COVID-19 Educational Setback in the United States: Spatial Analyses of Latinx Educational Achievement of Whites, Blacks, Asians, and Latines in the United States

The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated racial and ethnic disparities in educational achievement in the United States. Researchers have studied these disparities by examining the achievement setback across public-school districts, but it is at the beginning stages. While this research uses race specific measures of educational achievement (for example, changes in African American math achievement for districts between 2019 and 2022), most of the predictors they use are not race-specific. In this study, we aim to analyze the impact of the COVID pandemic on racial and ethnic educational disparities in U.S. public schools, utilizing race-specific data wherever possible. This contribution includes the addition of data from the Civil Rights Data Collection project, a data set which prior research has not exploited is designed to measure racial and ethnic disparities in public schools in the United States. In total, we merge eight data sets to study the racially unequal impact of COVID-19 on educational achievement in public school districts in the United States. The data include race-specific measures of changes in achievement, availability of Wi-Fi at home, racial and economic student-body compositions, socioeconomic status of neighborhood residents, chronic absenteeism, and language background. We also have information, not race specific, on the intensity of the virus, the mode of instruction (online, in-person, or hybrid), and the state-level political context. We analyze the data with linear regression, both with and without state fixed effects. Fixed effects models are used to account for policy differences across states, which were prominent during the pandemic. The study will help explain why some racial and ethnic groups suffered greater academic setback than others and provide guidance for how to avoid such large setbacks in the future and help students catch up.