Research

Job Market Paper

The Impact of COVID-19 Virtual Instruction on Child Maltreatment [pdf]

Child maltreatment is a serious and common issue in the United States, with nearly 4 in 10 children reporting experiencing maltreatment by adulthood. Education personnel (teachers, school staff, administrators, etc.) play a critical role in the early detection and reporting of such cases due to their repeated interactions with children, but the frequency and quality of such interactions may have been reduced during school closures and virtual instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic. In order to investigate how virtual instruction during the pandemic has affected the child maltreatment reporting process, I employ a difference-in-differences strategy leveraging variation in the level of virtual instruction across different counties in the United States during the 2020-21 school year. My estimates indicate that a fully virtual county is associated with a 36.4% decline in child maltreatment reports made by education personnel relative to a fully in-person county. This decline in reporting is approximately half of the decline in education personnel reporting during the earlier nationwide school closures near the end of the 2019-20 school year (March 2020). In contrast, there are no significant differences in maltreatment reports made by non-education personnel. I also find that substantiated reports decline more than unsubstantiated reports, suggesting that more severe cases were disproportionately affected by under-reporting. Subsequently during the 2021-22 school year, education personnel reports rebounded as the previously virtual schools returned to in-person instruction. These results underscore the importance of in-person interaction with education personnel for the detection of child maltreatment cases, emphasizing the need for appropriate policies to counteract this potential drawback of schooling arrangements where such interactions are limited.

Working Papers

The Impact of COVID-19 on the Transition to College: Evidence from COVID-19 [pdf ]

with Nolan Pope

(Submitted)

During the COVID-19 pandemic, virtual instruction reduced in-person support that may have helped high school students transition to college. Using national school-level data on FAFSA submissions, ACT participation, and first-year college enrollment, we estimate a difference-in-differences model that exploits crossschool variation in virtual instruction during the 2020/2021 school year. A fully virtual school year reduced FAFSA submissions by 4.2 percentage points, ACT participation by 4.8 percentage points, and first-year college enrollment by 2.5 percentage points. FAFSA submissions partially rebounded after reopening, but ACT participation and college enrollment did not. Effects were substantially larger in disadvantaged schools.

Works in Progress

The Causal Effect of Student Absences Post Pandemic: Evidence from Three School Systems

with David Blazar, Seth Gershenson, Ethan Hutt

Researchers, educators, and policymakers have long worried about consequences of student absences for educational achievement and attainment. Concerns about student absenteeism have only grown in recent years, as both absence and chronic-absence rates increased significantly during the pandemic and remain elevated several years later. However, pandemic-induced changes in cultural norms regarding attendance and the use of virtual learning software suggest that student absences may be less harmful today than they were in pre-pandemic school environments. We rigorously test this hypothesis using both pre- and post-pandemic administrative data from three public school systems: the states of Maryland and North Carolina and a large urban school district. Results are remarkably consistent across the three settings: The impact of absences on math and reading test scores was modestly (about 10%) smaller in the 2022-23 school year than in the 2018-19 school year. This reduction is statistically significant. However, the smaller post-pandemic effects remain practically and statistically significant: ten absences reduce both elementary and middle school math scores by about 6% of a test-score standard deviation and chronically absent students score about 10% lower than non-chronically absent students. Consistent with prior research, these harmful effects of absences are approximately linear and showed little heterogeneity across race and gender pre-Covid. However, white students experienced a greater reduction in the harmful effects of absences compared to black students post-Covid. In Maryland, the impact of absences in 10th grade on high school graduation and 2-year college enrollment was much smaller (about 40%) post-Covid, but the impact of absences on any (2-year or 4-year) college enrollment worsened slightly. The post-pandemic effects remain statistically significant, with ten absences reducing high school graduation, 2-year college enrollment and any college-enrollment by 3%, 1% and 5% respectively. Absenteeism is and should remain a serious concern among policymakers, school leaders, and other stakeholders.     

Scholarship Programs and the Teacher Workforce in Maryland

with David Blazar

(in progress)