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 College Attendance and Federal Financial Support [pdf]

with Nolan Pope

Virtual instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the education system in the United States in various ways, one of which is the reduced in-person interaction between educational personnel (teachers, counsellors) and high-school students. In order to investigate how virtual instruction during the pandemic has affected the college-going process, we employ a difference-in-differences strategy leveraging variation in the level of virtual instruction across different schools in the United States during the 2020-21 school year to investigate three college-going outcomes, (1) submission rates for the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), (2) number of ACT test-takers and (3) number of first year college enrollees. Our estimates indicate that during the 2020-21 school year, a fully virtual school is associated with a 4.2 pp decline in FAFSA submission rates, 4.8 pp decline in ACT test-takers and 2.5 pp decline in first year college enrollment relative to a fully in-person school. There is evidence of a rebound in FAFSA submission rates in the 2021-22 school year when schools reopened, but little evidence of a rebound in ACT test-takers and first year college enrollees. These results highlight the importance of in-person interaction with education personnel for the transition of high school students to college and the need for appropriate measures when such interactions are limited.

Works in Progress

Understanding the Consequences of Chronic Absenteeism Pre and Post COVID-19

with David Blazar, Seth Gershenson, Ethan Hutt

Students across the country suffered varying amounts of learning loss during and immediately after the COVID pandemic. While recent gains have been made, the recovery has been slower than many would like and remains incomplete. Rates of chronic absenteeism also increased during this time period, raising questions about its role in driving learning loss and hampering the subsequent recovery.  We first investigate whether student absences have become more or less harmful in the post-Covid landscape using administrative data from two states: Maryland and North Carolina. Using a classroom fixed-effects regression strategy, we find that the impact of absences on math and reading test scores in both states was marginally (about 10%) smaller in the 2022-23 school year than in the 2018-19 school year, though it remained practically and statistically significant: ten absences reduce both elementary and middle school math scores by about 6% of a test-score standard deviation. However, this modest reduction in the harmful effect of absences was not large enough to offset the 65% or higher increase in absenteeism that followed the pandemic. Next, we estimate the share of learning loss that is plausibly attributable to chronic absenteeism. As of 2023, about 8% of the learning loss experienced since 2019 in math can be explained by elevated levels of chronic absence. For the economically disadvantaged students, the share is as high as 10%. This suggests that while chronic absenteeism is and should remain a serious concern among policymakers, school leaders, and other stakeholders, it is far from the only factor driving COVID-induced learning loss.     

Scholarship Programs and the Teacher Workforce in Maryland

with David Blazar

(in progress)