“Severe Vitamin D deficiencies may cause cognitive impairment, missed school days, and affect a student’s academic ability.”
The Sun is Free
by Ron Isaac | published November 30, 2010
A November 26 post on Mike Klonsky’s SmallTalk Blog notes: “Severe Vitamin D deficiencies may cause cognitive impairment, missed school days, and affect a student’s academic ability.”
He cites the conclusions of research studies that appear to suggest that given the wide disparity according to race of affected students, this vitamin deprivation may indeed help explain the persistent so-called “achievement gap.”
Klonsky correctly observes that “corporate school reformers would like us to believe that the entire responsibility for measurable learning outcomes rests on the school and classroom teachers,” and that they (the “reformers”) “show little interest in improving the conditions for students outside of school and claim that focusing on such issues is simply an ‘excuse’ for low performance.”
He calls for medical care, especially preventive, for all students and vitamin D supplements where appropriate.
We are living in such callous and topsy-turvy times that large segments of the American population would probably characterize his plea as “un-American.” They would use phrases like “redistribution of wealth” that in their minds, and according to their definitions, equate with despised (and misunderstood) political systems as envisaged by the late (and, amazingly, in some circles, lamented) Senator Joseph McCarthy.
These critics would tell the kids to just sit in the sun for their vitamin D. And what would they prescribe for the lead poisoning and other documented environmental hazards that are a fact of life for poor kids?
The same folks who would foreclose every poor child’s access to a well-rounded or even a basic education are hostile to the notion that a talk-show host who gets tens of millions of dollars a year for blabbing about “class envy” should pay a few cents to the taxman to help subsidize a blood test for a less fortunate citizen.
Teachers have to take up the slack for much of the rest of society that would leave the next generation hanging. The knowledge we actually impart in the classroom is, certainly, a weapon for liberation, but in another sense it is gravy.
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