Will the last be the first? School closures and educational outcomes

Abstract

Governments have implemented school closures and online learning as one of the main tools to reduce the spread of Covid-19. Despite the potential benefits in terms of reduction of cases, the educational costs of these policies may be dramatic. This work identifies the educational costs, expressed as decrease in test scores, for the whole universe of Italian students attending the 5th, 8th and 13th grade of the school cycle during the 2021/22 school year. The analysis relies on a difference-in-difference model in relative time, where the control group is the closest generation before the Covid-19 pandemic. The results suggest a national average loss between 1.6-4.1% and 0.5-2.4% in Mathematics and Italian test scores, respectively. After collecting the precise number of days of school closures for the universe of students in Sicily, we estimate that 30 additional days of closure decrease the test score by 1%. However, the impact is much larger for students from high schools (1.8%) compared to students from low and middle schools (0.5%). This is likely explained by the lower relevance of parental inputs and higher reliance on peers inputs, within the educational production function, for higher grades. Findings are also heterogeneous across class size and parental job conditions, pointing towards potential growing inequalities driven by the lack of in front teaching.