by Cole Voorhies, Fordham Environmental Law Review Journal Symposium Editor, Class of 2021

“We could go on and on, talking about different social dynamics that disproportionately impact communities of color,” said Ms. McTeer Toney, who is now national field director for Moms Clean Air Force, an advocacy group. “For every single one of them, we can make a link to climate.” – New York Times, Oct. 5, 2020.

Climate change causes inequities that reach even the classroom.  A recently published report by R. Jisung Park, Joshua Goodman, and A. Patrick Behrer asserts that students’ standardized test performance suffered for each additional school-day of 80 degrees Fahrenheit or higher.  While this is a problem globally (the study measured data across 58 countries), the report also notes that in the United States, Black and Hispanic students disproportionally shoulder the impact of rising temperatures.

The effect of this paradigm is that rising temperatures are widening America’s racial achievement gap in education.  The paper concludes that the gap reflects the lack of air conditioning available to Black and Hispanic students (both at home and school), which in turn affects students’ ability to learn.  Indeed, the conclusion is that increased temperatures affect only Black and Hispanic students.  This paradigm is underpinned and compounded by racial school segregation in the United States, regardless of the geographic region.  Therefore, any policy seeking to address climate justice in the classroom must address school segregation and include a plan for its undoing.

We already know that rising temperatures hit BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) folks the hardest.  Indeed, a New York Times article about the report points out that this problem is compounded by issues identified in other intersectional climate research: Black and Brown neighborhoods tend to be hotter due to fewer trees and more paved areas.  Additionally, all urban areas experience generally higher extreme temperatures than their suburban or rural counterparts.  This is due to heat island effect, a phenomenon that results in higher temperatures in urban areas due to a variety of factors including lack of tree cover, building density, paved area, and emissions.  Thus, any solution to classroom climate injustice includes a plan to decrease the vulnerability of Black and Brown communities to rising temperatures and extreme heat events.

We cannot ignore classroom climate justice in the fight against climate change because educational outcomes correlate with other social and economic equalities.  BIPOC folks need to be centered in any climate solution.  In education, climate justice means desegregation, increased resiliency to extreme heat events and rising temperatures, and equal access to air conditioning.  Classroom climate justice is paramount; as we look towards protecting Earth’s future generations, we must consider educational equality.