Installing air filters in classrooms has surprisingly large educational benefits

[LiberalArkie]

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.

If Gilraine’s result holds up to further scrutiny, he will have identified what’s probably the single most cost-effective education policy intervention — one that should have particularly large benefits for low-income children.

Snip

https://www.vox.com/2020/1/8/21051869/indoor-air-pollution-student-achievement

[Kurt V.]

1. all human behavior is contingent on our social environment and our genetic endowment.

this is yet another example. imo

[Bob Loblaw]

2. $700 will be deemed too expensive by repubs

nt

[KT2000]

3. My friend needed to pick up

his grandchild at school. While waiting he noticed the school busses were idling in front of the air intakes of the school building. He got that fixed right away.
An office building in Seattle had a lot of people getting sick with sick building syndrome. The state investigated and said it was psychological in nature. The real culprit was the loading dock was situated near air intakes for the building's air system. Many trucks do not turn off their engines - they idle.

Nonetheless, workers comp held that the sickness was psychological in nature. Hint: They have access to ALL of your medical records and they will search through them until they find an instance when you may have agreed you were feeling stressed, even if it was decades ago. Sick - lost jobs - lost health insurance - spend down assets - hope to qualify for welfare. Happens all the time.

[muriel_volestrangler]

4. Reminiscent of the hypothesis about airborne lead and crime rates, but this has visible evidence

at a small scale, rather than seeing what seems to be a correlation and trying to eliminate all other kinds of things. Interesting. I wonder if anyone's done any work to compare the current levels of indoor pollutants in different classrooms around the world.