The Educational Impacts of School Closures and Reopening in the Pandemic: Evidence from Brazil

Abstract

The transition to remote learning in the context of COVID-19 could lead to dramatic setbacks in developing countries – where a multiplicity of challenges are bound to limit its effectiveness. To date, however, no study has rigorously documented the impacts of remote learning relative to in-person classes within primary and secondary education. Taking advantage of two natural experiments in São Paulo, Brazil, which featured in-person classes for the most part of the first school quarter of 2020, but not thereafter, we estimate the effects of remote learning using a differences-in-differences strategy, contrasting variation in dropout risk and standardized test scores within 2020 to that in 2019, when all classes were in-person. We find that, under remote learning, dropout risk increased by 250% and students only learned 27.5% of the in-person equivalent. Authorizing schools to partially reopen for in-person classes increased high-school students’ test scores by 20% relative to the control group.