Poor kids used as ‘guinea pigs’

Protests in New York over poor school children including Indians, Chinese and blacks being used for racially explosive studies on gender, race

School kids from poorer families, some living in the immigrant quarters of New York, are being exploited as “human guinea pigs” by researchers carrying out suspect and racially explosive studies on race, religion and gender, warn parents and activists.

Vara Hassner Sharav from the Alliance for Human Research Protection told DNA that researchers with a “bonanza of grant money” were making children in public schools, mostly from poorer immigrant and black neighbourhoods, their malleable subjects. “Why should public schools become laboratories? First, you let in researchers from universities. Then you let in all kinds of marketeers. This needs to be addressed by Congress. This is out-and-out pork,” Sharav told DNA. 

A New York Post investigation blew the lid Monday on the astounding truth that city education officials last year quietly green-lighted 50 research projects which related to health, psychology, gender and religion mostly on kids living in New York’s poorer neighbourhoods. The education department allowed teachers to accept “modest cash gift certificates” as a quid pro quo for being co-operative. 

Some of the studies are peculiar, if not downright controversial. For instance, the NYU College of Dentistry is running a questionable study on the “oral health knowledge” of Chinese first-graders. Critics have also slammed a study by Maria Kromidas of Columbia Teachers College on “Children and Race in New York City” being run in a Queens Elementary School which has a large immigrant base of Indians, Chinese, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis. Kromidas wants to study how children from different races get along. 

Kromidas, earlier ran another race-sensitive study on fourth-graders at PS 214 in Brooklyn mapping the fallout of the 9/11 terror attacks. She concluded that South Asian immigrant kids were subject to “vicious racism by Latino and Black classmates.”

“Why are researchers being allowed to nose around and run these racially targeted behavioural studies on kids who are eight years old?” asked Sharav charging that it was lunacy to ask children to talk about such sensitive issues in a school environment. The Alliance for Human Research Protection is aghast that another Columbia University study weighs in on whether being Muslim is baggage in school.  

“The Department of Education markets our kids like they are a piece of meat,” activist parent Granville Leo Stevens told The Post after refusing to allow his daughter Savanna to participate in a NYU study. The researchers offer parents cash to sign on the dotted line but activists say they have no idea about the scope of the study.  “The parents are so poor that $25 for putting their children in a research session might help,” Sharav said.

Critics also charge researchers are getting into dangerous territory by diagnosing school kids. They say that children diagnosed with behaviour and psychiatric problems during a research session may not get drugs in school but this is often a “first step” to nudging them towards private US clinics which prescribe pills.

The education department says the research projects are “carefully vetted” but declined to discuss the flap.