Could Global Warming Increase Racial Disparities in Student Achievement?

While much of global warming research focuses on the natural world — considering how climate change impacts ecosystems, agriculture, and biodiversity — a new wave of research studies how climate change will reshape the social and economic world. In this emerging field, a novel study suggests that global warming may harm children’s ability to learn, affecting low-income students and students of color most dramatically.

The study was conducted by Park, Goodman, Hurwitz, and Smith and published in the May 2020 edition of the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy. It combines data from over ten million students who took a nationally standardized high school assessment. By examining the results of students who took the test multiple times, the authors were able to identify how an abnormally warm year can upset a child’s academic trajectory.

The findings are alarming. The authors argue that a sustained 2 degrees Celsius increase in temperature would cause students to perform 7% worse on standardized tests. A single warm year damages student learning, but the authors suggest that successive years of warming damage learning even further. These effects occur in spite of relatively high rates of air-conditioning in the United States.

The authors believe that the psychological duress of heat exposure drives these impacts. When classrooms warm up, students become inattentive and teachers have more difficulty completing lesson plans. “It’s like a thousand little cuts to your ability to focus and concentrate and learn,” Dr. Park stated in a New York Times article covering the study.

In addition to measuring scholastic achievement, the authors conducted a nationwide survey of air-conditioning access in public schools. They found districts with adequate access are largely immune to the negative effects of heat exposure. Importantly, however, they also found substantial racial disparities in terms of access to air conditioning. Black and Hispanic students are roughly two percentage points less likely to attend a school with adequate air-conditioning — a result they attribute to disparate investments in school facilities. Inequalities in neighborhood temperatures may further exacerbate these conditions, as recent scholarship suggests that a history of racial redlining and underinvestment has left many low-income neighborhoods bereft of green space and tree cover.

This paper also contributes to a growing body of evidence that suggests school funding and infrastructure are important prerequisites for student success. Advocates and academics have long debated the importance of school funding, with the provocative Coleman Report of 1966 suggesting that increases in school spending do little to improve students’ academic achievement. In recent years, this finding has come under increased scrutiny. With the earth expected to warm in future decades, the authors suggest investments in school air conditioners will become increasingly important to level the playing field for low-income students. To ensure these investments don’t exacerbate climate change, utilities will also need to expand the supply of carbon-free electricity.

In the summer of 2020, heat waves rolled through California and made clear the impacts of climate change, with crimson skies and ashen forests capturing national headlines. But it would be a mistake to think these are the only costs of global warming. As Jisung Park and colleagues have shown, the academic success of our children, the character of urban classrooms, and the equality of racial opportunity are just as much at stake.

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Park, R. Jisung, Joshua Goodman, Michael Hurwitz, and Jonathan Smith. 2020. “Heat and Learning.” American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 12, no. 2: 306–39. https://doi.org/10.1257/pol.20180612.