[derek1800]

The city of Flint has extremely high poverty and the schools were very bad well before the water issue came to light. I wonder how much of this is due to the lead in water vs just the situation of the city, high poverty, and poor schools, etc. anecdotally I don’t think the things mentioned in this article are all that different from other cities in similar situations without the lead in water issue.

Either case hopefully they can turn things around for the kids who have to grow up in this situation.

[tzs]

I remember reading a very interesting article about a case that showed lead could be a major factor in poor school performance. The article was in a newspaper or news magazine in the '80s or early '90s, and I've not been able to remember enough details to find anything online about it.

Anyway, it was about a school district that had given IQ tests to all the kids. The black kids on average scored significantly lower than the white kids. This could not be explained by the white kids going to better or richer schools, because this district was well integrated. Black kids and white kids that had been together in the same classrooms for their entire school history showed the same IQ gap.

The district concluded that the test was biased and was going to ignore it. One teacher decided to look deeper, and started looking to see if he could find some other factor besides race that was significantly different between the black and white kids.

He realized that all the white kids lived in relatively new housing, and all that black kids lived in much older housing. The black kids' houses were all built long before lead paint was banned. The white kids' house all came after that ban.

They arranged to test the kids for lead, and to test their houses, and they found that most of the black kids were suffering from lead exposure. None of the white kids were.

The lead paint was removed from the black kids' houses, and the kids were treated for lead poisoning.

A couple years later, when the district gave another IQ test, most of the gap between the black and white students was done.

[pietrovismara]

There's a great video[0] on contrapoints' YouTube channel where she talks about racism in Baltimore and US and covers exactly this topic.

[0] https://youtu.be/8r6GBo_7UNc

[JackRabbitSlim]

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15305761

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17451672

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20390814

This is why specifically lead is highlighted.

Just more of the extremely high cost of being poor.

[gmanley]

I’m guessing OP was aware of this but was more questioning whether we know this was because of lead exposure or just the fact the school system isn’t good. It seems it would be hard to separate the two. Like was said: there are plenty of cities with similar results but without the lead exposure. The lead could definitely be a contributing factor, it’s just hard to know.

[Symmetry]

There was a nice natural experiment that happened a while ago where children with sufficiently high blood lead concentrations had the government perform lead abatements in their homes. And then see how much better the kids with the newly lead free homes do compared to the kids who were just a little too low lead to get these abatements but who were otherwise very similar.

[everdrive]

There's almost certainly quite a bit of lead in the buildings too.

[bdamm]

There's lead in paint all over America, just dripping off old buildings into the soil in some places. And asbestos in insulation and other building products. So?

[everdrive]

So in certain areas the concentration of lead contamination is worse. Usually, poor urban or industrial areas.

[ivanhoe]

Probably all of the factors you mention are important, but lead certainly didn't help. The main reason to mention lead specifically is the horrible way the situation with water pollution was handled by pretty much everyone, from city officials to Obama himself with his completely disrespectful "take a picture of me pretending to drink the Flint water" media stunt.

[sokoloff]

I agree that's disrespectful if the water he was drinking was not actually Flint water, so I went looking. It appears that what he drank (an admittedly small amount of) was actually filtered Flint water (and he identified it as such).

I fail to see the disrespect or anything else untoward about his actions there.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/obama-drinks-filtered-ci...

[ptaipale]

I would guess the "stunt" here is that everyone knows that drinking one glass of Flint water won't really hurt you. It's the long-time exposure from childhood that is the problem.

[sokoloff]

OK, so when the reporter specifically asks him if he'd drink the water in front of him, what's his least bad option? If he makes the speech he does, saying "I don't do stunts" asserting its safety and takes a sip, he's handling the situation as gracefully and productively as he can.

If instead he starts in with a lecture about how it's cumulative exposure, affects children more severely, and that is why he won't take a drink as a publicity stunt, he knows that all that will be reported is "Obama refuses to drink Flint water!"

This wasn't a planned stunt in my estimation (unless you think the reporter was "in on it").

[cyphar]

First of all -- it was clearly a stunt. The question from the reporter where he "drinks" some water[1] happened after he asked for water in the middle of a speech[2] -- the moment in his speech was so obviously staged that it's not worth elaborating past including the link to the video. With that in mind, it's pretty clear that his answer to the reporter's (probably genuine) question was just doubling-down on the point he'd made with his earlier stunt -- that it's safe to drink.

But ignoring all of that -- why is it a good thing that he said the water was safe? The water wasn't safe to drink, and the video of the President sipping water from Flint means that the entire country collectively agreed that the situation was fixed. But it wasn't fixed -- the water in Flint is still contaminated with lead today.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2ZynkD3N_k [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjugN-nUHh8

[cloverich]

It doesn't seem obviously staged to me? The first video you linked he says the water is filtered, emphasizes it multiple times, and says "this doesn't mean we don't need to still replace some pipes". Is there more to the story?

[3JPLW]

He didn't claim the water was not contaminated. He claimed that the _filtered_ water with a _correct_ filter _properly installed_ was safe to drink.

Was that not the case?

[throwaway_law]

>OK, so when the reporter specifically asks him if he'd drink the water in front of him, what's his least bad option?

Probably to laugh and say instead of "trying the water" he will see the water is sent to a lab for proper scientific testing and the results published to the public.

[ptaipale]

Perhaps it was a stunt planned by the reporter only, but anyway, I can see how some people can see it as disrespectful.

There are similarities with people who virtue-signal by working with children in a ghetto of a 3rd world country, and get photographed doing it - while actually living in the comfort of a luxury hotel and just showing up in the ghetto for a brief time. The intentions may be very good but people may still perceive it as hypocrisy. (Not particularly blaming Obama for this, he maybe in fact came to a situation where there is no good way out.)

[dsfyu404ed]

>I would guess the "stunt" here is that everyone knows that drinking one glass of Flint water won't really hurt you. It's the long-time exposure from childhood that is the problem.

The general public doesn't really know that. People think that lead is this magical chemical that manically makes people stupid if they so much as lay eyes upon it. I guess that's better than thinking it's harmless but it's certainly non-optimal from a societal decision making standpoint. I would be very surprised if the reporter knew that the lead content of the water was mostly irrelevant to an middle aged man drinking one glass.

[wongarsu]

On youtube you find many respectable and smart people massively overestimating the risk of lead exposure when coming in contact with it for a project, making sure nobody ever touches lead without gloves.

[ivanhoe]

The fact that he's been "drinking" (actually barely sipping) water all over Flint for cameras turns it into a cheap media stunt, but I actually was referring to this fake-as-hell "Can I have some water":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjugN-nUHh8

[gman83]

Yeah the problem was entirely with Obama and the city officials, never mind the fact that Governor Rick Snyder had put the city under emergency management with his appointees deciding everything.

[that_jojo]

I'm from the Flint mtro, currently working ~50 minutes away from Flint, my mother lives in Flint across the street from Mott.

I have literally never heard a single person from the area say anything but neutral to positive things about Obama's visit.

And the filtered water in most places has been EPA-compliant for a long-ass time.

[bsanr2]

Many of the comparable cases will involve cities that also had lead poisoning issues.

[Aunche]

Many towns in Canada have even higher concentrations of lead in their water than Flint. How are their schools doing compared to Flint?

https://apnews.com/24628f49af1e45219ee4b06c0a9a1229

[bilbo0s]

Looks like the highest one was about 140ppb in Canada. In Flint it was 158ppb.

But at those levels, it makes no difference at all. They may as well be equal. If there are 10 elephants sitting down on top of you, it probably won't matter if an eleventh elephant comes along and takes a seat on that stack as well.

Now that I'm actually seeing the data, I kind of think we shouldn't even be talking about schools for these people. They have way bigger problems. I thought we were talking about levels maybe 2 or 3 times the globally accepted standard. Which is still too much, I get that. But that's all the more reason that levels 25 to 30 times that standard are just not even on the charts. These are levels literally an order of magnitude higher than I thought they were.

Flint may be slightly worse numerically, but at those levels, I'm not sure there's a whole lot of material difference in impact?

[bsanr2]

Is it a matter of discussion there? Is there proper support for the people who live there? Do Canadian institutions, such as universal healthcare, make for different outcomes?