Can health really cause low achievement? Does poverty and poor health impact learning?

http://www.epi.org/analysis_and_opinion/entry/a_look_at_the_health-related_causes_of_low_student_achievement

Does poverty and poor health impact learning?

A distinguished and diverse coalition of education, health, and social service experts, in a their campaign for a Broader, Bolder Approach to Education, have issued a statement calling for the establishment of school-based clinics in schools serving disadvantaged children as one of the most important strategies for raising the achievement of disadvantaged children. The California School Health Centers Association (CSHC) is a statewide organization that advocates for, disseminates information about, and provides training and other resources for operators of, and those interested in starting, school-based health centers.

Overall, lower-class children are in poorer health.

Those with vision problems have difficulty reading. In the United States, 50 percent of poor children have vision impairment that interferes with academic work, twice the normal rate. Lower-class children may be more likely to have vision problems because of less adequate prenatal development than middle-class children whose pregnant mothers had better medical care and nutrition. Visual deficits also arise from disadvantaged children being placed in inexpensive low-quality child care settings where they watch too much television, activity that does not develop hand-eye coordination and depth perception – 42 percent of black fourth graders watch six hours or more of television a day, compared to 13 percent of whites. Middle-class children more likely have manipulative toys that develop such coordination. A longitudinal study of entering kindergarteners reveals that fine motor skill development at age 5 is a stronger predictor of later mathematics and reading performance than is kindergartners’ pre-literacy knowledge (of the alphabet, of counting numbers, of phonemes).