Socioeconomic disparities in the reopening of schools during the pandemic in Chile.

The COVID-19 pandemic produced the most significant disruption in education in history. More than 190 countries suspended in-person instruction, affecting an estimated 1.6 billion students. The reopening of schools has been unequal. Schools in more affluent areas reopened sooner than poorer ones, exacerbating preexisting inequalities. There is limited research about the reopening processes in Latin America, where schools were closed for extended periods. Using a rich administrative dataset, we investigate the gaps in the resumption of in-person instruction in Chilean schools across socioeconomic groups in the fall of 2021. Schools with lower socioeconomic status were significantly less likely to offer in-person instruction. Disparities in reopening decisions were associated with administrative factors rather than economic or local epidemiological conditions.

Growth mindset tempers the effects of poverty on academic achievement.

Two largely separate bodies of empirical research have shown that academic achievement is influenced by structural factors, such as socioeconomic background, and psychological factors, such as students' beliefs about their abilities. In this research, we use a nationwide sample of high school students from Chile to investigate how these factors interact on a systemic level. Confirming prior research, we find that family income is a strong predictor of achievement. Extending prior research, we find that a growth mindset (the belief that intelligence is not fixed and can be developed) is a comparably strong predictor of achievement and that it exhibits a positive relationship with achievement across all of the socioeconomic strata in the country. Furthermore, we find that students from lower-income families were less likely to hold a growth mindset than their wealthier peers, but those who did hold a growth mindset were appreciably buffered against the deleterious effects of poverty on achievement: students in the lowest 10th percentile of family income who exhibited a growth mindset showed academic performance as high as that of fixed mindset students from the 80th income percentile. These results suggest that students' mindsets may temper or exacerbate the effects of economic disadvantage on a systemic level.