摘要: The COVID-19 pandemic has come with many nonpharmaceutical interventions to curb the spread of the virus. One of the most significant measures has been to close schools for in-school education, at the primary, secondary, and tertiary levels of schooling. While such interventions have been demonstrated to be effective in reducing the spread of the virus (1), they come at a cost: an intermittence of the learning process that is not easily repaired with online instruction. The well-designed study by Engzell et al. (2) shows, convincingly, that the “learning loss” due to school closures is severe (although learning delay may be a more appropriate term). Using data from primary schools in The Netherlands and analyzing test scores on externally standardized tests, the study reports a learning loss of 3.16 percentiles on a composite index of math, reading, and spelling, an effect that varies in size by socioeconomic background and school composition. At least as concerning as the overall learning delay is the reported inequality by socioeconomic background and school composition. Using school records of parental educational attainment (classifications used to determine weighted student funding for schools with children from disadvantaged backgrounds), the study shows that children of very low-educated parents (i.e., none of the parents have more than lower-secondary education; in total, 8% of the families) suffer more from school closure than children from more-educated backgrounds. Using a more fine-grained measure of school-level disadvantage, supplementary analyses show that the learning delay is much stronger in schools with a higher share of disadvantaged children (which could be simply compositional, as the school-level indicators were not available at the individual student level). Other European studies on the impact of COVID-19−related school closures show similar patterns (3, 4), with stronger delays among children with disadvantaged backgrounds or schools with higher concentrations of disadvantage. … [↵][1]1Email: H.G.vandeWerfhorst{at}uva.nl. [1]: #xref-corresp-1-1