The Environment of Vulnerable Students: The Association Between Environmental Risk and Children’s Academic Improvement

• In Event: The role of affirming high quality experiences on children's wellbeing and learning

Abstract

Environmental justice has traditionally examined the impact of environmental disparities on children’s health, but less so on children’s development. Nascent research showing lower schoolwide academic performance in environments with greater pollution suggests that environmental risk can adversely impact children’s life chances (Legot et al. 2010). As academic achievement in children represents a gateway to life opportunities, the potential of future generations might be related to a more distant ecological component- the presence or absence of pollutive forces. A handful of studies have found increased exposure to environmental pollution to be associated with lower academic performance, primarily at the school level (Mohei et. al 2011; Rosofsky et al. 2014) and some at the individual level (Clark-Reyna et al. 2016; Grineski et. al 2020), after controlling for factors known to affect academic achievement.

In this study, we set out to investigate whether children learn better in less hazardous environments. We continue to investigate the link between pollution and individual academic performance and contribute to previous findings by incorporating new independent and dependent variables in a cumulative risk framework. Along with traditionally examined hazardous air pollutants- PM2.5 and industrial toxic release- we also examine the cumulative effects of environmental exposures such as drinking water, traffic density, ozone, and diesel, and investigate their impacts on more nuanced and meaningful measures of student learning, including raw test scores, attendance, and grade-equivalency. Whereas past studies used single test score outcomes, our model examines two test score outcomes for each student (initial and final) and an attendance variable used as a dose-response to academic instruction to investigate the construct of learning in different environments. The groundwork for investigating learning emerges from recent evidence linking toxic environmental exposure to increasing levels of learning disability rates (Rauh and Morgolis 2016) and negative cognitive functioning in children (Calderón-Garcidueñas et al. 2016).

We had the opportunity to collaborate with a school-based literacy program operating in multiple regions in California to examine 7789 individual K-6th grade students’ achievement data between 2012-2015, and across a range of geographic areas representing different levels of hazardous exposure. We geospatially characterize the environmental exposure children experience in their home and school census tract environments. Robust control measures known to affect academic performance are implemented at the individual (race, grade, gender, attendance), school (SES, enrollment, ethnic diversity, student-teacher ratio), and neighborhood levels (poverty, unemployment). In our analysis, we employed hierarchical linear models (HLM) to account for the nested nature (students within schools within neighborhoods), and to investigate the association between cumulative school and home environmental exposures on academic performance. Preliminary results from multilevel models show increased environmental risk to be modestly negatively associated with test performance, with a greater impact on long term grade achievement after adjusting for multiple control variables. Children at the highest cumulative levels of exposure were most affected in achievement. This study’s findings have the potential to reframe childhood disadvantage in policy terms to include unconsidered scalar impacts of environmental exposure, and to inform educational policy makers to better protect children’s learning environments.

Authors

• Rouzbeh Rahai, Cornell University
  Presenting Author

• Gary W Evans, Cornell University
  Non-Presenting Author