Can All Children Learn?

Not if they have been poisoned.
(Chapter 1 of A Strange Ignorance)

Democratically elected school district governing boards are under attack nationwide for the perceived "failure" of public schools. This is particularly true in urban inner-city public schools where low-income children, often minorities, display an "achievement gap" between their test scores and the scores of more affluent children. In several recent jurisdictions, politicians have wrested control of public schools away from local parents.

William Raspberry, a nationally syndicated Washington Post columnist, described it succinctly in a February 5, 2001, column:

Much of President Bush's approach to education reform is based, I fear, on a persistent and misleading myth: That the people who run and staff our low-performing public schools could do a much better job if they wanted to.

And this is not a myth brought to Washington from Austin. Listen to the way reformers across the country talk about school reform. One of the consistent arguments for vouchers, for instance, is not that a few, self-selected youngsters would get a better education, but that failing public schools — spurred by the threat of losing enrollment and money — would crack down and do what they (presumably) already know how to do.

Some legislatures have enacted laws that allow — in some cases require — the states to take over failing schools from local districts. Again, the assumption seems to be not that state education officials are so much smarter at educating problem learners but that they, unlike the teachers already in those schools, will really try. (See at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A26498-2001Feb4)

"... the assumption seems to be not that state education officials are so much smarter at educating problem learners but that they, unlike the teachers already in those schools, will really try."       William Raspberry

Over the past few years, politicians have indulged in a frenzy of school bashing epitomized by the slogan "All Children Can Learn." The slogan presupposes that "failing schools," the "achievement gap," drug abuse and disruptive behavior are a consequence of incompetent educators and indifferent governing board members. But there exists a body of medical research which demonstrates that politicians themselves are responsible for a conveyor-belt of tragedy that produces precisely those symptoms attributed to "failing schools."

Subsequent pages in this report will lay out the medical research that explains how exposure to environmental lead creates the conditions of "failing schools." The fact that most "failing schools" are in low-income neighborhoods where children live in housing known to be laced with a brain damaging neurotoxin is not just a coincidence. There is mounting evidence that a host of social problems, including "failing schools," represent symptoms of lead ingestion by children during their first three years of life. The subsequent "soft bigotry of low expectations" in their school years is thus a consequence of the hard bigotry of indifference by politicians to the well-documented brain damage caused by environmental lead in children who live in these neighborhoods.

Recently, scientists have documented that during the first three years of a child's life the brain undergoes a dramatic transformation from a disorganized network of neurons into a differentiated learning organ. If during that transformation the body incorporates lead into tissues when calcium is actually needed, the brain is irreversibly damaged. As a consequence, it is nearly certain that the presence of lead in the environment of a child during the first three years of life will cripple the child's brain. This early brain damage from lead poisoning has been linked by careful research to:

1. a ten to fifteen point drop in I.Q. that essentially eliminates the leaders, inventors, artists, and entrepreneurs from the affected populations,
2. an inability to learn because brain tissues constructed of lead do not bind properly to form the neural learning connections,
3. attention deficit disorders because lead damaged brain tissues have a tendency to misfire and disrupt normal concentration,
4. violence because the careful balance of brain structures in the prefrontal cortex that inhibits impulsivity and violence are attenuated, and
5. drug use because untreated sufferers find illegal drugs help to medicate the agitation caused by lead damaged brain cells.

While lead based paints were banned in most western countries during the 1920s & 1930s, the United States continued to use lead-based paints into the 1970s. The explosion of home building after World War Two created vast neighborhoods that were painted with lead based paints. The 30-year useful life of most tract housing structures means those homes are now deteriorating and showering lead dust and paint chips on the unsuspecting children living in low-income housing. It takes a surprisingly small amount of lead to damage developing brains, a few sand-grain sized paint chips will do it.

As long as this lead-laced housing exists, it establishes a well-documented conveyor belt of tragedy. The well-documented prevalence of poverty among children in the United States means many infants are forced to live in deteriorating low-income housing. Those children will inevitably ingest environmental lead from deteriorating paint, be brain damaged, enter school with well-documented learning disabilities, fail to learn, become frustrated with the well-documented agitation of lead-induced ills, find well-documented solace in illegal drugs, and engage in criminal (often violent) acts due to the well-documented lead-induced impulsivity.

Politicians who trumpet the slogan "All Children Can Learn" universally blame public schools for the "achievement gap" and support "high-stakes tests" to punish educators and close down "failing schools" in low-income areas. But as will be documented later in this report, the connection between environmental lead and academic failure is unquestionable. The connection between environmental lead and violence is unquestionable. The connection between environmental lead poisoning among children in low-income communities surrounding "failing schools" is equally well established. And the claim by politicians' that "failing schools" are due to incompetent teaching does not explain why so many of these so-called "failing schools" are wracked by lead-induced violence and drug use.

But it is even harder to explain why educators display such a strange ignorance of the consequences of environmental lead exposure. Over ten years ago, the July 15, 1991, issue of the national magazine Newsweek made "Lead And Your Kids" its cover story. Newsweek quoted "Bailus Walker, dean of the public-health school at the University of Oklahoma and former commissioner of public health in Massachusetts," as declaring over ten years ago:

The education community has not really understood the dimensions of this because we don't see kids falling over and dying of lead poisoning in the classroom. But there's a very large number of kids who find it difficult to do analytical work or [even] line up in the cafeteria because their brains are laden with lead.

I did not dredge this quote up from some rationalizing public school educator attempting to explain away teacher incompetence. This quote, blatantly pointing out that lead poisoned children can barely line up in public schools, came instead from a top reporter in a top national newsmagazine interviewing a top public health expert about a well-documented public health issue. Yet public school educators still have "not really understood the dimensions of this" problem and the implications for both schools and suffering children.

Near its conclusion, the 1991 Newsweek article averred:

The new science about lead's effect on the brain may force policymakers to re-examine some social issues through a new prism. For example, if lead can cause aggressive behavior, learning disabilities and hyperactivity, might it not also be a contributing factor in poor educational performance among low-income blacks, who suffer the most lead poisoning?

Why then, over ten years later, do educators and governing board members allow politicians to ignore lead poisoning as a dominating factor in the "achievement gap" and of poor educational performance among students in "failing schools?"

Eight years later, in the December, 1999, Phi Delta Kappan "Special Section on Urban Schools," Jacquelyne Faye Jackson, a research associate at the Institute of Human Development at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote an article titled "What are the Real Risk Factors for African American Children?" After a long discursion rounding up and dismissing the usual suspects blamed for school failure, Jackson wrote:

Inexplicably, the education literature has given scant attention to the growing body of medical information implicating low-level lead exposure as a critical factor in cognitive deficits and behavior problems. This is the case even though the threats to children's health posed by environmental toxins such as lead have become such a major concern to specialists in environmental health that they recently persuaded the federal Environmental Protection Agency to establish an Office of Children's Health and to fund eight research centers dedicated to children's environmental health issues. ….

Where are the voices of educators in this policy debate? After all, it is educators who will face the formidable challenge of trying to prepare future generations of African American and other minority children for productive life in the 21^st century after society has allowed those children to suffer ongoing lead exposure at levels known to undermine their educational potential.

The Center for Children's Health and the Environment of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine has a factsheet on its web site that reads:

Lead is the most well-studied example of an environmental contaminant that interferes with learning. Lead causes reductions in IQ. In addition, exposure to lead has been linked to disruptive classroom behavior and reduced ability to pay attention. Lead exposure has been shown to be correlated with failure to graduate from high school, as well as a tendency toward violence, addictive behaviors and other behavioral and emotional problems. (see: http://www.childenvironment.org/factsheets/adhd.htm)

Is this not indicative of the typical "failing school?"

A 1996 National Institutes of Environmental Health abstract of an article titled "Behavioral Effects of Lead: Commonalities between Experimental and Epidemiologic Data" reported:

While age-appropriate standardized measures of intelligence (IQ) have been the dependent variable most often used to assess lead-induced cognitive impairment in epidemiologic studies, researchers have also used a variety of other methods designed to assess specific behavioral processes sensitive to lead. Increased reaction time and poorer performance on viligance tasks associated with increased lead body burden suggest increased distractibility and short attention span.

Assessment of behavior on teachers' rating scales identified increased distractibility, impulsivity, nonpersistence, inability to follow sequences of directions, and inappropriate approach to problems as hallmarks of lead exposure.

Robust deficits in learned skills such as reading, spelling, math, and word recognition have also been found. Spatial organizational perception and abilities seem particularly sensitive to lead-induced impairment. Assessment of complex tasks of learning and memory in both rats and monkeys has revealed overall deficits in function over a variety of behavioral tasks. Exploration of behavioral mechanisms responsible for these deficits identified increased distractibility, perseveration, inability to inhibit inappropriate responding, and inability to change response strategy as underlying deficits.

Thus, there is remarkable congruence between the epidemiologic and experimental literatures with regard to the behavioral processes identified as underlying the deficits inflicted by developmental lead exposure. (See at: http://ehpnet1.niehs.nih.gov/docs/1996/Suppl-2/driceabs.html)

In plain English, "there is remarkable congruence" in what researchers have found as symptoms exhibited by children exposed to lead who perform poorly in school and what scientific experiments have shown to be symptoms of lead exposure "in both rats and monkeys." Children exposed to lead have "increased reaction time" and "increased distractibility" plus "robust deficits in … reading, spelling, math and word recognition" because of an "inability to inhibit inappropriate responding" (misbehavior), "and inability to change response strategy" (learn). And the "behavioral mechanisms responsible for these deficits" are "congruent," meaning they are exactly the same as, "the behavioral processes identified as underlying the deficits inflicted by developmental lead exposure." In other words, scientists know lead exposure causes much of what politicians blame failing schools for.

After confirming that there is a plethora of research about the detrimental brain damaging effects of lead poisoning, I wondered whether the 1999 Kappan article on lead poisoning had stimulated any greater awakening of the issue among educators. I wrote to Ms. Jackson in 2001 about the response she received after her article was published. Her answer was that she received very little response and concluded:

I fear that the current social and educational climates are too preoccupied with intimidating individual students and teachers to give much attention to something that implicates societal responsibility for failing schools.

"Where are the voices of educators in this policy debate?"       Jacquelyne Faye Jackson

But individual students and teachers don't make political decisions. What she is really saying is that for politicians, it is easier to intimidate school officials and governing board members than to fight venal lobbyists for the lead industry to protect children.

Instead of testing children for crippling lead poisoning, politicians have created an Orwellian testocratic Taliban that intimidates governing board members into abandoning local control, intimidates administrators into curricular burqas and intimidates teachers into being called to test practice three times a day. Where the salient feature of Talibanic legislation called "No Child Left Behind" is precisely to allow unpoisoned children who can learn to leave behind those lead-poisoned children who cannot.

Talibanic politicians ignore the laws of physics and chemistry to insist that moral infidelities by educators require "accountability" for those who can't make "All Children Learn." The fact that most children in "failing schools" are primarily suffering from political indifference is ignored, a strange ignorance, in order to flog teachers and administrators for not overcoming what scientists tell us is irreversible once the damage is done.

Over ten years ago, before politicians started their Orwellian chanting "All Children Can Learn" and before the political doublethink scapegoating of "failing schools" rose to today's prominence, it was well-known that environmental lead played a prominent role in academic failure and student delinquency. Sufficiently well known that the cover story on a national newsmagazine suggested "... lead's effect on the brain may force policymakers to re-examine some social issues through a new prism." Why, then, are educators and governing board members today chanting "All Children Can Learn" even if scientific research says they can't?