58% of Detroit students.....

[Dr Mordrid]

....have a history of lead poising, and now a study links it to MEAP (assessment) scores.

This explains a lot....

Detroit News.....

High lead levels hurt learning for DPS kids

More than half of students tested have poisoning history

More than half of the students tested in Detroit Public Schools have a history of lead poisoning, which affects brain function for life, according to data compiled by city health and education officials.
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'These numbers are scary'

Now, a landmark study by the city health department and Detroit Public Schools of lead data and test scores shows that the higher the lead level, the worse a student's scores on the Michigan Educational Assessment Program exam, or MEAP.

Overall, 58% of roughly 39,000 DPS students tested -- 22,755 children -- had a history of lead poisoning, according to the study.

Perhaps more startling: Of the 39,199 students tested as young children, only 23 had no lead in their bodies.

"These numbers are scary," said Lyke Thompson, a Wayne State University professor who has studied lead poisoning in Detroit for more than a decade.

The correlation between high lead levels and low test scores carries particular resonance in Detroit, where students have fared poorly on academic achievement tests.

DPS students ranked last in the nation in 2009 on the National Assessment of Education Progress math test for fourth- and eighth-graders. The city's MEAP scores are consistently among the lowest in the state.
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[Brian Ellis]

Whereas the phenomenon is important, the following is a VERY operative sentence, as anyone with experience in epidemiology will say.



It is far too easy to try and find correlations when few exist without full knowledge of confounding factors that can influence the conclusions. For example, are the least proficient kids housed in older houses with more lead oxide-based paints? Are they in areas with higher traffic densities? Are they close to automotive suppliers who found lead for wheel weights, batteries, body fillers etc.? Do they live in households using old crockery with lead glazes? Are kids in poor areas suffering from less parental guidance? Do they use more "recreational" narcotics?

Apart from lead, other heavy metals used in the automotive industry can have similar retarding effects, which may even be cumulative with small amounts of lead, bearing in mind that it is at least a couple of decades since TEL was added to motor fuels (bugger Thomas Midgley!!!!).

My message is not to jump too hastily to conclusions.

[Evildead666]

Spaghetti junction in the UK had this sort of correlation way back.
It was one of the reasons lead was banned from petrol, and why the school right next to/under the junction eventually closed i think...

and as a response to Brians "recreational narcotics" with a relation to heavy metals => Smoking Crack through a lead pipe ?