What lead is doing to our students

Every child's ability to succeed in school is influenced by lots of external factors: teacher quality, parenting, poverty, geography, to name a few. But far less attention has been paid to the power of a child's bedroom walls. Or, rather, the paint that's on them and the lead that may be in that paint.

A new study published in the Harvard Educational Review suggests that efforts to reduce kids' lead exposure have led to tangible academic gains in Massachusetts.

Researcher Jessica Wolpaw Reyes, an associate professor of economics at Amherst University, has been studying the effects of lead exposure since the 1990s. The metal piqued her interest as a grad student at Harvard, when she was pregnant with her first child and living in older, lead-rich housing.

"Lead is a very useful metal, which is kind of how we got in this situation," Reyes says. "Throughout history people keep using lead despite the fact that it has these neurotoxic effects." Those effects, in kids, can lead to reduced IQ and a whole host of behavioral problems.

After World War II, when Americans fell in love with the automobile, lead wasn't just in their paint and plumbing. Thanks to leaded gasoline, it was also airborne. Mother Jones reported that "lead emissions from tailpipes rose steadily from the early '40s through the early '70s, nearly quadrupling over that period."

But alarm bells were also going off. In early 1971, the EPA's first administrator, William D. Ruckelshaus, said that "an extensive body of information exists which indicates that the addition of alkyl lead to gasoline ... results in lead particles that pose a threat to public health." By the late '70s, lead-based paints had been banned for use in housing, and leaded gasoline was being phased out. In 1986, lead pipes were also banned.

Continue reading at NPR.

Lead paint image via Shutterstock.