We know that kids of color have worse outcomes in school in America. And kids in low-income areas. And kids who don’t speak English as their first language.
What about kids with childhood obesity?
Kavitha Cardoza, a journalist for the Hechinger Report, is one of the few people who has looked into this growing population and says their education outcomes are way worse than every other group. It’s a problem that affects 15 million children and the pandemic only made it worse.
Cardoza has been writing about childhood obesity for years and joined The Show to talk about it.
Full conversation
KAVITHA CARDOZA: They're more likely to get lower grades in reading and math, to repeat a grade, they're twice as likely to be placed in special ed or remedial classes. They're also significantly more likely to miss school, to be suspended, received attention, and they're less likely to enter and to graduate from college.
LAUREN GILGER: Wow, OK, so really big differences here. And you also found in your reporting that they're often treated differently in schools. Tell us, you know, what often happens?
CARDOZA: I think it's very unconscious on the part of teachers, at least I like hope so, but I think we all have this kind of unconscious bias against people with obesity. And the kind of thinking is, if you don't want to be treated like this, you should lose weight as if it's something under our control, and it really isn't.
It's such a complex disease and it's made up of genetics and hormones and economics and the environment and so many different factors and so children really have a hard time. They're treated differently both by their peers and by teachers. I profiled so many children with obesity, and they have no idea what the research said, Lauren. It mirrored exactly what the research said over and over.
GILGER: Over and over. Wow. So tell us, yeah, tell us about some of those students you profile, for example, a student in the piece named Stephanie, whose last name you're withholding to protect her privacy. Tell us about what happened to her in school.
CARDOZA: She is Hispanic and so in her family, she says no one ever said anything. She was called, like always thought of as very cute. Her parents doted on her and she went to school as early as kindergarten, she started being called a Teletubby.
And then after that, she noticed like when someone brought in cupcakes for their birthday, the teacher would say, “well, are you sure you want a slice of that? Like, why don't you eat the carrots instead?”
So it was one of those things where she didn't want to eat in school, she didn't want to be around other kids, and I think what particularly hurt her is she said that she was taught and told from a very young age, “if you ever need help, if you're ever upset, go find a teacher, they'll be on your side.” But in this case she found that that wasn't true.
She kept telling me through the interview how she felt like a shadow, and she said she would put her hand up to answer questions, and the teacher wouldn't call her even though she was the only one with her hand up or she wasn't chosen for things. This came up several times with Stephanie and other kids, you know, they were not chosen for the drama. They were not chosen to be in the robotics club, they were not chosen. It was as if teachers didn't see them or thought that they were not capable.
And one time was just devastating to her. She went up to the front of the classroom to ask the teacher a question after class, and the teacher said, “Hey, are you a new student?”
And she said, “I've been here the whole year. I've been submitting classwork like every day. Like how can you not have seen me?”
And she said that was the point at which I think she was in the seventh grade. She said she'd stopped caring about grades.
GILGER: Wow, so that, yeah, I mean you can see the direct impact on her to her educational outcomes. And it's not just kids teasing, which you might expect. It's, it's the way teachers and staff treat kids like this, too. Is there any training, Kavitha, for, for teachers, for school staff about this?
CARDOZA: It's really disappointing, Lauren, but there isn't. Every school district, every school really has an anti-bullying policy. And you know that's explicitly mentioned and teachers receive training on, you can't discriminate on the basis of race or gender or sexual orientation or national origin, or, you know, we have a lot of protections and teachers are trained on a lot of those things.
They are not trained on weight and in some ways that kind of mirrors our society where there are legal protections for all those other identities, but not for weight. You can legally discriminate on the basis of weight. And so there's no training, there's no protections for kids like that.
GILGER: Is there in your reporting on this, is there talk of solutions?
CARDOZA: We're not sure how effective it is, but one study found that it was effective, and that was to include weight. You know, you have teacher training for all these other kind of categories, include weight, and some school districts do have appearance, but researchers found that is not enough. And then everyone is more likely to kind of get on board and even realize that they're doing it.
A lot of times it's unconscious with teachers because you know our society is so we have this unconscious bias about weight and we're only starting to change that.
GILGER: Right. Like that's that solution is almost so simple you don't think of it. Let's talk then about the, the context that this is happening in, right? Like we are much more aware of, at least it seems, of childhood obesity, of obesity in general as an issue. There's much more conversation around it today and what it means and discrimination against it. Has behavior gotten any better on a broader scale? Why hasn't that been reflected in what's happening to kids?
CARDOZA: Actually, I, I have to say that with kids, childhood obesity has steadily been increasing over the past 50 years, and so has weight bias. It's one of those things where you've seen other biases like racial bias and things like that go down, but you have not seen discrimination on the basis of weight go down. And I think now because of drugs like Ozempic, there's even more of a sense almost that, well you could just take a tablet or you could just take a shot and you could cure this, and it's kind of really not understanding what the situation is.
There are all kinds of factors that one, these drugs are not approved for children and teens. Bariatric surgery, which the child I interviewed Stephanie had when she was 18. But you have to take nutritional supplements all your life, you know, so if you're kind of low income, if you're not in a stable household, like those are not avenues you can go down if you don't have insurance, and it's a major surgery.
So I'm not saying like those are not solutions. I've spoken to several doctors who really advocate for it, the Association of Pediatrics came out and said like children should be given the option of surgery when they're teenagers, but it really is something to carefully consider.
But really the eat less and exercise more. I mean, if it worked, then adults would do it easily, right? And we know how hard it is. Why do we think it's easier for children, especially when they're not the ones cooking food, grocery shopping, you know, deciding what's on the school lunch menu, they have no control over any of that.
Right. And, and does some of this point to a larger problem, like a societal problem, just in terms of access to good foods?
CARDOZA: Absolutely it's a much, much bigger problem. I was at a grocery store once and I was speaking to a mother and she had a lot of shelf stable, what they call shelf stable foods. And she said she was in a low income neighborhood. She said, “I can't afford to buy food that my children won't eat.”
Lauren, that just stopped me in my tracks because, you know, if you're upper middle class, it's very easy to say, “oh, try different foods.” You can't do that if you don't have money or you don't have that disposable income, and so it's way more complex.
