Register Online
Executive Searches
Staff Directory
The Philadelphia Experiment
(Chapter 5 of A Strange Ignorance)
In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the governing board of its local schools was dismissed in a power play involving politicians chanting "All Children Can Learn" and for-profit businesses hoping to cash-in on the schools' travail. The disconnect between academics and discipline in the hotly contested travail of Philadelphia schools serves to illustrate how the real issue of lead poisoning goes completely undetected.
Under the threat of a state takeover of its "failing schools," Philadelphia was in the process of hiring a private firm that operated "alternative disciplinary" campuses for the Houston (Texas) Independent School District (HISD) where disruptive students were sent to remove them from district schools. The Philadelphia Inquirer (January 19, 2000) published a story titled "A study in teaching the toughest" which reviewed how the Houston Independent School District under its then Superintendent, now U.S. Secretary of Education, Rod Paige handled "its most disruptive students." The article told of visiting 'alternative' campuses in Houston:
Officials of the Houston Independent School District cite a 30 percent drop in violent crime on district campuses since the two disciplinary campuses opened, one in 1997, the other in 1998. …. At the Houston schools, there is no homework, few certified teachers, and little traditional teaching. The program will be costly - Houston pays about $9 million a year. It is so new its long-term success rates aren't available. ….
Amid the stream of students arriving for school at the Ferndale campus …. Monitors pat students from head to toe, even reaching into pockets. They check shoes for weapons and drugs before students walk through a metal detector. …. Students remain in one classroom most of the day. …. The classrooms are arranged in quads, with a central area where students - one class at a time - eat lunch. "It's like a prison!" complained Francine Dennington, 16. But, she acknowledged, it's easier to focus on schoolwork. Added Sonya Garcia, 17, who was harassed by gangs in her previous school: "I don't have to worry about somebody coming in here with a 12-gauge and shooting me in the back." And in Houston's public schools, robbery, theft, weapons offenses, assaults, and disorderly conduct have decreased, Superintendent Rod Paige said. "It's a win-win," he said. ….
Once placed in a class, students mostly work independently on computers and with books and are tested regularly. …. For highly disruptive students, computer-based learning offers a viable solution, some experts say. "These kids have learned such negative disruptive behavior patterns that to put them in a classroom and try to lockstep them along doesn't work," said Robert D. Barr, senior analyst at the Center for School Improvement at Boise State University. ….
Luis Contreras, 18, is among a group of students facing the wall at a long table along the perimeter of the room. He is reading a textbook. In the room's center, other students work on a dozen computers. There are eight televisions for video- and audio-based work, too. Also within each class is a small room with windows, where teachers can take a student for discipline or help and still be able to monitor the class. The classroom is designed to minimize distractions and allow students to work independently. ….
Monitoring work and answering questions is classroom teacher Kelsan Shaw, a former social worker with a bachelor's degree in political science and communications but no teaching certification. Only about 15 percent of classroom teachers are certified, though many are enrolled in education programs. All are required to have bachelor's degrees. …. Some are former corrections officers or counselors. …. The staff also includes behavior specialists, truancy officers, and university mentors. A justice of the peace holds court at the schools and metes out punishment to truants and disruptive students. The aggressive truancy policy helped the schools achieve 82.5 percent average attendance last year ….
The Philadelphia School District has identified a pool of 5,000 students for a Community Education Partners program - including the 1,200 who return to the city's schools annually from incarceration or who are weapons offenders, and disruptive youths, or severe academic stragglers. ….
The [Houston] district pays Community Education Partners $8,950 per pupil - about $3,000 less than the cost of the district's in-house alternative programs, Paige said. (In Philadelphia, the … city's three discipline schools cost about $10,500 per pupil - about $3,500 more than regular education.)
In other words, their existing "disruptive students" cost Philadelphia 50% more per student than regular students and Philadelphia already pays nearly 50% more per student on regular students than Arizona does on all students. In Houston, removing these disruptive students to "a prison" without teachers results in only an 82.5 percent average attendance, meaning these students are absent, on average, one day of every week of school. And the authorities in Houston admit "its long-term success rates aren't available."
More significantly, there was nothing in the article that indicated these students were learning anything. Nothing that indicated this program had any academic purpose. For a problem that ostensibly involves poor test scores, they hired "corrections officers" instead of academic specialists. There was nothing in this news story about how well these students did on tests after they were subject to these extreme measures. The newspaper reported instead on the decline in student violence. Yet even these extreme measures produced only a "30 percent drop in violent crime on district campuses" such as "robbery, theft, weapons offenses, assaults, and disorderly conduct."
|
The chilling horror of this newspaper story, to anyone knowledgeable about lead poisoning, is the specter that these children are suffering from environmental lead. These children are displaying the classic symptoms of lead poisoning and ADD/ADHD, only to have their suffering compounded by institutionalized abuse in prison-like "alternative disciplinary schools" instead of having their ailments directly addressed. These warped peg students are simply being pounded into square prison cells labeled as educational holes rather than receiving any real education.
There is no question the lead was there. On April 8, 1993, The Houston Chronicle reported in a story titled "Study of lead poison offers hope for project" that:
Since October, the city has screened about 3,000 children for lead poisoning. Up to 20 percent were discovered to have potentially dangerous levels of lead in their bloodstream. …. Stahl said 15 to 20 percent of the 3,000 children screened since October -- in clinics, Head Start programs and daycare centers -- had more than 10 micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood.
Robert Stahl was Houston's project coordinator in 1993 for their "Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Project" who estimated that there were 124,000 children "thought to be at risk here." There was no mention in the story what effect this population of lead poisoned children would have when they reached Houston's schools in future years. But the children were being poisoned with a neurotoxin whose documented symptoms are precisely the symptoms described for the students in the disciplinary campuses.
The extent of lead poisoning in Houston remains enormous. I talked to Stahl's successor in Houston about the problem. He said that the lead abatement program in Houston had initially focused on children who were found with blood lead levels in excess of 20 micrograms per deciliter. In the late 1990s they were finding fewer such cases than they could handle and therefore officials decided to drop their standard to 17 micrograms per deciliter. They were inundated with so many new cases that they had to raise the standard to 19 micrograms per deciliter.
Yet the currently recognized level of lead that causes brain damage and behavioral problems is documented at half the level that overwhelmed them. The children of Houston continue to be poisoned, continue to be ignored, continue to suffer brain damage, continue on to public school failure, and no one seems to connect this conveyor belt of tragedy with the "failing schools" that propelled its superintendent to national prominence. The official in Houston lamented to me that he regularly sees the poisoned children of new Hispanic immigrants in Houston whose parents' entrepreneurial spirit leads them to buy and renovate old homes, unknowing that in the process they are destroying their children's lives.
His lament reminded me of the 1991 Newsweek article on "Lead and your Kids" which began with an example of inadvertently poisoned children:
When Helene and Bruce Tackling found their two-story house in New London, Conn., in December, 1989, they called it 'our Christmas miracle.' It seemed perfect. On the very same street where Bruce grew up, it had two parks nearby, a big backyard and enough space so their 2-year-old, Jessica, and the baby on the way could have their own bedrooms. It needed some renovation, but Bruce was handy with a Spackle knife and the family moved in on March 1, 1990.
Bruce immediately went to work, scraping the old paint off the pantry and sanding the bathroom walls down to the original wood. The place was looking sharp. But within months of moving in, the children had become increasingly demanding and irritable. Nicholas, the new baby, wouldn't stop crying, his voice sometimes locking into a continual eerie scream, "like he wasn't even awake," says Helene. Doctors said it was colic, and nurses told her to feed him bananas and rice. Jessica kept complaining of stomachaches, but checkups found nothing wrong. ….
But this April, the Tacklings learned that … Jessica and Nicholas had lead poisoning. They probably got it not from eating paint chips but from fine paint dust --- stirred up in part by the renovations Bruce did to make the house just like new and the vacuuming Helene did to make it pristine. Helene consoled herself by thinking they had caught it early enough so doctors could cure her kids. Doctors had to repeatedly tell the disbelieving mother the disturbing news: damage from regular exposure to lead is usually irreversible.
"The disbelieving mother" epitomizes the attitude of those who blame educators for "failing schools" in low-income neighborhoods where nearly all "failing schools" are found. Disbelief that such a horrible irreversible consequence is widespread in inner-city neighborhoods. Disbelief that a potent neurotoxin would be found in children's homes. Disbelief that children exposed to environmental lead might not be able to overcome the irreversible damage to their brains. Disbelief that schools cannot educate these children. No matter how hard they try.
On May 9, 2001, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported on Philadelphia's new "disciplinary campus" imported from Houston in a story titled "District finds promise in disciplinary school run by firm":
"Community Education Partners, a private company that is based in Nashville and runs schools in Houston and Dallas, has become the latest weapon in fighting one of Philadelphia School District's major problems - disruptive students. The Philadelphia school board, impressed with CEP's track record in Texas, hired the national company last year at the urging of state officials. …. CEP's per-pupil cost in Philadelphia is about $13,000 a year; the district pays its average cost, nearly $7,000, and the state covers the rest of the tab." (see: Revision: article is available at http://www.philly.com/mld/philly/archives/)
The lengthy article by Susan Snyder, identified as an "Inquirer Staff Writer," detailed the operation of the school as a response to student crime:
"The school district grapples with serious discipline problems each year. About 1,200 students return from incarceration to the 210,000-student district annually. Last school year, officials confiscated 1,196 weapons, ranging from penknives to guns, on school property. According to a 1998-99 state report - the most recent year available - the district also reported more than 1,500 arrests and 1,700 assaults."
Ironically, there was nothing in this lengthy article about lead poisoning even though Susan Fitzgerald, a fellow "Inquirer Staff Writer," had reported only six months before on November 21, 2000, in a story titled "District: Unsafe lead levels found in 20 pct of water outlets" that:
Testing of drinking water for lead has been conducted at all but one of 298 of Philadelphia's older school buildings, and so far, about 20 percent of the nearly 14,000 water outlets sampled have unsafe lead levels. …. As reported by The Inquirer earlier, the school district knew several years ago that there was a problem with lead in the drinking water at some city schools.
Lead is a toxic metal that can accumulate in the body and is particularly dangerous to the developing brains of children. At even low levels of lead exposure, children may experience a drop in IQ, reduced attention span, hearing impairment, and other problems.
In written testimony, an official from the federal Environmental Protection Agency said that records supplied to the agency by the school district showed that sampling of water for lead took place in at least 60 schools between 1991 and 1994. But the EPA knew nothing about the results until 1998.
Bradley M. Campbell, the EPA's regional administrator, testified that in March 1998, the EPA was contacted by a citizen about the drinking water at Bache-Martin Middle School in North Philadelphia. He said that person supplied lead-test results from 1993. When the EPA asked the school district if it had corrected the drinking-water problem at the school, the district did not respond, Campbell testified. And when EPA officials asked to take samples at the school and review testing records, they were told to get a search warrant, he said. Eventually, the district agreed to allow the agency to review records of lead tests from about 100 schools. (see: Revision: article is available at http://www.philly.com/mld/philly/archives/)
In other words, one out of every five drinking fountains in the Philadelphia school district was poisoning the students with lead. The very school district that implemented an extreme solution for "disruptive students" was continuously poisoning those students with a substance known to cause disruptive behavior. Some of the "other problems" that this Inquirer news story cited as symptoms of lead poisoning were very likely the same behavioral and criminal problems cited in the other Inquirer news story as the reason for bringing in the CEP program.
It is strange that one newspaper reporter could detail the symptoms of lead poisoning in one story, while another reporter for the same newspaper detailed almost the same symptoms of "failing schools" without either connecting the two. But there was nothing that connected the lead poisoning to the district's problems with violence in this news story, nor in a more extensive earlier story on October 15, 2000, (see: Revision: Tom Ferrick column of 10/15/2000 link no longer functioning).
Even more unsettling is the fact that a 1997 medical study of lead poisoning in 817 inner-city children in Philadelphia found "the highest reported prevalence in a U.S. general pediatric clinical population" of high blood lead levels. Shoshana Melman et al performed a retrospective analysis of blood lead levels of inner-city children in Philadelphia who were tested during routine checkups in 1992, and excluded any children previously identified as having high blood lead levels.
They found "More than two-thirds (68%) of the study patients had a blood lead level of over 10 micrograms per deciliter." (see: http://ehpnet1.niehs.nih.gov/docs/1998/106p655-657melman/abstract.html) And even that study was cited by Crime Times (Vol. 4, No. 4, 1998, pg. 1) as merely echoing a 1995 study by J.F. Wiley of Philadelphia's St. Christopher's Hospital for Children that found "71% of the children seen at one hospital, and 50% of children seen at the second hospital, exhibited high lead levels."
Educators and politicians alike ignore the fact that the overwhelming prevalence of lead poisoning in Philadelphia's "well baby" clinics documented in 1992 has to have some consequences ten years later in Philadelphia's schools. Nor that the documentation represents only a snapshot of a continuing conveyor belt of tragedy in a "criminal production factory" that existed before 1992 and continues unabated today. It's not like people haven't looked.
The City of Philadelphia's Childhood Lead Poisoning and Prevention Program conducted a survey of "88/89 births and first graders" in 1996 of "specific areas in the City where exposure to elevated lead is more likely, such as, lower-income areas with older, dilapidated housing" and found "of those screened, 64.2% had elevated blood lead levels." They also checked to see how many of those children met the "standards for promotion to the 2nd grade" and found that 21.7% of those with blood lead levels above 20 micrograms did not meet the standards compared to 15.8% of those with blood lead levels below 10 micrograms. As if blood lead levels below 10 micrograms had no effect.
Bruce Lanphear, M.D., M.P.H., a physician in Cincinnati Children's division of General and Community Pediatrics, reported in a paper presented at the joint conference of the American Academy of Pediatrics and Pediatric Academic Societies in May of 2000 that: "children's math and reading scores begin to decline at lead levels as low as 2.5 micrograms per deciliter." (See: Crime-Times Volume 6, No. 3 pg. 2)
Thus approximately two-thirds of the children in today's inner-city Philadelphia public schools were previously documented as being lead poisoned during early development at a level known to produce reading and math difficulties. Lead poisoning produces brain damage that has been documented to produce academic and behavioral problems. Supposedly, extreme measures have been taken to educate these children and still the Philadelphia schools are labeled as "failing schools." Politicians keep hammering the Philadelphia public schools with the slogan "All Children Can Learn" but at the same time they do next to nothing to prevent the lead poisoning, refusing even to fix the pipes that daily serve lead poisoned water to the students.
It's as if no one comprehends the travail of these students. Lead circulating in the blood (acute poisoning) has well-documented disabling effects and severe behavioral implications in terms of violence and attention deficits due to the agitation it produces. Prevention Magazine, in September, 1991, (pp. 106-113) related the story of an adult case of environmental lead which can serve to illustrate the problems that children with acute lead poisoning can face. The first paragraph reads:
Fran Wallace was dying. Her frail body was so sensitive that even a light robe brushing her legs brought her excruciating pain. She had severe stomach cramps, and even a sip of water triggered violent vomiting. Her husband, Don, had to carry her into the hospital where the doctors, who had diagnosed her with a rare, genetic blood disease called porphyria, said this was a fatal attack. It was two years earlier, in 1979, when Fran came down with the first symptoms. "I thought it was the flu," she says.
The Prevention article noted that at one time during those two years, her husband Don was forced to work from his home directing relief operations after a hurricane. He was the senior U.S. Air Force officer in the Dominican Republic. The article quotes Don:
"I was drinking lots of coffee at home. I dropped 35 pounds. I also became very irritable. My personality changed from 'diplomatic' to aggressive."
The Prevention article relates:
In fact, his personality altered so dramatically that Don eventually asked for and received early retirement from the Air Force. Here was a man who had flown 133 combat missions in Vietnam and yet, he says, "I suddenly couldn't cope. I was a basket case." He and Fran went home to Seattle where Don had to start casting about for a new career.
The doctors had told Don that his wife's disease puzzled them because she was suffering from anemia "which did not dovetail with the porphyria diagnosis." Don had been an aircraft-accident investigator in the Air Force and that anomalous anemia caught his attention because it did not fit the logic of porphyria. Going to the library to research anemia and porphyria, he discovered a textbook that noted
… lead poisoning often masquerades as porphyria. They have almost exactly the same symptoms --- weight loss, stomach cramps, vomiting, muscle cramps --- the very symptoms Fran had. But lead poisoning sometimes has one more symptom that most forms of porphyria do not: anemia.
Blood tests eventually confirmed the lead poisoning, but doctors initially scoffed because, as Prevention magazine quoted a Veterans Affairs Medical Center doctor, "the issues of occupational and environmental disease are out of the mainstream of medicine. It's left to the public health departments."
Prevention noted:
… it has become common knowledge that children can be poisoned by eating chips of old leaded paint or its dust. The problem generally surfaces in substandard or renovated housing. Such children can suffer irreversible IQ reduction and behavior problems.
Fran and Don simply did not fit into those circumstances. But the source was eventually traced to a set of lead-glazed Italian ceramicware cups that leached lead into the coffee and tea they had been drinking. Simply drinking from cups that had traces of lead diminished their capacity to function. But why does no one comprehend the travail of the students in Philadelphia (and other places) even though "it has become common knowledge" the children should be exhibiting these symptoms?
Fran and Don were educated affluent adults with mature brains, much older than children attending public schools, and yet the tiny amount of lead poisoning sipped from lead-glazed cups crippled them. Forced a senior fighter pilot to retire. So what about low-income children with acute lead poisoning attending school with "almost exactly the same symptoms --- weight loss, stomach cramps, vomiting, muscle cramps ---" that Prevention noted were symptoms of lead poisoning? Can we glibly assume, as politicians do, that all of these children can learn? Even though Don "… suddenly couldn't cope. I was a basket case."
Those children are not likely to quietly attend school with their full faculties devoted to academic achievement. Instead, they will adopt behaviors that ameliorate their suffering in ways that may be counter-productive in the long term, but quite successful in the short term. The research is clear that students who self-medicate their symptoms with illegal drugs do, in fact, find that the drugs make them less anxious and more stable. They, in turn, can offer empirical testimonials to other students about the benefits of illegal drug use. Children who find solace in illegal drugs from the irritation of lead poisoning will offer a pernicious example for other students. The students who lack the irritation of lead poisoning will not find these evident benefits and consequently will turn to larger doses in an attempt to achieve the benefits posited by the lead poisoned students.
At the same time, the beneficial effects of the illegal drug use by lead poisoned children actually improves their behavior and makes it easier for them to participate in school without detection. This introduces the regular presence and influence of illegal drug use in the school. The presence of a small coterie of obviously benefited students who establish and maintain a supply of illegal drugs for other emulating students can be greatly reduced when lead poisoned students disappear. Although the general use of illegal drugs is unlikely to disappear entirely even with a healthy student body, the introduction of drugs into the school is subject to greater dissuasion when students do not have the evangelists of lead poisoned students.
The irritation of lead poisoning coupled with the frustration of learning disabilities engendered by the lead poisoning compels many students to "act out" their emotions. It is extremely difficult for students constantly irritated by lead poisoning to sit calmly while muscles twitch and mental impulses abound. At the same time, to mask their own disappointment in their learning abilities they succumb rather easily to the discrediting of learning as having any importance. Students who try hard and succeed are far more likely to subsequently try hard than students who try hard and fail with mental circuitry that does not respond to the effort.
These frustrated students, in turn, have a higher propensity to disrupt classes with inappropriate behavior if for no other reason than to participate in classroom activities in the only way possible. Locked then in a classroom management struggle with the teacher, students for whom regular classroom activity is counter-productive will strive to assert themselves with inappropriate behavior. This, in turn, disrupts the orderly classroom for other students.
The Des Moines Register, Monday, June 24, 2002, in a newspaper article about teachers leaving the profession in their first years of teaching, interviewed two teachers who complained mostly of classroom disruption.
Jennings and Gloe said unruly and disrespectful students compose less than 10 percent of the enrollment at their schools. Still, both said they see little being done to alleviate problems caused by those youngsters.
"We've got to have parents understand that their child is destroying the educational development of other children in the building," Gloe said. "That's not happening."
These teachers claim less than ten percent of the students can drive off teachers and destroy the educational development of the other children. Lead poisoning does not have to infest a student body to become a major influence in academic achievement among the other students.
To the Testocratic Taliban of school reformers, however, not paying attention in class, misbehaving in class, and other symptoms of lead poisoned children are not due to the physical presence of a neurotoxin interrupting the chemistry of the brain: it is all a matter of moral infidelity that requires "Character Education."
Recently the Houston Independent School District has been trumpeting its "Character Education" program to deal with disruptive students. Dot Woodfin, the director of HISD's "Character Education" program was featured in a Houston Chronicle news story even though the reporter wrote:
"While Woodfin says there is no way to measure the effectiveness of the program, she says she can feel and hear the difference."
Another desperate program to deal with disruptive children carries the caveat of having no evidence that it actually works. The Chronicle reporter did include one telling quote however:
"Twenty percent of kids keep coming through the discipline process," Woodfin said. "And it's the same kids. They don't understand how to make it stop because no one in the process has ever taught them how." (See at: http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/metropolitan/education/1415105)
There was nothing in the story about lead poisoning. Nothing to indicate "the same kids" might be those who were previously documented as being lead poisoned in Houston. In the ultimate irony, however, the reporter quoted Woodfin as complaining that "Teachers are under so much pressure for the TAAS test" that they don't have time to teach character education.
In the two most notorious school districts in the United States, where public attention has made each a virtual "poster child" for "failing schools," it turns out that each is also an actual "poster child" for lead poisoning. The widespread presence of lead in the children at those schools had previously been independently identified by public health researchers. The children in those schools are known to be brain damaged; the children should be expected to exhibit the classic symptoms of lead poisoning; and those classic symptoms are almost exactly the symptoms used to label a school as "failing." The "failure" is simply that public schools cannot overcome the damage done to these children by the presence of environmental lead.
< Previous | Table of Contents | Next >