Is your school near a toxic hazard site?

Sometimes you read something that you just want to scream about from the rooftops. That happened to me a few days back when I read the first new report from SustainableED, the Sustainable Education Research Initiative at Brown University. That’s a relatively new center devoted to examining the impact of climate change on kids and families in schools. With just some basic statistics, the team has shown that huge numbers of kids learn everyday near environmental hazard sites—and exposure is highly uneven and inequitable. The new report is out in PNAS, one of the most highly cited scientific journals out there.So today we’re talking to Dr. Matthew A. Kraft, founder and director of SustainableED, and one of the authors of the new report. Dr. Kraft is also an expert on teacher labor markets and policy interventions like high-dose tutoring, and served in the Biden White House on the Council of Economic Advisors. Following field guidelines, Dr. Kraft’s team defines environmental hazards as Superfund (EPA-designated sites with significant legacy toxins), Brownfield (former industrial or commercial properties with real or suspected contamination), or Toxic Release Inventory (active facilities that process toxins). In terms of total number, my home state of Michigan is at the very top with more than 5,000 hazard sites, and near the top in sites (51.2) sites per 100,000 people. Nearly two-thirds of our schools are within 1 mile of an environmental hazard site, ranked behind only the tiny state of Rhode Island. With the exception of Minnesota, other standout states are in the northeast— Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York and Vermont—or the Mountain Plains. Across the country, students of color—especially Black students—are far more likely to attend school near a hazard site. As are lower income families. Highlighting this kind of problem is exactly why I started The Forum. And one of the best things about doing it is that I don’t have to summarize the issue much further beyond what you can casually dig up on your own. Instead, I can just reach out to the experts and let them walk us all through it. Let’s get into it. A Conversation with Matthew Kraft.Matt Kraft thanks for being here. We’ll get to the report in a second. But I want to orient folks to who you are, the kind of work you’re drawn to, the sort of work that you are involved in, and what brings you into the work you’re doing today. What have you been up to?Well, I’m an educator. I started my career as a substitute and taught middle and high school humanities in public schools in the Bay Area.And since then, have dedicated my academic career to thinking about how we can strengthen K to 12 public education. And I try to do that in a way that isn’t just about writing abstract academic treatises, but to really ask questions that matter for real families, real teachers, and connect to policy and practice on the ground.A lot of the folks that listen to this or read this series here are in the policy community, policy staff, education community, things like that. Those of you citing something that says that, yes, teacher experience matters to student outcomes, chances are you’re citing some work that Dr. Kraft here was a part of, and we’ll get to that in just a second. But let’s talk about this report. A lot of public schools in the United States—and private schools—are located near environmental hazard sites. That’s what your report here is showing. Tell me a little bit about this.I’ve been engaged in a pivot in my research. The privilege of academic careers is that I get to pursue things that I think are interesting and important. And in the last several years, it’s just been increasingly evident when I’m in schools, talking to teachers, talking to parents and families that environmental pressures, climate change, is impacting the daily work of teachers and the experiences of students. One need only look out at the, you know, orange-colored skies with fire season upon us to know that reality is here with us today. Or have a kid like I do who goes to a school that doesn’t have AC, and it’s sweltering hot with upwards of 90 degree temperatures inside the classroom. And so, part of what I’ve tried to do is just to learn more about what’s happening, what’s what’s the basic facts about how schools are impacted by environmental pressures, and what can they do to try to address them?And one of the things that we learned about early on was that schools are sometimes located shockingly close to toxic facilities.We had a sense that there were some really bad individual cases, you know, a few cities where some analysis is done, a few kind of snapshots that focus on one particular type of toxic site.But being newcomers to the space, we started to just ask the basic questions like, well, how big of a problem is this? How often does it occur? And it turned out we just didn’t have answers to these very basic fundamental questions.And so we set out to try to answer them by collecting data that we work with often on the universe of K-12, public and private schools in this country, and then let’s map that onto these other datasets that we had never worked with before, maintained by the Environmental Protection Agency, that catalog three different types of these registries of known environmental hazard sites.Black students in the U.S. are 86% more likely than their white peers to attend a school that is within a quarter-mile of a toxic site.—Dr. Matthew KraftHow frequently? How common a problem is this?Way more common than I ever anticipated. We try to be conservative, like most academics, to say, hey, first off, we’re telling you proximity and that isn’t a guarantee of exposure but it’s certainly at a heightened risk and a lot of studies find exposure to different toxic sites up to a mile or more can have negative effects on children’s health and development.We found that even when we narrow in to a quarter of a mile, we’re talking 4 blocks at most, a lap around that track at the high school, that there are over 9,000 schools. We’re talking 8% of our U.S. K-12 public school buildings are within a quarter mile of a toxic site.And you found something like 44% are within a mile total?That’s right. And so this isn’t an isolated or unique phenomenon. This happens in every state and in more communities across this country than anyone, I think, fully perceives. Sometimes it’s really obvious. There’s a major, you know, industrial plant, and it’s got giant smokestacks, and it’s billowing smoke. Others are a little bit more kind of subtle, with different types of manufacturing plants that may spill chemicals that leach into the ground or old abandoned sites that in more of the earlier industrial air were using chemicals, lead, asbestos that are still there in the ground.And so we found that these numbers really belied a national problem about providing safe and healthy learning environments for kids.Are there some kids that are more affected than others?Like so many other examples of educational inequity in our country, we found that Native American students, Black students, Hispanic students, and students from low income backgrounds were substantially more likely to attend a school that was in close proximity to one of these toxic sites. And to put that more concretely, Black students in the U.S. are 86% more likely than their white peers to attend a school that is within a quarter-mile of a toxic site. It’s not just that schools have always existed in these sites sites show up or don’t. It’s that these sites often are legacy sites that operated, you know, decades and decades ago, and now school districts are trying to figure out, you know, where can we build affordably? And sometimes that means building in places where that hasn’t been attractive to develop other types of homes or other business areas.—Dr. Matthew KraftIs that because—I want to ask you about the policy implications in a second, but is that because of where at-risk children are located, and where these hazard sites are located? I mean, it seems like it’s sort of a two-part problem: these environmental hazards are located far more widely than we might believe. Like you don’t have to be sitting next to Three Mile Island or whatever to be next to a dangerous site. And even given the widespread nature of these sites there is still differentially bad clustering in at-risk communities. Is that a fair way to put the result?I think that’s right. Frankly, it’s a complex social science phenomenon where we both have patterns such as these sites are more common in more urbanized areas, and students of color are often more likely to live in those urban centers.And so it’s a distributional thing, and it’s also a phenomenon that different industries are often, when they are producing these toxic emissions and working with hazardous chemicals, not welcome in communities, and so they have to find places where they can get a foothold, and it’s often communities with the least political capital, the communities with the most economic need, that end up kind of having the lack of ability to oppose these types of facilities to show up.You know, it’s a little bit of a two-way causal arrow as well. It’s not just that schools have always existed in these sites sites show up or don’t. It’s that these sites often are legacy sites that operated, you know, decades and decades ago, and now school districts are trying to figure out, you know, where can we build affordably?And sometimes that means building in places where that hasn’t been attractive to develop other types of homes or other business areas.So what are the implications for sort of policy? You mentioned the problem of the lack of AC. Folks in the research community are studying schools that are too hot, too cold in the winter, or th problem of exposure to poorly ventilated systems obviously came up during COVID. But those are maybe a little structurally easier to fix through a grant process or whatever to redo an air filtering system. Here we’re talking about a bigger problem, physically, at least in that like you’ve got whole locations that are an issue. How are you thinking about talking about this as a problem with potential policy solutions?It’s hard to fix a problem that you can’t see and you don’t measure. And so I think part of the solution has to be an increased effort to monitor air quality, soil quality out in the playground, water quality in drinking fountains at schools. You know, we forget that kids spend upwards of 20% of their time in schools, and more when you add on extracurricular activities after school, the sports practices. Schools are really central hubs for community and family life, and so that makes them also potential sites of environmental exposure.And we need to know what we’re exposed to in those places. Beyond that, we need to think about targeted investments in school infrastructure that help to mitigate those effects. You know, the high-quality HEPA or HVAC system filters that may help to reduce particulate matter that students inhale when they’re inside of school buildings, as one example.And so we can make investments, but beyond that, I think it really the importance of the legislative process at a local level as much as anything, thinking about zoning, thinking about questions about site review processes. Are we aware of the surrounding facilities when we’re thinking about opening a school, or permitting for air pollution at different types of sites, so that we can make conscientious choices in trade-offs? You know, the answer is simply not to stop all possible manufacturing and energy production. It’s that there are particularly young students whose bodies are still developing are highly vulnerable, both physiologically and neurologically, to these types of toxins from things like Superfunds and toxic release inventories, Brownfields that we measure—all collected and tracked by the Environmental Protection Agency. I think, owe it to them to say, hey, your parents put you on the bus, they drop you off to school, you ride your bike. We expect that to be a safe and healthy place. The more people that come to see that environmental issues are core education policy issues, I think the more progress we’ll be able to make. —Dr Matthew KraftLast question, sort of a wraparound question, and I don’t want to get too in the weeds here, but there’s a larger conversation right now going on at the federal level in some states about what education research can do in the policy space. And even some attacks on education research in general. We’ve got all kinds of stuff with Department of Ed funding and Institute for Education Science and all that business.But you’re somebody who spends a lot of time working on teacher labor markets, on high-dose tutoring, on all kinds of really specific policy problems that there’s a lot of interest in. This issue on environmental conditions is something a little different.What do you think the role that the research process in general, whether it’s academic, whether it’s at an agency, whatever it is, in trying to identify problems like this, and particularly in a cross-field, cross-disciplinary, cross-professional way, because it seems like we’re going to have to draw on a lot of different types of expertise to address problems like this, whether they’re coming from the environmental community, when they’re coming from the contracting and construction communities. I mean, there’s going to be like a lot of different sort of conversations that need to be had here. How do you think about where research fits into that type of conversation moving forward?One of the things that’s become more and more apparent to me in my career is that the way that the academy kind of structures narrow focus and expertise doesn’t necessarily allow us to do our best work in work that most accurately reflects the complexity of the real world. I’m increasingly convinced that the more that we can do interdisciplinary research that draws upon the expertise of, you know, scientists across disciplines and the more that we can leverage that expertise in partnership with folks in the real world or in state capitals or the federal government to inform ongoing conversations or frankly to shine a light on evidence that just hasn’t gotten the attention that research suggests that it should is really a critical role.That, frankly, has something to do with the research production process, but it has just as much to do with how you talk about your research: who you talk about it with, how you share it.I think it’s incumbent upon researchers to think: I found a question that in talking to folks, it feels like matters, for policy and practice. And we’ve done a rigorous, pressure-tested academic study. How then am I going to engage in a public-facing dialogue?I know from my own experience serving in the White House to serving on my local school board that time is unbelievably short, and no one’s, you know, googling most recent academic research that’s behind a paywall that is too technical to read.Instead, they’re saying, okay, like, what did the parent who stood up and, you know, give an impassioned plea for, like, how can I respond to that? And so, we as academics, I think, need to do excellent work, but we need to do excellent work that informs an ongoing and real conversation. And does so in a way thatrepresents the reality and complexity of the real world.Dr. Matthew Kraft, Brown University and SustainableEd, the new center you’re building to address some of these research questions. Appreciate you taking the time with us today.It’s a pleasure, and I’ll say that we at the SustainableEd organization are looking to bring people together who are interested in these topics about climate and education from all different angles, researchers, policymakers, practitioners, and so we welcome people to reach out. We think that moving the conversation forward will really require us to help people to understand that this is just not about macro, global, planetary health. This is about the bottom line of budgets for families and for school districts. This is about student health and student learning. And the more people that come to see that environmental issues are core education policy issues, I think the more progress we’ll be able to make. And a big shout out to my co-authors, uh, the lead on this study, Sohil Malik and Grace Falken. This is a public episode. 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