I liked this report from a few months back on improving students’ grades:
An emergency situation that turned out to be mostly a false alarm led a lot of schools in Los Angeles to install air filters, and something strange happened: Test scores went up. By a lot. And the gains were sustained in the subsequent year rather than fading away.
That’s what NYU’s Michael Gilraine finds in a new working paper titled “Air Filters, Pollution, and Student Achievement” that looks at the surprising consequences of the Aliso Canyon gas leak in 2015.
The impact of the air filters is strikingly large given what a simple change we’re talking about. The school district didn’t reengineer the school buildings or make dramatic education reforms; they just installed $700 commercially available filters that you could plug into any room in the country. But it’s consistent with a growing literature on the cognitive impact of air pollution, which finds that everyone from chess players to baseball umpires to workers in a pear-packing factory suffer deteriorations in performance when the air is more polluted. [Vox]
I shouldn’t think this is surprising, since we didn’t evolve for polluted atmospheres – by definition – but it does appear that some are surprised. Or perhaps at our sensitivity.
And I do recall reading, somewhere, about 40 years ago, about how the passengers on steam engines actually liked the fact that their clothes were covered in soot, because that was symbolic of their separation from Nature, that Nature that took lives suddenly and randomly through disease and wild animal attacks.
But mostly, I think, we just think we’re too damn special to be afflicted by minor air pollution.
