Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

In April of 2014, Flint, Michigan switched its municipal water source from Lake Huron to the Flint River as a cost saving measure. The corrosive river water was improperly treated, causing lead from aging service lines to leach into the city’s drinking water. By the time that the Michigan government acknowledged the water crisis, the residents of Flint had been exposed to contaminated water for over a year and a half. Unfortunately, Flint is not unique; lead poisoning from tap water is not uncommon. Today, 30% of community water systems use some lead pipes and an estimated 18 million Americans receive water through lead service lines. Academic studies have noted similar water contaminations in Rhode Island, Oregon, North Carolina, Maine, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, and most famously, DC in the last twenty years. Despite these repeated crises, there exists no contemporary, quasi-experimental research exploring the impact of lead poisoning from lead plumbing on child development.

In this paper, we quantify the causal effects of the Flint Water Crisis (FWC) on educational outcomes. We match Michigan’s universe of longitudinal, student-level education records with a unique parcel-level service line dataset collected by Flint city officials tasked with pipe inspection and replacement following the FWC. We take two methodological approaches to estimate (a) the effect of the FWC overall and (b) the effect of exposure to lead poisoning from lead plumbing. For both approaches, we consider a range of student educational outcomes, including academic achievement, attendance, behavioral problems, and drop-out.

To measure the overall impact of the FWC, we use synthetic control analyses to compare changes in outcomes over time between students living in Flint and students living in Michigan control districts. These models obtain estimates of the causal effects of the FWC on the academic outcomes of affected students. The potential mechanisms of these broad effects include lead exposure as well other health effects (e.g. Legionnaires Disease) and social responses (e.g. protests, civil detachment, social stigma).

To measure the effect of exposure to lead plumbing, we employ difference-in-difference analyses that compare changes in outcomes for Flint children living in homes with lead pipes to Flint children living in homes with copper pipes. These models isolate the narrow effect of the lead exposure due to lead pipes on academic outcomes.

Preliminary results suggest that the FWC caused a large decrease in academic achievement for all students living in Flint and that students living in homes with lead pipes experienced an increase in absences compared to students living in homes with copper pipes. Our work contributes to the literature in several ways. First, we quantify the educational costs of a famous case of government mismanagement. Second, we provide the first quasi-experimental evidence that lead pipes remain an economic and social burden in the U.S today. Third, we show that lead exposure can have negative effects on children above the age of five. Fourth, we improve upon previous studies of lead exposure by using a treatment indicator (home service line material) that is free of measurement error.