Impacts of COVID-19 on Educational Outcomes
Education is a key determinant of socioeconomic success and thus the long-run growth of an economy. Understanding both short- and long-term impacts of COVID-19 on education and the mechanisms by which a pandemic affects child learning can therefore make an important contribution to the formulation of public policies that assist with the recovery of learning loss and ensuring that the disparities in learning losses can be rectified. In particular, attention is focused on disparities that have arisen due to differential access to remote learning, and other key resources that were implemented with the purpose of alleviating the impacts of COVID-19. To provide empirically rigorous public policy evaluation, guidance, and recommendations, policymakers need to identify the causal impact of COVID-19 and its pathways on educational outcomes. This has been impossible so far, as the necessary data and identification strategies needed to disentangle the different mechanisms by which COVID-19 impacts educational outcomes and learning loss have not been available. This project provides new insights on this topic by utilizing a novel identification strategy and a purpose-collected panel dataset from 2015 – 2022 that has detailed information on educational outcomes, remote learning access, household expenditures, employment and wages of household members, and health expenditures.
This project builds upon work focused on the effects of parental migration on children’s educational outcomes in the Philippines. Building on data collection and a framework that focused on the dual impacts of parent time and educational expenditures, I distinctly identify the multiple ways in which COVID-19 affects the educational outcomes of children in the Philippines context. In particular, I will be able to identify the following pathways by which COVID-19 has affected children’s learning: (1) Disruptions to income from parents and household members as a result of unemployment due to lockdowns at home and abroad; (2) Changes in the time inputs of parents and household members at home, as migration opportunities close down and there is local loss of employment as a result of lockdowns at home; (3) School closures and disruptions to learning infrastructure; (4) Introduction of remote learning modalities; (5) Health effects of COVID-19 infection to children and family members living with children. A second round of data collection is being planned to follow the same households in the Spring of 2025 to further study the long-term consequences of COVID-19.
Location: Philippines
Partners/Stakeholders:
International Labor Organization
UNICEF
Innovations for Poverty Action
Philippines Department of Education
Philippines Department of Migrant Workers
Overseas Workers Welfare Administration
Philippines Overseas Employment Administration
Funding:
Multi-Partner Trust Fund for Migration
ILO-UN Women BRIDGE project
Economic Growth Center
Principal Investigators:
Siu Yuat Wong (Yale)
Research: