The role of stress in urban public education

How humans respond to stress

The human brain is at the core of our response to stress. Social interactions can create stressful events. When these stressful events incorporate social constructions, such as discrimination, poverty, dilapidated housing, dense social interactions, we can think of this as urban stress.. When exposed to this over prolonged periods it leads to chronic stress which we may or may not even notice.

Repeated responses to stress, over time, lead to behaviors and eventually habits that an individual might display when dealing with a stressful situation (e.g. poor sleeping and eating habits) (McEwen, 2007, 2006).  Early life experiences contribute substantially to how a person learns how to deal with stress (Heim and Nemeroff, 2001). This suggests that care-givers of young children can significantly influence the way those children respond to stressful situations. Further, care-givers can also positively affect the way young children respond to stress by helping them to develop positive self-esteem and social supports as coping mechanisms (McEwen, 2008; Seeman, Singer, Ryff, Dienberg, Levy-Storms, 2002).

How stress affects what students can do in school

Allostasis is an organism’s ability to maintain internal constancy in the context of change. This is the process that facilitates homeostasis. The allostatic state is a condition of sustained activity that is different from the organism’s naturally occurring state. The condition occurs in response to long term stress or changes in the organism’s environment or during challenging social interactions.  Unchecked chronic stress, or chronic exposure to stressful situations, results in high allostatic load or allostatic overload (McEwen & Wingfield, 2003). In addition, to a sustained altered state of activity, high allostatic load includes the associated habits that can be of further detriment to health (i.e. poor sleeping, poor eating). These habits can further influence learning. For instance, sleep plays a role in learning and memory consolidation.

In a state of high allostatic load, an individual produces stress hormones that affect the human brain by changing the actual physical nature of neurons, dampening their function (McEwen, 1999, 2008). In particular, these stress hormones act on the hippocampus (associated with the consolidation of memory and spatial navigation), the prefrontal cortex (associated with cognitive function, personality expression, social behavior and decision making) and the amygdala (also associated with decision making, memory and emotional reactions.) Thus, high allostatic load affects regions of the brain associated with learning and behavior, thus having implications for what a child can do and does in school.

Stress Disparity in the Urban Neighborhoods

Research has pointed to factors that increase the likelihood of stress, which are applicable to the social conditions present in many urban environments. For intsance, one such study suggests that children of low SES families are more likely to produce stress hormones when learning something new. While family language complexity was shown to intervene between SES and learning, the lower a family’s SES the less likely they were to have high language complexity (Sheridan, Sarsour, Jutte, D'Esposito, & Boyce; 2012). Another study found that people of color and the poor are more likely to suffer from poor sleep quality, one of the side effects of chronic stress. Further, factors like employment level, education attainment and health status only influenced levels sleep quality in poor individuals, suggesting that they are especially vulnerable to differences in those factors (Patel, Grandner, Xie, Branas, & Gooneratne, 2010).  Sharkey’s (2010) study examining violence and cognitive function in children showed that exposure to local violence diminishes that child’s performance on cognitive assessments. This suggests that following neighborhood violence local children’s ability to perform in school or on some sort of cognitive assessment is diminished. His study also found that in the Chicago neighborhood where it was conducted African Americans were more likely than Hispanics and much more likely than whites to be exposed to violence. While the data in Sharkey’s (2010) study could not point to stress and the mechanism that diminishes the child’s ability to perform on a cognitive assessment, we synthesize his findings with the previous studies on stress and cognitive function. These suggest that local violence serves as a stressor for neighborhood children which potentially influences both their cognitive and behavioral outcomes in school. Finally, studies have suggested that discrimination and lack of belonging, is related to high levels of stress contributing to high allostatic load (Cokely, Hall-Clark, & Hicks, 2012; D'Anna, Ponce, & Siegel, 2010; Johnston-Brooks, Lewis, Evans, & Whalen, 1998; Mays, Cochran, & Barnes, 2007; Williams et al., 2012). American cities, post WWII were more likely to have a high concentration of African Americans due to surburbanization and codified geographic segregation. Remnants of historical codification of African American discrimination still persist institutionally (Satcher, 2001) Further blacks are most likely to perceive discrimination across all racial groups (Cokely, et al., 2012). Taken together, these studies highlight the role of stress in places with high concentrations of poor and minority urban environments, which specifically has repercussions for children’s outcomes in urban public schools.