The big research news this morning is a study being reported by the Associated Press that offers some strong evidence to suggest that smog can have a harmful effect on the developing brain.

The new findings come from a study of 249 children of New York City mothers that is being published this morning in the August issue of the journal Pediatrics.

As part of the study, mothers wore backpack air monitors for 48 hours during the last few months of pregnancy. By age 5, the children who had been exposed in utero to the highest levels of air pollution—most of it from car, bus and truck exhaust—scored an average of four to five points lower on IQ tests than children with less exposure. That's a big enough difference, researchers say, to affect classroom performance.

These moms, all non-smokers, lived mostly in low-income neighborhoods in northern Manhattan and the South Bronx, but the researchers say that air pollution levels in those communities are typical of those for many large cities. Keep in mind, too, that the researchers adjusted for differences in children's exposure to air pollutants in the years after they were born.

Are we looking at another possible cause of achievement gaps? More studies are needed to know for sure, but the researchers, in the meantime, will continue to track this group of children as they progress through school.

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This one goes in the category of research that I wish I didn't have to report. According to a study out earlier this week, disparities in cognitive development begin to show up among children from different socioeconomic backgrounds as young as nine months of age.

Even before babies begin to walk or toddlers enter preschool, this research shows, children from poor families are trailing behind their more-advantaged peers on measures rating their behavior and cognitive abilities. The same pattern holds for minority children vis-a-vis white children, children of mothers with a high school diploma or less compared to those whose mothers are more educated, and children growing up in Spanish-speaking homes vs. those from English-speaking households. And those differences, the report adds, only grow over time.

Child Trends put together this study for the Council of Chief State School Officers. The researchers based the findings on data from a federal study that is tracking a nationally representative set of infants born in 2001.

They say the results speak to the need to intervene even earlier in children's development. Forget universal preschool, these findings seem to suggest. Zero-to-five programs and efforts aimed at engaging and supporting parents could be an even better starting point for closing those persistent achievement gaps that bedevil K-12 educators.

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In his take on the results released earlier this week from the National Assessment of Educational Progress tests in reading and mathematics, the NYT's Sam Dillon emphasizes the fact that the test-score gaps separating poor and minority students from their higher-achieving white and better-off counterparts have not budged over the last four to five years.

Now a new report from the Educational Testing Service explores some of the many possible reasons why. Parsing the Achievement Gap II is a follow-up to a 2003 study that lays out the racial and ethnic fault lines for 14 different indicators that have been linked to academic achievement. Its basic conclusion: While the nation has made some progress in narrowing disparities among students of different racial, ethnic, and income groups, not much has changed, for the most part, since 2003.

I know. That may not exactly be news.

But the new report, which expands the original number of indicators to 16, includes some illuminating statistics. Did you know, for instance, that in 2007 more than half of African-American 8th graders, compared with a fifth of white 8th graders, had a teacher who left before the end of the school year? Among students poor enough to qualify for federal free-lunch programs, two-thirds had teachers who failed to finish out that year.

That's sobering. My two children attend, or graduated from, middle-class public high schools. In all their years of schooling, I can only recall two instances in which one of their teachers failed to make it to the finish line—one because of a terminal illness and another due to maternity leave.

If you couple those statistics with the disproportionately high mobility rates that the report documents among poor and minority families, it adds up to a lot of disrupted schooling.

One bright spot the report notes, however, is that increasing numbers of students of all racial, ethnic, and income groups are taking on more advanced coursework in high school. (For an interesting analysis on how that trend has contributed—or not contributed—to longtern NAEP results see my colleague Sean Cavanagh's post in the Curriculum Matters blog.) Yet, by the same token, black students remain badly underrepresented among those students who go on to take Advanced Placement exams.

Check out the full report for yourself here.

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