Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

We examine the academic consequences of the Great Recession across all U.S. school districts. To date, no large-scale evaluation of these events has yet been conducted. To address this existing gap in the literature, we leverage a unique dataset recently made available through the Stanford Education Data Archive (SEDA). SEDA provides population-level achievement data for all tested students in the United States in the years during (and after) the Great Recession This paper addresses the following questions:

1. Did exposure to the recession affect student achievement growth and racial/ethnic achievement gaps?
2. Did exposure to the recession disproportionately affect districts serving higher concentrations of low-income and minority students?

We construct a district-level panel dataset consisting of all public-school districts in the United States for the 2006-07 through 2012-13 school years. We combine data from multiple sources, including: (i) achievement information from SEDA; (ii) demographic, revenue and expenditure information from the U.S. Department of Education’s Common Core of Data (CCD); and (iii) economic, employment and housing information from the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the U.S. Census and American Community Survey (ACS).

The SEDA data include over 200 million standardized achievement test scores for approximately 40 million public school students during the 2008-09 through 2012-13 school years. Achievement data have been placed on a common scale across every school district in the U.S. and therefore provide a unique opportunity to evaluate large-scale changes in the education production function. We use district-by-year-by-grade achievement scores, for both math and ELA, as the outcome variables of interest.

To estimate causal effects of the recession on academic achievement, we first leverage the fact that cohorts of students within the same district varied in their exposure to the recession. Specifically, the recessionary impact on student achievement was likely greatest for cohorts who experienced more years of schooling during the recession. Second, since the economic consequences of the recession varied across districts, students in the same cohort but located in different districts likely experienced different educational outcomes due to the intensity of the recession in their local settings. Using county-level economic data, we construct a recession intensity index based on the net log changes in county employment (Hershbein & Kahn, 2016; Yagan, 2016). Together, the recessionary impact on student achievement was likely greatest for students (a) with more years of exposure to the recession and (b) located in districts most adversely affected by the economic downturn.

We find that a one-year difference in exposure by recession intensity resulted in achievement losses ranging between 0.02 (ELA) to 0.032 (Math) standard deviations. Moreover, these recession intensity effects disproportionately affected districts with greater concentrations of low-income students, suggesting that the recession exacerbated existing socioeconomic achievement gaps. While the economic consequences of the Great Recession have been well documented, we know almost nothing about the consequences of the recession on student academic achievement. This paper aims to improve our understanding of the recessionary impacts of the Great Recession on student achievement.