The Long-Term Impact of Early Childhood Investment on Reducing Covid-19 Learning Loss

We leverage a randomized evaluation of an early childhood program to study the impact of early life investments on resilience to negative shocks. When the children in our study were 3-5 years old, they were randomized to a preschool program, a parenting program or to a control group. Ten years later, the children were exposed to school closures during the Covid-19 pandemic. These school closures led to significant declines in test scores, otherwise referred to as Covid-19 learning loss. With nearly 900 observations, we explore the determinants of learning loss in our children. Importantly, we find that the parenting program children were randomly assigned to a decade earlier had a protective impact on learning loss. The control group saw a 0.31 SD decline in standardized test scores during school closures, whereas the parenting group saw only a 0.12 SD decline. Learning loss in the preschool group was similar to the control group. These findings point to the importance of parents during times of negative schooling shocks.