Lead poisoning a factor in poor school performance?

The top priority of the R.I. Department of Education is ensuring education excellence, according to Deborah A. Gist, commissioner of elementary and secondary education. To do that, Gist’s focus has been on improving the quality of the teacher in the classroom.
But harmful lead levels in the bloodstream of children, particularly in the state’s core urban centers – Providence, Pawtucket, Central Falls and Woonsocket – may prove to be an equally important part of the equation in the nonperformance of students in reading and learning and standardized testing, according to researchers, advocates and public health officials anticipating two forthcoming research studies examining the educational impacts of lead poisoning in Rhode Island.
Dr. Patrick M. Vivier, an associate professor of community health and pediatrics at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University, as well as a pediatrician at Hasbro Children’s Hospital, is a primary researcher on one of the studies.
“I think that lead poisoning is a particular burden for low-income, urban communities in Rhode Island,” Vivier told Providence Business News. “This has individual and community-level negative consequences that we must address,” he said of the long-term, persistent educational consequences of lead in young children affecting their ability to learn.
Dr. Peter Simon, who was worked on lead-poisoning issues at the state Department of Health for more than three decades, voiced concern about the long-term legacy of lead poisoning in Rhode Island’s urban communities.
“I am worried about the impact of lead on Rhode Island’s urban communities and their sustainability and economic competitiveness,” he said.
Simon believes the new research, expected to be published by the end of the year, will show that lead poisoning has harmful and persistent effects on children’s ability to learn and to read in Rhode Island, even at lower levels than the current threshold. Such findings would be consistent with other recently published research, including a 2011 study done in Connecticut, “The Impact of Early Childhood Lead Exposure on Educational Test Performance among Connecticut Schoolchildren,” conducted by the Children’s Environmental Health Initiative at Duke University. The study concluded that early-childhood lead exposure negatively affected test scores in reading and mathematics, and suggested that lead may account for part of the achievement gap among Connecticut schoolchildren.
“Lead dust and lead paint in all of the older, often-dilapidated housing tends to be in our urban settings,” Simon said. It’s a public-health and a public-education problem, he continued. “We have not eliminated the problem of lead poisoning, even if the data looks better, and the overall incidence of lead poisoning has declined.”
The long-term impacts of lead have not disappeared, according to Simon. “If kids aren’t reading by the third grade, they are 7-15 times more likely to end up in a prison bed,” Simon said, citing the research of economist James J. Heckman at the University of Chicago.
“Lead poisoning is not an equal-opportunity disease,” said Roberta Hazen Aaronson, executive director of the Childhood Lead Action Project in Rhode Island. “It’s primarily a function of being poor and a minority in this state.”
The problem of lead paint and lead dust exists anywhere there are homes built before 1978 and not well-maintained, Aaronson continued. “There are lead-contaminated houses everywhere in the urban, core cities,” she said. “Lead poisoning is a factor in the reason why poor [children] do not perform well in the classroom. It’s not the only factor, but it’s a very important factor, and an understated factor.” Aaronson cited a forthcoming study co-authored by Patricia McLaine at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. McLaine had given a preview of her work in October 2009 at The Meeting Street School, entitled, “Not Ready for Kindergarten in Providence: New Evidence of the Negative Impact of Lead Levels on Reading Readiness.”
The real tragedy, according to Aaronson, is that 94 percent of the funding for programs to prevent childhood lead poisoning here in Rhode Island and across the nation will be eliminated at the end of August by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as a result of budget cuts by Congress.
The elimination of funding comes at a time when the CDC is in the midst of lowering the threshold to 5 micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood from the current 10 micrograms level. “We’ve made significant progress in reducing the level of lead poisoning for the 10 micrograms threshold,” Aaronson said. “In 2011, 200 kids were diagnosed. But, if the level were to go down to 5 micrograms, there would be 1,300 kids diagnosed with lead poisoning in Rhode Island.”
The educational deficits, according to Aaronson, are the same at the lower levels: decreased IQ, lower scores on reading and math exams, reading disability, increased attention dysfunction, increased aggression and delinquency.
The state recently celebrated the de-leading of 615 homes. The initiative was paid for largely from an out-of-court settlement with Dupont in a suit against companies that sold lead paint in Rhode Island.
“The 615 homes is a huge contribution to primary prevention,” Simon said. “But the larger question is whether every mom who takes a baby home from the hospital goes home to a lead-safe environment?” •