How air pollution can harm student achievement and what schools can do to stop it

A variety of causal papers have examined how exposure to pollution harms student outcomes. For example, contemporaneous school bus pollution affects students’ test scores and respiratory health (Austin, Heutel and Kreisman 2019; Beatty and Shimshack 2011). High air pollution from sources ranging from highways to Toxic Release Inventory sites increases absences from school (Chung, Liu, and Persico, 2025; Currie et al., 2009; Simon, Heissel, and Persico, 2021) and lowers student achievement (Marcotte, 2017; Simon, Heissel, and Persico, 2021; Venator and Persico, 2021). This talk will survey the literature on the impacts of various health exposures on student outcomes as well as promising evidence on the impacts of school-level interventions to reduce exposure.