Did Remote Learning Lead to Different Education and Health Outcomes in Pennsylvania?

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Abstract

This paper examines remote learning in Pennsylvania and its role in shaping education and community health outcomes during the 2020–2021 school year. The findings contribute to a growing evidence base on the effects of remote learning during the pandemic that has predominantly focused on assessment outcomes. This paper also explores suspension, high school graduation, and high school dropout outcomes, as well as whether remote learning helped reduce COVID-19 case rates in local communities.

Like other states, Pennsylvania had major challenges in addressing the COVID-19 pandemic. One of the most difficult decisions was to move students from in-person to remote learning. The findings in this paper suggest that remote learning did harm academic achievement, as feared, but may have also had important public health benefits, highlighting the difficult tradeoffs educators and care givers faced during that time.

About half of Pennsylvania students started the 2020–2021 school year with fully remote learning. Remote learning appeared to lower achievement outcomes, particularly in schools with high levels of economic disadvantage, consistent with research findings in other states (Cohodes et al. 2022; Darling-Aduana et al., 2022; Goldhaber et al., 2022; Jack et al., 2023). Students facing economic disadvantage were also more likely than on average to be in LEAs where the predominant instructional mode involved remote learning. Our evidence also suggests that fully remote learning in high school helped lower COVID-19 rates in the local communities during the 2020–2021 school year, a period before vaccines became more widely available and adopted. This is an important finding given that high school students are a small fraction of the population in any of these communities. Another study (Goldhaber et al., 2021) reached similar conclusions by analyzing data from two other states, at least for counties with relatively high COVID-19 rates like those in Pennsylvania during this time. National evidence also suggests that in-person learning increased COVID-19 rates more when used in high school grades than in lower grades (Lessler et al., 2021).

Remote learning may have led to another important, likely unplanned, result. Situations that might have otherwise led to suspensions were far less common online than in-person, and the punishment (staying home) was not relevant when all students were already at home. As a result, remote learning largely eliminated suspensions and, of particular importance, the longstanding disproportionality in suspension rates that existed between different groups of students in Pennsylvania.

In the coming years, educators in Pennsylvania will continue addressing the challenges brought on by COVID-19. Students remain well behind where they would have been in the absence of the pandemic (Lipscomb et al., 2022b). At the same time, the evidence presented here suggests lower COVID-19 rates and lower suspension rates were two benefits of remote learning during this time. With the return to in-person learning, helping students catch up while preventing the reoccurrence of inequality in suspension rates will likely require ongoing effort and suggests a need to consider alternative policies (Welsh, 2022).

Authors

• Steve Lipscomb, Mathematica Policy Research, Inc

• Duncan D. Chaplin, Mathematica Policy Research, Inc

• Ijun Lai, Mathematica

• Alma Vigil, Mathematica Policy Research, Inc

• Hena Matthias, Mathematica Policy Research, Inc