Socioeconomic disparities in the reopening of schools during the COVID-19 pandemic in Chile

• In Event: A comparative analysis of inequalities in national education systems: Case studies from Ethiopia, Jordan, Uganda, and Chile

Proposal

School closures due to the COVID-19 pandemic will have profound consequences for students’ human capital, well-being, and achievement in the long term. Growing evidence shows that school closures have resulted in significant learning losses for children during the pandemic, with higher impacts where closures have lasted longer. In this context, the educational response to COVID-19 affects more to more disadvantaged students.

The reopening of schools has been unevenly distributed since they first closed in March 2020. Compared to those in more affluent countries, students from poorer countries have had their schools closed for more extended periods, despite having access to fewer resources and less support to facilitate remote learning on average. Also, within countries, disadvantaged students have been affected by school closures for more extended periods than students with higher socioeconomic status. These trends amplify the educational inequalities that existed before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Understanding what determines the socioeconomic gaps in school reopening and the resumption of in-person learning is essential. It is a critical factor in the design and implementation of policy that addresses widening gaps in development and learning and in developing more equitable responses to future disruptions such as this pandemic. Research, however, has been concentrated primarily on high-income western countries. As a result, very little is known about differential access to in-person learning and the factors that explain it in the Global South, particularly in Latin America, which experienced extensive delays in the reopening of education systems compared to regions in the Global North in 2020-2021.

We address this gap by studying the resumption of in-person learning in Chile in the fall semester of 2021. In this country, schools closed on March 16, 2020, and the educational system achieved a generalized reopening of its schools 18 months later, in September 2021. Only 10% of schools offered in-person learning throughout 2020. In the fall semester of 2021 (March-June), schools could voluntarily offer in-person instruction conditional on favorable local epidemiological indicators, as specified in the Ministry of Health’s guidelines. However, many schools decided to remain closed.

Using a rich national dataset of school closures and openings of the complete school system, we examine differences in the number of days with in-person learning between schools with different socioeconomic statuses in Chile's decentralized and voluntary school reopening process in the fall of 2021. We employed nested hurdle models to assess socioeconomic gaps in schools' reopening and determine their association to differences in local epidemiological conditions, schools' resources (proxied by student-teacher ratio and municipality income level), and type of school administration (public-municipal, public, charter, private). Regarding this last variable, the diversity between types of school administration led to heterogeneous behavior during the pandemic. Because the type of school administration correlates with socioeconomic status in Chile, this heterogeneity between school administration types may have led to socioeconomic inequalities in school reopening, conditional on local epidemiology, local restrictions, and the resources to which schools have access.

Our analysis shows that schools with students of lower socioeconomic status were 52% less likely to hold in-person learning during the fall semester of 2021 than those of high socioeconomic status. Furthermore, considering only schools that opened at least one day, schools with high socioeconomic status students opened 43% more days than schools with students of low socioeconomic status. These disparities were strongly associated with the administrative factor (type of administration); the epidemiological (COVID-19 incidence rate) and economic (student-teacher ratio and municipality income level) factors were less relevant to the decision to reopen. Specifically, public-municipal schools –headed by elected municipal authorities (mayors)- were significantly less likely to reopen than the other types of school administration. Because students of lower socioeconomic status concentrate on public-municipal schools, these administrative differences led to significant socioeconomic disparities in the resume of in-person learning.

The implications of these results are twofold. On the one hand, the vast socioeconomic disparities in access to in-person instruction suggest that the pandemic is likely to exacerbate educational inequalities in Chile, with consequences on students’ lifelong learning trajectories. Therefore, targeted efforts will be required for students more affected by the closure of schools. On the other hand, our results stress the critical importance of the coordination between political authorities at the national and municipal levels. We show that the unfruitful dialogue between the central government and mayors in managing the pandemic within educational settings became a significant barrier to the effective reopening of the school system during the fall semester of 2021, particularly in the public-municipal sector. Hence, improving the articulation between these actors will help better prepare the Chilean school system to combat future crises more equitably.

Author

• Danilo Kuzmanic, Center for Advanced Research in Education