A guide to lowering test scores: unhealthy environmental conditions in classrooms can make it difficult for students and teachers to concentrate and affect productivity, health and the bottom line

Leadership, Sept-Oct, 2002 by Shelly Rosenblum, Barbara Spark

Suppose for one moment that you are living on a planet where everything is the opposite of what we experience here on earth. (Those of you who grew up on Superman comics will recognize this as the "Bizarro" planet.) On this other planet, your elected representatives, instead of wanting you to raise test scores, are demanding that you lower them. Drop those scores--your job depends on it!

That's the mandate. To get there, try this surefire strategy: make it difficult for students and teachers to concentrate (and generally undermine their health and productivity) by providing poor environmental conditions in their classrooms. Bonus: you'll keep your district facilities staff busy dealing with the complaints that come in. Here are some winning tactics:

1. Make it too hot (or too cold), too humid (or too dry), too noisy (don't forget to avoid day lighting).

2. Fill the air with fumes from idling buses, too much CO2, mold or other allergens, or chemicals and pesticides that can affect occupants' nervous systems.

3. To make sure that indoor air pollutants concentrate in each classroom, install a poorly operating ventilation system that can't provide enough outside air exchange and is difficult to maintain. If you have no ventilation system at all, then nail most of the windows shut.

4. In case their allergies and asthma, sinusitis and coughs aren't sufficiently distracting, put allergic students and teachers on medications that make them either drowsy or agitated.

5. Allow mold, allergens and other pollutants to accumulate long enough for some teachers and students to get sick and have to miss school or feel they need to take extra days off while recuperating from other illnesses. (This accomplishes two purposes, since it also reduces your ADA funding.)

6. To prevent conditions from improving, cut your maintenance budget, and don't forget to cut your custodial budget and then arrange the classrooms in a way that makes it difficult for the few remaining custodians to clean. Then fail to educate school occupants about the way that many of their own activities might contribute to indoor air problems.

7. Prevent good communication between district-level staff, principals and school occupants so work orders don't get processed, or instead, the occupants believe that the district is unresponsive even when the work's been done.

8. Develop a poor relationship with parents and the community so they think you're wasting money and won't give you any more. Allow this poor relationship to fester so that when a problem arises, your staff are so busy trying to calm down parents, teachers and news reporters that you can't get any real work done.

9. Close the school because of health concerns, guaranteeing that everyone falls behind in their studies.

10. Finally, do not take the very simple steps that could correct many of the problems above.

Would such strategies reduce test scores? Well, that's the way to bet, anyway. Sure, some particularly resilient students would still do well, and some "teachers of steel" might carry on unscathed, but it's pretty certain that the graph of test scores would nosedive. The new publication, "Indoor Air Quality & Student Performance" (www.epa.gov/ iaq/schools/perform.html), outlines studies that support what should be obvious.

Is the solution "out of this world?"

Now the question is, is this really the Bizarro planet we're talking about, or California, USA? While hereabouts the purported goal is to raise test scores, you have to wonder about the likelihood of accomplishing it (or schools achieving their overall mission) when so often environmental health obstacles are placed in the way of teachers and students. What we've seen in many years of hands-on experience working with schools seems to indicate that the United States is closer to the Bizarro planet than anyone would care to admit.

The key item in our list of ways to reduce test scores was, "Do not take the simple steps that could correct many of the problems above." How could it be that problems that for so long have impeded schools from achieving their mission could have simple solutions? It seems to be we've forgotten some important things our great grandparents knew.

In 1871, an issue of a journal called the "Health Reformer" made it clear that "neglect of proper ventilation makes the teacher's work toilsome and ineffective." In 1871, our great grandparents had connected ventilation (an important part of assuring good indoor air quality) with a teacher's effectiveness (read "test scores").

Unfortunately, too many contemporary worries have overshadowed consideration of indoor air quality: vandalism and burglaries, energy conservation, construction costs, labor costs and the myriad other social problems with which school officials are all too familiar. Yet, as our great grandparents recognized, the environment within our schools is intimately tied to the effectiveness of our schools. We've got to recapture that wisdom.

Providing a healthy environment

Step one in improving test scores is to realize that you can't teach kids who are absent; it's harder to teach kids who aren't feeling well or are distracted by other kids' hacking coughs; you can't teach kids who are sleepy from high CO2 levels or spacey from medication; and when teachers are out sick, instruction by substitutes may or may not be able to stay on track.