Interrogating Educational Debt: The Association Between COVID Campus Closures and Academic Performance Among California Schools

• In Event: Shifting Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) Toward Equity: Integrating Systemic SEL, Transformative SEL, and Implementation Science

Abstract

Background: Equity-oriented change initiatives, such as systemic tSEL implementation, ought to consider the contemporary contexts that disproportionately impact communities of color. The burden of the COVID-19 pandemic and K-12 school campus closures disproportionately impacted Black, Hispanic, and other students of color. Many students of color live in areas that experienced both higher infection/mortality rates (Mude et al., 2021) and longer school campus closures (Oster et al., 2021), relative to their White counterparts. Given what studies have found about the deleterious effects of remote learning (Bueno, 2020; Bacher-Hicks et al., 2021) on student academic performance, the pandemic is widely understood to have deepened educational disparities, Yet, these mechanisms remain conflated and obscured.

Objectives: We use the framework of “education debt” – whereby students of color have been systematically denied access to equal education through multiple mechanisms (e.g., attending lower resourced schools, experiencing more exclusionary discipline, tracking into fewer advanced classes; (Ladson-Billings, 2006) – to explore the extent to which school campus closures increased the education debt.

Method: All data are derived from publically available data (e.g., COVID-19 and Equity in Education Longitudinal Database, California Department of Education database) that reveal societal conditions shaping California education proceeding, during, and after the height of the pandemic (2019-2022). Multilevel models were run in R (lme4 package) with random effects accounting for county and district nesting. Educational outcomes included 2021-2022 school-level math and language arts proficiency and high school graduation. Key covariates included county-level cumulative COVID cases as of June 2022 and school-level 2020-2021 months in-person instruction, 2021-2022 student enrollment, school racial composition, and school-level percent of students qualifying for free and reduced price lunch (FRL).

Results: Student proficiency in math and language arts declined from 2019 to 2022, while graduation requirements were temporarily modified (CDE, 2022) and graduation rates increased. The proportion of Hispanic, Black, and FRL students was significantly positively correlated with county-level COVID cases, (r=.41, p<.001; .14, p<.001; .36, p<.001), deaths (r=.36, p<.001; r=.07, p<.001; .38, p<.001), and reduced time in in-person instruction (r= -.25, p<.001; r=-.15, p<.001; -.12, p<.001), respectively. Covariates (e.g., 2019 proficiency and graduation rates, school FRL, school racial composition) were associated with 2022 proficiency and graduation, in the expected directions. Accounting for COVID case rates, months of in-person instruction did not predict language arts proficiency or graduation rates, but did predict math proficiency (ꞵ=.23, p<.001).

Significance: Months of in-person instruction during the pandemic was associated with math proficiency, a key indicator of student academic success. These findings underscore the pervasiveness of systemic inequity and the need to further understand how the education debt has been shaped by COVID-19 pandemic and school campus closures. The context of the education debt is critical to consider when implementing school improvement initiatives, including systemic and transformative SEL initiatives.

Authors

• Tiffany M. Jones, Colorado State University

• Ashley Metzger, University of California - Berkeley

• Sophia Hwang, University of Maryland - Baltimore County

• Jennifer A. Bailey, University of Washington

• B. Elizabeth Kim, University of California - Los Angeles

• Kamryn Morris, University of California - Berkeley

• Jie Deng, Colorado State University

• Valerie Shapiro, University of California - Berkeley