Children’s learning and life chances depend on factors in and outside of the school setting. Air pollution exposure is one important out-of-school factor with potentially far-reaching impacts on children’s cognitive functioning. Yet, little is known about the population-level effects of air pollution on individual children’s learning within school settings. Children’s school-based learning and academic performance play an important role in life-course trajectories and future opportunities. We evaluated data on individual-level academic improvement outcomes for 6080 kindergarten through sixth graders who were enrolled in a school-based literacy program operating in multiple urban California regions between 2012- 2015. Children’s home and school environmental data were linked with their demographic, academic and elementary school data to evaluate the association between cumulative exposures to 24 neurological air toxins and one-year improvement outcomes in reading. We implemented hierarchical linear models to account for the nested nature of the data, controlling for attendance to the literacy program as well as a variety of other individual, school and neighborhood covariates. We observe statistically significant associations (B= -.054, SE=.027, P=.049) between higher cumulative neurotoxin exposure and lower annual reading improvement after adjusting for covariates. In addition, we found a significant interaction effect between higher grade (proxy for age) and toxic exposure levels on academic improvement (F=5.48; B= -.025, SE=.010, P=.019), suggesting that duration of pollution exposure throughout life moderates adverse reading deficits. When we implement the grade by neurotoxin interaction term in the full model, we observe a moderately significant effect size of neurotoxin exposure (B= -.050, SE=.027, P=.07).