{"id":177064,"date":"2020-01-08T19:05:00","date_gmt":"2020-01-09T00:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2020\/01\/08\/maybe-cleaning-up-the-air\/"},"modified":"2020-01-08T19:05:00","modified_gmt":"2020-01-09T00:05:00","slug":"maybe-cleaning-up-the-air","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2020\/01\/08\/maybe-cleaning-up-the-air\/","title":{"rendered":"Maybe Cleaning up the Air?"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>A recent study shows that <a href=\"https:\/\/www.vox.com\/2020\/1\/8\/21051869\/indoor-air-pollution-student-achievement\">filtering air in classrooms creates a significant jump in student performance<\/a>.<\/div>\n<p>This is interesting, but it begs the question, &#8220;Doesn&#8217;t it work everywhere?  If so, why not clean up <b>ALL<\/b> the air?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Also, how does this effect adults breathing our polluted air?<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">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. <\/p>\n<p>That\u2019s what NYU\u2019s Michael Gilraine finds in a new working paper titled \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.edworkingpapers.com\/ai20-188\">Air Filters, Pollution, and Student Achievement<\/a>\u201d that looks at the surprising consequences of the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.cpuc.ca.gov\/aliso\/\">Aliso Canyon gas leak<\/a> in 2015. <\/p>\n<p>The impact of the air filters is strikingly large given what a simple change we\u2019re talking about. The school district didn\u2019t 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\u2019s consistent with a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.vox.com\/future-perfect\/2019\/12\/11\/20996968\/air-pollution-cognitive-impact\">growing literature on the cognitive impact of air pollution<\/a>, which finds that everyone from <a href=\"http:\/\/conference.iza.org\/conference_files\/environ_2019\/palacios_j24419.pdf\">chess players<\/a> to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.journals.uchicago.edu\/doi\/abs\/10.1086\/698728\">baseball umpires<\/a> to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nber.org\/papers\/w19944\">workers in a pear-packing factory<\/a> suffer deteriorations in performance when the air is more polluted. <\/p>\n<p>If Gilraine\u2019s result holds up to further scrutiny, he will have identified what\u2019s probably the single most cost-effective education policy intervention \u2014 one that should have particularly large benefits for low-income children. <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Another way that our society craps on the poor.<\/p>\n<p>Even the air they breath hurts them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A recent study shows that filtering air in classrooms creates a significant jump in student performance. This is interesting, but it begs the question, &#8220;Doesn&#8217;t it work everywhere? If so, why not clean up ALL the air?&#8221; Also, how does this effect adults breathing our polluted air? An emergency situation that turned out to be &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[397,484,597],"class_list":["post-177064","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-education","tag-environment","tag-inequality"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177064"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=177064"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177064\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=177064"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=177064"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=177064"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}