Environmental Ascription: High-Volume Polluters, Schools, and Human Capital

Abstract

Studies of ascription often focus on the relationship between inherited characteristics such as gender, race, or social class and educational inequalities that limit life chances. This project proposes that reduced educational outcomes, and hence ascription, can also emerge from physical/spatial inequalities, specifically, the place where a child attends school. The place where one lives is often not a matter of choice; rather, it is determined by other ascriptive forces such as race and social class—hence making environmental ascription not only a physical dimension of inequality in the direct sense but also another dimension of socially constructed inequality in the indirect sense. The prevalence of toxins near schools and the potential correlation with limited life chances and racial and class characteristics remains an understudied topic in the environmental inequality literature. To explore these connections, the authors mapped the locations of the top 100 polluters of developmental and neurotoxins in the United States and then determined the number of schools within a 2-mile radius, as well as the racial and socioeconomic composition of the areas surrounding each site. Overall, it was found that a significant proportion of the top industrial polluters were located in close proximity to multiple schools and that these schools were more likely to be located in neighborhoods with a disproportionate number of poor, minority residents. Because this exploratory study reveals a pattern of exposure to developmental neurotoxins in precisely those places where educational outcomes are already compromised, it suggests the need for further research specifying the relationship between environmental inequalities and school performance.