Lead Did Not Turn Flint Children Into Idiots. Stop Saying So.

Here’s a headline at The 74:

Another Outrage in Flint: Third-Grade Reading Levels Plummet by 75% After City’s Water Poisoned by Lead

The article goes on to say that grade-level reading proficiency dropped from 41.8 percent in 2014 to 10.7 percent in 2017. Sure enough, that’s a 75 percent drop. Case closed?

Nope. All by itself that figure should make you suspicious: a modest increase in lead ingestion simply shouldn’t have that big an effect. And sure enough, it turns out that proficiency for the entire state of Michigan dropped from 70 percent to 50 percent in the single year between 2014 and 2015. Why? Because Michigan put in place a new, more difficult test in 2015. Test scores dropped all over the state after the new test was introduced.

But scores dropped even more in Flint. Is that because of lead? Probably not. Reading proficiency in Flint dropped from 41.8 percent to 18.7 percent between 2014 and 2015, but it makes no sense to blame lead for this. Lead primarily affects 1-5 year-olds. These are 8-year-olds. A smallish increase in lead levels simply wouldn’t have that big or that immediate an effect on 8-year-olds. It would be more informative to track, say, children who were three years old in 2015 to find out how they did five years later. But we can’t do that yet because those kids are barely out of kindergarten. We’ll have to wait.

There’s also this: if lead was the cause of the decline, then reading proficiency should have increased after 2016, when the lead was removed. It didn’t. It kept dropping, and so did scores throughout Michigan. Lead just doesn’t fit except as possibly a very small contributor to this decline.

Why do I care about this? For the same reason as always: warning people about the dangers of lead is great, but producing panic isn’t. Children know what’s going on around them. If they hear that kids are being made stupider by the water in Flint, they’ll do worse on tests. This is common knowledge: expectations of success affect test scores in both directions.

I understand that it takes yelling and screaming to get anything done. But it has other consequences too, and one of them is panicking children into thinking they’ve been turned into idiots. Stop it.

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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

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