators figure that’s due in part, to No Child Left Behind. They’re concerned enough about the legislation to hold a seminar later this month, called No Museum Left Behind.

COHN: You would never get myself or the Secretary to ever say or believe museums are expendable. That’s not what we’re saying at all.

Kristine Cohn is the U.S. Department of Education’s top regional official.

COHN: We believe all boys and girls need to be able to read and do math at grade level.

And Cohn says that will make field trips, more meaningful. That’s just what some museum educators here are trying to do. In addition to the Children’s Museum, several institutions, including the Art Institute, the National Museum of Mexican Art, and the Museum of Science and Industry, have looked at their exhibits, and listed how they meet state learning standards.

Sound of field trip

Back at the Children’s Museum, the students make an aqueduct out of rubber tubing, and plumbing connectors. They pour water into their contraption, to see if it will work.

STUDENTS: Yeah, we got it, yay, we made it to the city.
WORKSHOP LEADER: Ooh, you did it.

Wilma Gray, a teacher at J.N. Thorp Elementary School, says field trips like this reinforce her lessons.

GRAY: You can see little lights going on in their heads – oh, I should know that answer. I don’t believe you can teach how to behave by staying them out at the school. You have to bring ‘em out, in order to teach them how to behave.

One of the chaperones is parent Hilda Aguirre.

AGUIRRE: Field trips are good, it takes the pressure off kids, relaxes them a little. And I know my kid gets a little tense around test time, so, and I know ISATs are coming up, and it’s a lot of pressure on him.

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The Children’s Museum and the Field are among the museums that are bringing the field trip directly to the classroom.

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The Field Museum’s Andy Hershberger unloads six boxes of African instruments from his trunk.

KIDS: Hello, Mr. Andy.
HERSHBERGER: Hello.

Hershberger is at Clissold Elementary School, on Chicago’s South Side, to teach a class called Africa’s Beat. He pulls out a map of Africa, and talks about the desert and the people. Then he passes around instruments.

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Kindergartner Damian Evans has a whole list of what he’s learned from field trips:

EVANS: Different classes about animals and stuff, and people, statues and different countries and different animals and different planets.

In addition to raising tests scores, museum educators say the law is forcing them to reach out to teachers, to see what they actually need. And Nathan Richie, of the Freedom Museum, says that’s a good thing. But the downside, is the risk of making history and the arts less important.

RICHIE: When you put standards on math, science and literacy, specifically, you’re saying these three things are alone what’s most important for a kid’s education.

Richie says the irony here, is the disadvantaged schools need to spend so much time teaching to the tests and administering practice tests, they have the least time for field trips. And those are precisely the schools that No Child Left Behind intends to help.

I’m Lynette Kalsnes, Chicago Public Radio.