Inequalities in learning loss during the COVID-19 pandemic in Chile: the significance of school effectiveness

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 pandemic-associated learning losses were unequal across school subjects and sociodemographic groups. This study posits that these losses are also heterogeneous based on pre-pandemic school effectiveness, that is, the value schools added above the expected students’ learning based on their socioeconomic background. Using national-scale standardized mathematics and reading test scores, we compared learning losses between 2013–2018 (pre-pandemic) and 2022 at the school level in Chile and examined how they varied according to an indicator of schools’ pre-pandemic effectiveness. Schools with high effectiveness underwent the highest pandemic-driven losses, especially in mathematics. These losses were more pronounced as schools reopened later and students’ post-pandemic attendance decreased. Educational policies should adjust to this heterogeneity. While high-vulnerability, high-effectiveness schools require support to mitigate the pandemic’s effects, low-effectiveness schools must enhance their capacity to foster student learning beyond these impacts.

KEYWORDS:

• Learning losses
• Covid-19 pandemic
• school effectiveness
• inequalities
• Global South

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the ANID (grant number FB0003) and the Chilean Ministry of Education (grant number FON2300075). The funders had no role in the study design; collection, analysis, and interpretation of data; writing of the report; or in the decision to submit the article for publication.

Notes on contributors

Danilo Kuzmanic

Danilo Kuzmanic has an MA in Applied Economics and a BA in Economics, both from the University of Chile. Currently, he is a research assistant at the Center for Advanced Research in Education from the same university. His research topics include educational equity, socioeconomic segregation, and higher education. His latest work focuses on the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on educational inequalities in the Chilean school system.

Francisco Meneses

Francisco Meneses has an MA in Social Science and a BA in Sociology from the University of Chile. He is a research assistant at the Center for Advanced Research in Education from the same university. His interests include improvement in education, educational equity, and civic education.

Juan Pablo Valenzuela

Juan Pablo Valenzuela is a full professor at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Education (IE) and director of the Centre for Advanced Research in Education (CIAE), at the Universidad de Chile. He has a master’s degree and a PhD degree in Economics, from the University of Michigan, Ann-Arbor. He has published several texts about school improvement in education, school leadership, and evaluation of public policies.

Patricio Rodríguez

Patricio Rodríguez is an assistant professor at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Education at the University of Chile, and a researcher and chief of the Technology and Knowledge Transfer to Education Unit at the Center for Advanced Research in Education (CIAE) at the same institute. He obtained a PhD in Engineering Sciences from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. His research interests in education include student trajectories, data science, and visual analytics for decision support systems.

Susana Claro

Susana Claro is an assistant professor at the Escuela de Gobierno UC. She has a PhD in Education from Stanford University and an EdM from Harvard University. Her research topics include educational equity, growth mindset, SEL, and educational policy. She is one of the faculty directors of the National Survey of Schools in Pandemic published at www.covideducacion.cl, which has addressed the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on students’ development in Chile.