Berliner and Whitman Notes

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OSF 3: Food Insecurity and Schooling

- Poor diets, hunger, food insecutiry, malnutrition have a direct effect on academic achievement

- Example of kids from Guatemala

- Exposing kids to healthy food has direct impact on aa

- Important to give them nutritious food from 1-3 years as it gives rise to greater intellectual functioning and higher level of education in later lofe

- Also important that mother is given healthy food during pregnancy as it has direct impact on child

- Reports of ppl not having food for 4 or more days in a month

- Again, the rate of problem is nt distribured randomly – it was more in the minotiry population

- Food insecurity is a rural and urban problem- eg in text pg 16

- Dramatic change in behavior after they were eating regularly and healthy

- Many children go hungry over thw weekend and therefor are deprived of nourishment they need for Monday

- Nutrition deficts affect test scores

- School provide extra rich food on test days- calorie loading and full of energy

- Food stamps to reduce hunger- both good and bad

- Thrifty Food Plan to ensure poor people are abel to get inexpensive yet nutritious food- pg 16 at the end

- Food price increase affects toung children- anemic underweight and inadequate nutrition

- Food insecutiry has health consequences for toddlers and infants- increased hospitalization, development delays, jeopardizing mental and physical readiness for school

- Number of people who have issues affording food has doubled in the last 5 years in ny!!

- “There exists no ‘safe’ level of inadequate nutrition for healthy, growing children, even nutritional deficiencies of a relatively short duration a missed breakfast, an inadequate lunch impair children’s ability to function and learn. When children attend school inadequately nourished, their bodies conserve the limited food energy that is available. Energy is first reserved for critical organ functions. If sufficient energy remains, it is then allocated for growth. The last priority is for social activity and learning. As a result, undernourished children become more apathetic and have impaired cognitive capacity. Letting children go hungry means that the nation’s investments in public education are jeopardized by childhood under-nutrition.” (2008)

This telling quote (2008) from Brown, Beardslee, and Prothrow-Stith legitimizes what teachers have understood for a long time: children without proper nutrition lack the attention and cognitive function necessary to be successful learners. It is clear through a plethora of research that learning and nutrition are undeniably linked. Berliner additionally reminds readers that the current recession exaggerates the already too prevalent problem of under-nutrition in impoverished communities. Although diminished nutrition in older children and adults decreases attention and cognitive function, it represents a mostly manageable problem. Once adequate nutrition is provided the resulting inadequacies decrease to close to normal levels. However, when under-nutrition is coupled with early development the problems are long lasting and irreversible. This is a problem that again is overrepresented in poor and minority communities

OSF 4: Pollutants and Schooling

- In recent decades, humans have again been affected. One way is by consuming too much fish with dangerously high mercury concentrations. Mercury, which enters the food chain through pollution, is known to be a neurological poison that can cause a wide variety of symptoms that resemble ADHD when they occur in school children, including hyperactivity and loss of focus.

- municipal waste incinerators. These burn consumer and medical waste containing mercury that escapes into the atmosphere. Although concentrations of mercury are greatest close to the incinerator, the wind spreads it widely before it falls to earth, where it becomes bio-concentrated in the fatty tissue of animals (and fish), along with other pollutants such as PCBs and DDT. These incinerators also release dioxins, known to cause cancer and suspected of causing neurological damage. In addition, the incinerators release lead. Several pernicious effects of dioxins and lead are relevant to this discussion.

- significant for those that serve communities closest to medical and municipal waste incinerators and to coal-fired power plants—and these are communities of the poor

- The levels of contamination reached in these “hot-spots” are known to cause brain and nerve damage in developing fetuses and young children.

- if pollutants such as mercury affect the health and behavior of poor people more because their exposure rates are higher, then the effects of these toxic agents will be found more frequently among children in schools serving the poor

- challenge that occurs when trying to teach the few additional children in each grade who have cognitive and behavioral problems caused by mercury contamination.

- The neurological damage caused by lead pollution has been common knowledge for about a century, but even over recent decades, tragic effects such as this have been documented in families and communities around the world.

- half a million lead-poisoned children in the U.S., and a huge but uncounted number of adults have lived lives of lower quality because they were affected by this highly toxic metal

- Although none of these children are likely to die from the lead, their low-level, clinically asymptomatic lead poisoning may well have lifelong, crushing effects, including diminished learning capacity and behavioral problems such as attention deficit disorder and hyperactivity—all affecting school performance. Ultimately, even low doses of lead can limit prospects for employment and stigmatize a whole ethnic or racial group as “low in ability” when they are more accurately classified as “high in lead.”

- low levels of lead significantly affect IQ also found that ADHD children, compared to controls, showed elevated (though levels still technically consider low) levels of lead in their blood. The hyperactivity and impulsivity seen in these children was attributed to poorer cognitive controls due to the effects of lead on the