Does online education magnify educational inequalities? Evidence from the COVID-19 pandemic

Taking the closure of all primary and secondary schools in China at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic as a quasi-natural experiment, this paper examines the impact of online education on student academic performance and the role of family socioeconomic status (SES) in the K-12 online environment. We employ a difference-in-differences approach and find that online learning has a positive effect on the performance of previous high-achieving students and a negative effect on low-achieving students. Further, employing the difference-in-difference-in-differences method, we find that students from high-SES families improve their GPA by 0.464 points after distance learning relative to disadvantaged students, i.e., the gap between low and high SES performance widens by 16.7 %, and this effect is more pronounced among students in primary schools and in provinces where online education lasts longer. The mechanism analysis shows that high-SES families help their children make academic progress in online education by developing their children's academic locus of control, providing access to information and communication technology, and increasing study time.