The Learning Crisis in the United States Three Years After COVID-19

Harry Patrinos, Maciej Jakubowski and Tomasz Gajderowicz
Additional contact information
Tomasz Gajderowicz: University of Warsaw

No 17755, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic caused widespread disruptions to education, with school closures affecting over one billion children. These closures, aimed at reducing virus transmission, resulted in significant learning losses, particularly in mathematics and science. Using United States data from TIMSS, this study analyzes the impact of school closure on learning outcomes. The losses amount to 0.36 SD for mathematics and 0.16 SD for science. The declines are similar across grades. The average decline in mathematics performance among U.S. students is substantially greater than the global average. n science, the decline observed among U.S. students does not significantly differ from the global trend. Girls experienced greater deviations from long-term trends than boys across both subjects and grade levels, reversing long term trends that once favored girls. Robustness checks confirm that pandemic-related school closures caused the decline in mathematics, while the downturn in science had already begun before COVID-19.

Keywords: COVID-19; labor markets; returns to education; human capital; pandemics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E24 J11 J17 J31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-03
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp17755.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: The Learning Crisis in the United States Three Years After Covid-19 (2025)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp17755

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().