Not Beating the Heat: Disentangling Heat’s Effect on Students and Teachers

• In Event: School Finance and Teacher Effectiveness

Abstract

This project examines how variation in environmental conditions during the school year, particularly extreme heat, affects student learning and teacher effectiveness, focusing on two questions: How do teacher characteristics, such as age, mediate or amplify the effects of extreme weather on student performance? And how effective are current mitigation strategies, namely air conditioning? To address these questions, I link matched student-teacher administrative data from the North Carolina Education Research Data Center with weather and air quality data from NOAA and the EPA, along with HVAC maintenance request records obtained via FOIA from six of the state’s largest school districts. Using a fixed-effects regression framework, I exploit exogenous variation in temperature across time to estimate the causal effects of environmental shocks on educational outcomes. Preliminary findings show that each additional day above 90°F leads to a 0.002 standard deviation decline in student test scores among those taught by teachers in the top 10% of the age distribution, with close to zero effect for students taught by younger teachers, highlighting the importance of accounting for teacher vulnerability in efforts to understand and mitigate climate-related educational disparities. This research has clear implications for school infrastructure investment, teacher support policies, and emergency heat protocols, emphasizing the urgency of protecting both students and educators, particularly in aging, under-resourced schools most affected by extreme heat.

Author

• Mary Quiroga, University of Michigan