Explaining inequalities of homeschooling in Germany during the first COVID-19 lockdown

Current studies suggest that the COVID-19 pandemic is worsening existing social inequalities in the field of education worldwide. In this paper, we argue that the pandemic is especially challenging for students from socially disadvantaged and educationally deprived homes, as parental engagement and resources are very important in terms of guiding and supporting students' learning processes during this school closure period. To examine how well parents were able to help their children with schoolwork during the homeschooling period in Germany, we used data from the German National Educational Panel Study (NEPS, n = 3,714) collected during the first such period in May/June 2020 when students were in Grade 7. Taking known mechanisms of inequality of educational opportunity into account, we explored the effects of parents' aspirations and cultural, social, and economic capital on their ability to help their children. Our results showed that although the majority of the examined parents were able to provide good schoolwork support, as expected, we found inequalities related to social background. Parents with low education were twice as likely as highly educated parents to be unable to provide sufficient support. In our multivariate analyses, family resources had a significant positive effect on the likelihood of a parent being able to help. Moreover, regardless of the social or cultural capital endowment of the parents, good household technical equipment was associated with a higher probability of support. Thus, ensuring that students have access to technical home equipment could be a way to promote an educationally supportive learning environment across all social groups.

The International Education Index: A global approach to education policy analysis, performance and sustainable development

Before the COVID‐19 pandemic, the world struggled to address growing educational inequalities and fulfil the commitment to Sustainable Development Goal 4, which seeks to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all. The pandemic has exacerbated these inequalities and changed how education functions, moving to online and hybrid methods. The challenges in global education highlighted and worsened by the pandemic make it necessary to re‐evaluate education systems and the policies in place to support access, quality and equal opportunity. This article focuses on analysing education policies at a national level. It tests a pilot policy analysis tool, the International Education Index (IEI), developed as a starting point to begin this reconsideration and create an accessible and comprehensive way to evaluate national education systems to inform decision‐making and policies in the new context. This research uses Ireland and Northern Ireland to test the IEI pilot tool. The IEI consists of 54 questions across nine indicators, including institutional frameworks, education strategies, digital skills and infrastructure, twenty‐first century skills, access to basic social services, adherence to international standards, legal frameworks, data gathering and availability and international partnerships. Countries can score 108 points to be categorised as having developed, emerging or nascent national education systems. Ireland scored 94 and Northern Ireland 81, indicating that they have developed national education systems.

Less learned but still good grades (for some) What impact had school closures on social inequality of educational opportunity?

Several studies have tried to estimate the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on student learning and the learning differences between social groups. Few studies have looked at the effects on other aspects of students' educational achievement, especially grades. Institutionally, grades are essential for evaluating students' ability, for tracking, for graduation, and as a signal for the labor market. However, grades are subject to many non-performance-based factors, e.g., students' characteristics such as gender or social origin. Based on previous research and theoretical arguments, we expected grades during school closures to be less correlated with cognitive competencies and higher correlated with social origin than previous cohorts. We analyzed the effect of the pandemic on students' grades in mathematics and German at the end of Grade 8. The pandemic can be seen as a natural experiment that can be exploited when analyzing two cohorts of the German National Educational Panel Study. The grades of the younger cohort (n = 4,069 students) who were in Grade 8 during the pandemic (2020) were compared to the grades of the older cohort (n = 6,861 students in 2014). Our results show no systematic increase in educational inequality based on the social origin of students. However, students in the treatment group reported higher grades which might be a result of pro-social grading by teachers. © 2023 Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft mbH und Co. All rights reserved.

Digital learning divide

This article reviews a wide range of national and international reports, empirical research, and theoretical articles to present a renewed look at the evolving digital divide in educational settings. Digital inequality impacts students' learning, and it has become a crucial problem across the globe. Using an international comparative approach, the article focuses on explanations for the digital divide. It also seeks to address how the patterns of this new form of inequality vary systematically across countries, and highlights the potential importance of examining the digital divide in educational research. © 2023 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Insights from a catholic school's transition to distance learning during covid-19

ABSTRACT Drawing upon 15 semi-structured interviews with teachers at a Catholic school in the British city of Hull, we offer new qualitative insights on the effects of students' unequal access to digital tools when switching to distance learning in the context of COVID-19 school closures. During the 2020-2021 academic year, this school serving pupils from highly dissimilar socioeconomic backgrounds distributed 300 laptops to students who did not own any digital learning device. It emerges that students with limited access to devices suffered negative impacts on their academic performance, and that this effect also applied to students who had access to a mobile device and hence did not receive a laptop. Our interviews also suggest that having to share a device with another family member leads to more absenteeism and a fall in academic attainment. Low parental involvement is shown to have negative effects on students' attainment, particularly for children from deprived backgrounds. Finally, poorer students are seen to become isolated from peers, with diminishing social skills throughout lockdowns due to their lack of access to digital tools. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

From the margins to the mainstream: The online learning rethink and its implications for enhancing student equity

From being largely at the margins of higher education for many years, online learning now finds itself in the mainstream. This paper offers a critique of the online learning literature both pre- and post-2020, looking at changes in response to this shift. Evidence tells us that online learning plays a significant role in enhancing student equity, widening higher education access and participation for many students who would have found it difficult, if not impossible, to attend university on campus. This includes students from government-identified equity backgrounds, as well as other student cohorts underrepresented at university, such as older working students, parents, and others with caring responsibilities, and those from families with no previous experience of university. The mainstreaming and normalising of online learning now presents an opportunity for universities to learn from both past and emerging evidence, to evaluate past practice and offer a more flexible learning experience that better meets the needs of an even wider range of students. Keeping online learning firmly in the mainstream, while taking an evidence-based approach to ensuring the quality of its design and delivery, has the potential to enhance student equity on a much broader scale.

Covid-19 en América Latina y México: brechas del bienestar

Este trabajo aborda empíricamente las brechas estructurales del bienestar reveladas por la epidemia de Covid-19 en cuatro países de América Latina: Argentina, Costa Rica, México y Panamá. Para ello, aborda diversos ámbitos: el sanitario, el económico, el del empleo y el de la protección social, particularmente en el ámbito de la afiliación a los sistemas de pensiones, la mayor o menor incidencia de la crisis en el ascenso de la pobreza y la pobreza extrema y la capacidad para responder a ese repunte, la agudización de las desigualdades de género y el surgimiento de brechas que magnifican las desigualdades educativas.Alternate abstract:This article empirically addresses structural welfare gaps revealed by the Covid-19 epidemic in four Latin American countries: Argentina, Costa Rica, Mexico, and Panama. To do this, it examines various areas: healthcare, the economy, employment, social protection, particularly in the field of affiliation to pension systems, the greater or lesser incidence of the crisis in the growth of poverty and extreme poverty and the ability of each state to respond to that rise, the worsening of gender inequalities, and the emergence of gaps that magnify educational inequalities.

Does the COVID-pandemic affect the educational and financial inequality in weekly sport participation in the Netherlands?

This paper explores the impact of the COVID-pandemic on educational and financial inequality in level of weekly sport participation in the Netherlands. Restrictions due to the COVID-pandemic resulted in several barriers for people to continue sport participation. Lower educated people and individuals with financial problems are expected to have relatively few resources to adapt to the COVID restrictions, and therefore, more likely will decrease their level of weekly sport participation. Using high-quality data from the Dutch Longitudinal Internet Studies for the Social Sciences (LISS) panel, we are able to compare individual sport behaviour before and during the COVID-pandemic. Our findings suggest that the level of weekly sport participation of lower educated people and individuals with financial problems decreased more strongly during the COVID-pandemic. This implies that indeed the COVID-pandemic resulted in increasing educational and financial inequality in sport participation. With these results, our study contributes to a body of knowledge on the broader societal impact of COVID on issues of social exclusion. It may also inform policymakers to critically assess and intensify sport promotion policies directed at vulnerable groups in society.

Effects of the COVID-19 school lockdowns on language and math performance of students in elementary schools: implications for educational practice and reducing inequality

The current study investigates the effects of the school lockdowns during school years 2019-2020 and 2020-2021 on the achievement scores of primary school students during the COVID-19 pandemic. We analyzed scores for spelling, reading fluency (i.e., decoding speed), reading comprehension, and mathematics from standardized student tracking systems for 5125 students from 26 primary schools in the urban region of The Hague, the Netherlands. Results showed that students in grades 1 through 3 had significant learning delays after the first lockdown. However, results after the second lockdown showed that most students were able to catch up, compared to students from corresponding grades of cohorts before COVID-19. The magnitude of these positive effects was mostly close to the negative effect of the first lockdown. Apparently, during the second lockdown, schools seemed better prepared and able to deliver more effective home schooling and online instruction. The hypothesis that students' learning from a low SES home environment will suffer most from the school lockdowns could only partly be confirmed. SES effects at the individual level tended to be mitigated by negative effects of SES at the school level, making SES-related differences between schools less profound. The findings of this study offer a broader perspective to evaluate the effects of long-term school closures. Implications for educational practice and issues of inequality between students are discussed.

Socioeconomic and gender inequalities in home learning during the COVID-19 pandemic: examining the roles of the home environment, parent supervision, and educational provisions

Objective: School closures due to the COVID-19 pandemic left millions of pupils to continue their education at home. We investigated gender and socioeconomic inequalities in pupils' home learning, and some mechanisms underlying those inequalities. Method: We analysed online survey responses from 3,167 parents collected between May and July 2020 in the UK, when most schools were closed. Results: Boys, pupils who were eligible for free school meals (FSM), pupils from families that were financially struggling, and pupils whose parents had not graduated from university were less engaged and spent less time home learning. Pupils of non-graduate parents found home learning challenging because they were less likely to have someone in their home who could supervise their work. Pupils eligible for FSM and from financially struggling families found home learning challenging because of noise, a lack of space, lack of technology and insufficient internet in their homes. The quality of educational resources schools provided positively predicted engagement and learning for all pupils. Conclusion: Pupils from lower socioeconomic status families and boys were less involved with home learning, although for different reasons. We discuss how these findings can inform policy and practice to reduce educational inequalities resulting from school closures. © 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Educational inequality

This chapter provides new evidence on educational inequality and reviews the literature on the causes and consequences of unequal education. We document large achievement gaps between children from different socioeconomic backgrounds, show how patterns of educational inequality vary across countries, time, and generations, and establish a link between educational inequality and social mobility. We interpret this evidence from the perspective of economic models of skill acquisition and investment in human capital. The models account for different channels underlying unequal education and highlight how endogenous responses in parents' and children's educational investments generate a close link between economic inequality and educational inequality. Given concerns over the extended school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic, we also summarize early evidence on the impact of the pandemic on children's education and on possible long-run repercussions for educational inequality. © 2023 Elsevier B.V.

Learning Loss in Vulnerable Student Populations After the First Covid-19 School Closure in the Netherlands

School closures due to the COVID-19 pandemic raised concerns about increases in educational inequality. We examined the magnitude of the impact of the first school closure for vulnerable student groups in particular. This study was conducted among 886 Grade 3 - 5 students in the Netherlands in schools serving a high percentage of students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Piecewise growth analyses indicated that the school closures caused discontinuity in students' achievement growth on national standardized tests and led to an average learning loss of 2.47 months in mathematics and 2.35 in reading comprehension, exceeding the duration of the school closure. Findings suggest that school closures contribute to educational inequality and indicate which students may particularly need additional support to overcome the adverse consequences of the lockdowns.

Collateral damage in education: implications for the time of COVID-19

The Coronavirus disease of 2019 (COVID-19) has impacted the world immensely in terms of both global health and economy. It has exacerbated the gap between the economically advantaged and disadvantaged groups in terms of access to various resources and opportunities across the world. This situation has been described as ‘collateral damage', which represents unexpected and unintended negative impacts that deprive the poor of certain opportunities and rights. Interestingly, the differences in capability to respond to the issues caused by COVID-19 are observed in developed and developing countries alike. This paper aims to discuss the potential risk factors that encourage students to drop out as collateral damage due to COVID-19, based on the literature on developing South East Asian countries. This commentary argues that collateral damage caused by COVID-19 has revealed a serious limitation in the nature of formal schooling in South East Asia. Although more socio-economically vulnerable groups can participate in formal schooling, there is still not a sufficiently communal climate in these schools that would prevent them from dropping out.

Educational inequality

This chapter provides new evidence on educational inequality and reviews the literature on the causes and consequences of unequal education. We document large achievement gaps between children from different socioeconomic backgrounds, show how patterns of educational inequality vary across countries, time, and generations, and establish a link between educational inequality and social mobility. We interpret this evidence from the perspective of economic models of skill acquisition and investment in human capital. The models account for different channels underlying unequal education and highlight how endogenous responses in parents' and children's educational investments generate a close link between economic inequality and educational inequality. Given concerns over the extended school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic, we also summarize early evidence on the impact of the pandemic on children's education and on possible long-run repercussions for educational inequality. © 2023 Elsevier B.V.

Guest editorial: Assessment of the impacts of COVID-19 and government reactions to it on inequality and poverty reduction

An assessment of the policies and a review of the heterogeneous impact provide information valuable for resource allocations, cross-country cooperation, economic recovery and development and inequalities and poverty reduction around the world. [...]the measures could not mitigate the initial income reduction and only had a temporary positive effect on consumption expenditure. [...]education disparities were observed between 25 and 50%.

The ability of low- and High-SES schools to inhibit learning losses during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The study examined whether the pandemic-induced digital distance learning affected the ability of educational units to inhibit learning losses and whether their SES compositions modified those effects. By applying random-intercept multinomial regression models to educational units' average test scores comparing the 2019-2021 period to the 2017-2019 period based on data from the National Assessment of Basic Competencies in Hungary, the results indicated that educational units were less likely to inhibit learning losses during the COVID-19-affected two-year period. Educational units with less advantaged student SES composition were more susceptible to a decrease in their average mathematics test scores than the most advantaged institutions. Nevertheless, the pandemic did not seem to have an additional negative effect on educational units with the most disadvantaged SES composition.

Educational inequality

This chapter provides new evidence on educational inequality and reviews the literature on the causes and consequences of unequal education. We document large achievement gaps between children from different socioeconomic backgrounds, show how patterns of educational inequality vary across countries, time, and generations, and establish a link between educational inequality and social mobility. We interpret this evidence from the perspective of economic models of skill acquisition and investment in human capital. The models account for different channels underlying unequal education and highlight how endogenous responses in parents' and children's educational investments generate a close link between economic inequality and educational inequality. Given concerns over the extended school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic, we also summarize early evidence on the impact of the pandemic on children's education and on possible long-run repercussions for educational inequality.

Insights from a Catholic school’s transition to distance learning during Covid-19

Drawing upon 15 semi-structured interviews with teachers at a Catholic school in the British city of Hull, we offer new qualitative insights on the effects of students’ unequal access to digital tools when switching to distance learning in the context of COVID-19 school closures. During the 2020–2021 academic year, this school serving pupils from highly dissimilar socioeconomic backgrounds distributed 300 laptops to students who did not own any digital learning device. It emerges that students with limited access to devices suffered negative impacts on their academic performance, and that this effect also applied to students who had access to a mobile device and hence did not receive a laptop. Our interviews also suggest that having to share a device with another family member leads to more absenteeism and a fall in academic attainment. Low parental involvement is shown to have negative effects on students’ attainment, particularly for children from deprived backgrounds. Finally, poorer students are seen to become isolated from peers, with diminishing social skills throughout lockdowns due to their lack of access to digital tools. [ FROM AUTHOR]

Desigualdades en la escuela secundaria argentina: recorridos escolares y proyecciones educativas

Este artículo versa sobre las formas de subjetivación de la desigualdad social en estudiantes del último año de la secundaria, en la Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires, Argentina. Se plantea una línea teórica útil para analizar la desigualdad educativa y pensar su configuración en el contexto de la pandemia provocada por la covid-19. Con este trabajo se exploran las lógicas desde las cuales las y los jóvenes proyectan sus trayectorias educativas o laborales postescolares. En este sentido, se recuperan las discusiones sobre cómo caracterizar la educación secundaria y los procesos de socialización entre sectores similares. La propuesta principal del artículo consiste en retomar la siguiente pregunta: ¿cómo se sedimentó la desigualdad social en las experiencias estudiantiles? A partir de tal interrogante se profundiza en el análisis de los tipos de recorridos y las expectativas que las y los estudiantes del nivel secundario construyen en su experiencia educativa para entender el procesamiento subjetivo de la desigualdad. Al concluir, se muestra la expresión actual de las tensiones y complejidades a la par de la expansión en la cobertura de la escuela secundaria y las nuevas líneas de diferenciación que se conforman. Así se evidencia la importancia de prestar atención a la interrelación entre aquello que las instituciones creen ofrecer desde su propuesta escolar y las expectativas del alumnado acerca del futuro.Alternate :This article deals with the forms of subjectivation of social inequality in students in the last year of secondary school in the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, Argentina. It proposes a useful theoretical line of inquiry to analyze educational inequality and to think about its configuration in the context of the pandemic caused by COVID-19. This study explores the logics through which young people project their post-school educational or labor trajectories. In this sense, debates are revised regarding how to characterize secondary education and socialization processes among similar sectors. The main objective of the article is to take up the following question: how did social inequality become sedimented in student experiences? Based on this question, an in-depth analysis is made of the types of paths and expectations that secondary school students develop during their educational experience in order to understand the subjective processing of inequality. In conclusion, we characterize the current expressions of tensions and complexities due to the expansion of secondary schooling and the emerging lines of differentiation that are taking shape. Thus, the importance becomes evident of paying attention to the interrelation between what institutions believe they offer in their educational projects and the students' expectations about the future.

Indicators of Equitable Civic Learning in U.S. Public Schools

The “twin pandemics” of racial injustice and COVID-19 have underscored the importance of promoting civic knowledge, skills, dispositions, and engagement among the nation’s young people. Although some evidence has demonstrated that civic-learning opportunities are inequitably distributed across U.S. schools and communities, we currently have limited data that could help inform efforts to promote more equitable access to these opportunities. In this article, we draw on a recent National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine report on equity indicators to explore the potential value of a large-scale system of such indicators for civic learning. We highlight the need for indicators of both opportunities to learn and of learning outcomes. We describe key features of this system, propose some example indicators, and discuss a research agenda that could contribute to the development of high-quality measures of equity in civic learning.