[tha_nose]

"Students attending schools located near and downwind from busy highways had lower rates of academic performance, higher absenteeism and higher rates of disciplinary problems than those attending less polluted schools."

Is it because of the pollution or because kids who live near highways come from poorer socio-economic environments? Kids who grow up in poor rural areas nowhere near cars also have performance and behavioral problems.

Also, some of the top schools in the NYC metro area are situated near highways or high traffic areas. Why aren't these kids affected as negatively? Could it be many of them come from higher socio-economic situations?

Finally, isn't it a bit disingenous to say poor kids pay for it when they don't pay taxes. Also, the article claims these kids receive free lunches, so most likely they parents don't make enough money to pay much in taxes. So the "wealthy" who pay taxes are already paying for the poor kids, their school and their air filtration system are already paying taxes to clean up the pollution. So they already paid, what more do they have to pay for?

Ideally, it would be great if every kid had a school in a middle of prisinte woods without any pollution, but then people would complain about the destruction of pristine nature.

[adam-a]

The study they link to claims to account for this by tracking the same students between different schools. They also track different schools which are the same distances from a highway but suffer different pollution because of wind patterns. It would have been quite easy for you to click that link and read the abstract.

[Nasrudith]

Yeah while pollution is no help clearly and lead poisoning is known for bad options it sounds like the mechanism for worse academic performance from power lines - lowered property values and the fact poorer kids tended to live in "undesirable" locations.

[yboris]

The simplest solution to numerous large problems in the US education system (while politically infeasible) is to fund schools based on student count uniformly, based on federal and state taxes, and not at all based on local township taxes.