What do school shutdowns do to kids?

By Noah Stein and Rob Moore

As states are reopening for recreation, office work, and even dining across the country, states are keeping schools shut down. On its face, this decisions seems like a no-brainer: buildings with hundreds of young children are breeding grounds for germs and our influenza shutdown protocol prominently features school closings as a strategy to limit the spread of disease. 

As students switch from in-school instruction to at-home instructions, though, they switch from an in-person learning experience to a virtual learning experience. This has the potential to erode the human capital development of children if virtual learning is not a good substitute for in-person learning, which could mean lower wages down the road and cascading harm to the economy.

For years, researchers have been working to understand variations in a student’s long-term earnings in the context of access to education. Now that the nation’s students have been pushed into a new virtual learning environment, understanding the impact of education on different learning outcomes has taken on a new urgency. According to a recent article published by Brookings, access to steady education is directly related to one’s lifetime earnings. Brooking’s valuation of education and Ohio’s current K-12 enrollment data suggest children in Ohio alone could see a loss of over $58 billion dollars in foregone lifetime labor market earnings due to lost educational time from school shutdowns associated with COVID.

A study looking at Ohio students who voluntarily participated in “E-schools” found them to be at higher risk for failing on their graduation tests relative to traditional public school students.  This study drew its conclusions from virtual classrooms of students who knew what they signed up for. Now, Ohio students across the board are dealing with the abrupt transition to a virtual learning environment they have no experience navigating. This means the existing risk of lowered test scores and increased achievement gap could be even more significant than past data shows. 

That being said, some studies have found online classes to be more cost-effective, accessible, and environmentally friendly than in-person instruction. Theoretically, anyone with access to the internet can access classes from home. This ability to have more agency on how the student digests the material has been shown to increase retention rates by up to 60%. And due to reduced community times, The Open University in Britain has concluded that switching to virtual learning reduces CO2 emissions by 85% per student.

The unexpected switch to online learning will likely result in lower test scores, an increased achievement gap, and severe economic consequences if students respond to virtual learning the way they have in the past. On the other hand, there is some silver lining in the potential for increased retention rate and reduced environmental impact. Ultimately, it will be years before we know the eventual impact of months of school closures. In the meantime, it is up to us to delicately balance the potential public health benefits of school closures against their severe human capital costs.