The impacts of remote learning in secondary education during the pandemic in Brazil

Abstract

The transition to remote learning in the context of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) might have led to dramatic setbacks in education. Taking advantage of the fact that São Paulo State featured in-person classes for most of the first school quarter of 2020 but not thereafter, we estimate the effects of remote learning in secondary education using a differences-in-differences strategy that contrasts variation in students’ outcomes across different school quarters, before and during the pandemic. We also estimate intention-to-treat effects of reopening schools in the pandemic through a triple-differences strategy, contrasting changes in educational outcomes across municipalities and grades that resumed in-person classes or not over the last school quarter in 2020. We find that, under remote learning, dropout risk increased by 365% while test scores decreased by 0.32 s.d., as if students had only learned 27.5% of the in-person equivalent. Partially resuming in-person classes increased test scores by 20% relative to the control group.