Coronavirus lockdowns and educational inequality in German high schools

The rapid shift to online learning affected schools (and teachers, and students) at all levels. Some schools (and teachers) were better prepared than others, having resources that were more easily adapted to online teaching modes. Some students were better prepared than others, having access to devices and stable internet connections, in order to more fully participate in online learning. The unfortunate thing is that the students who had the lowest access to online learning are likely to be those who were already under-achieving. At least, that is the headline result from this new article by Elisabeth Grewenig (Leibniz Center for European Economic Research) and co-authors, published in the journal European Economic Review (ungated earlier version here).

Grewenig et al. use data collected from 1099 parents of school-aged (i.e. not university) students in Germany, collected as part of the ifo Education Survey. The survey collected data on students' time use, both during June 2020 (when lockdowns were in effect and there was basically no in-person teaching), and retrospectively for the period before the coronavirus pandemic. Time use was separated into several categories: (1) school-related activities (school attendance; or learning for school); (2) activities 'deemed conducive to child development' (reading or being read to; playing music and creative work; or physical exercise); and (3) 'activities deemed generally detrimental' (watching television; gaming; social media; or online media); and (4) relaxing.

Comparing students' time use during the lockdowns with their time use before the pandemic, Grewenig et al. find that:

...the school closures had a large negative impact on learning time, particularly for low-achieving students. Overall, students’ learning time more than halved from 7.4 h per day before the closures to 3.6 h during the closures. While learning time did not differ between low- and high-achieving students before the closures, high-achievers spent a significant 0.5 h per day more on school-related activities during the school closures than low-achievers. Most of the gap cannot be accounted for by observables such as socioeconomic background or family situation, suggesting that it is genuinely linked to the achievement dimension. Time spent on conducive activities increased only mildly from 2.9 h before to 3.2 h during the school closures. Instead, detrimental activities increased from 4.0 to 5.2 h. This increase is more pronounced among low-achievers (+1.7 h) than high-achievers (+1.0 h). Taken together, our results imply that the COVID-19 pandemic fostered educational inequality along the achievement dimension.

So, low-achieving students (defined as those in the bottom half of the grade distribution for this sample for German and mathematics combined) reduced their study time by more than high-achieving students. To the extent that study time leads to greater academic achievement, this can only lead to an increase in the disparity in academic performance between students at the top and those at the bottom. The really disheartening finding though was that:

...only 29% of students on average had online lessons for the whole class (e.g., by video call) more than once a week. Only 17% of students had individual contact with their teacher more than once a week... The main teaching mode during the school closures was to provide students with exercise sheets for independent processing (87%)... although only 37% received feedback on the completed exercises more than once a week...

The distance-teaching measures over-proportionally reached high-achieving students. Low-achievers were 13 percentage points less likely than high-achievers to be taught in online lessons and 10 percentage points less likely to have individual contact with their teachers... Low-achievers were also less likely to be provided with educational videos or software and to receive feedback on their completed tasks.

If you thought that teachers, having scarce online teaching time available, would prioritise the low-achieving students, perhaps because the high-achieving students are more self-motivated and/or have better learning support through their parents, you would be sorely mistaken. That strongly suggests to me a failure in the way that German teachers were supported in their rapid shift to online teaching activities, since it was entirely foreseeable that low-achieving students would be more greatly affected by the changes. Alternatively, supporting the low-achieving students in low socioeconomic families to have better access to online resources would no doubt have helped as well (although New Zealand's experience suggests that something more proactive than simply having support or resources available for those who ask for it is required).

One issue with this research is the use of retrospective recall about students' time use from the period before coronavirus. Grewenig et al. argue that the degree of social desirability bias is low, and that the results are similar to those from the German Socioeconomic Panel (GSEP), where students report their own time use. However, comparing those two sources, it is clear that the reported number of hours of school-related activities before coronavirus is much higher in this sample than in the GSEP. That needn't be a problem, unless the disparity differs between parents of high-achieving students and parents of low-achieving students. Presumably, all parents are roughly equally able to observe their children's time use during lockdown. That probably is less likely of the period before coronavirus. If parents of low-achieving students are more likely to overestimate the number of hours of school-related activities than parents of high-achieving students, then that would bias the results towards showing a bigger decline in school-related activities for low-achieving students. Since those students are low-achieving, it is entirely plausible that they usually spend less time on school-related activities than their parents think they do. Unfortunately, there is no way to easily identify whether that is a problem in this sample.

With that caveat in mind, this study does point to an issue that we should be concerned about, which is how the pandemic has affected student learning, and in particular whether it has increased educational inequality. Hopefully, this is not a general result that extends beyond the German schooling system, but unfortunately it seems likely that it is.