Modeling the Long-Run Learning Impact of the COVID-19 Learning Shock: Actions to (More Than) Mitigate Loss

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced 1.7 billion children out of school temporarily. While many education systems are attempting varying degrees of remote learning, it is widely accepted that the closures will produce substantial losses in learning (World Bank, 2020; Kuhfeld et al., 2020). However, the real concern is not just that a few months of learning will be lost in the short run, but that these losses will accumulate into large and permanent learning losses as many children fall behind during school closures and never catch up. This note uses a calibrated model with a “pedagogical production function” (Kaffenberger and Pritchett, 2020) to estimate the potential long-term losses to children’s learning from the temporary shock of school closures. The model shows that without mitigation, children could lose more than a year’s worth of learning even from a three-month school closure as the short-term losses continue to compound after children return to school. Turning to mitigation strategies, the note examines the long-term effects of two strategies, finding that with some mitigation efforts education systems could come back from the crisis stronger than before.