 Has the Opioid Crisis Affected Student Learning? A National Analysis of Growth RatesJessica Drescher, Lily Steyer, Carrie Townley-Flores and Keith Humphreys The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 2022, vol. 703, issue 1, 234-261 Abstract: The potential spillover effects of the United States’ opioid epidemic on children’s educational outcomes have received surprisingly little attention from researchers. Accordingly, this study leverages national datasets of county-level opioid prescription rates and public school students’ third- to eighth-grade academic achievement to provide the first analysis of associations between community opioid prevalence and children’s learning rates. We find that students in counties with higher community opioid presence learn more slowly than peers in counties with low community opioid presence, both in aggregate and across different racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic groups of students. Moreover, within states we observe a small significant negative association between community opioid presence and student learning rates. This association is similar in rural and nonrural communities. These findings underscore the urgency of conceptualizing the opioid epidemic as a community-level crisis, with potentially long-lasting implications for children’s future educational attainment and life outcomes. Keywords: opioids; education; learning rates; student; growth (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:anname:v:703:y:2022:i:1:p:234-261 DOI: 10.1177/00027162231151524 Access Statistics for this article More articles in The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science |
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