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Education researchers and economists have long agreed: In the long run, the price for closed schools is paid by the students themselves, because they miss out on essential education.
But how can the damage be precisely quantified?
The Munich Ifo Institute has tried it - and comes up with disturbingly high numbers.
The negative consequences of school closings during the pandemic could amount to up to 3.3 trillion euros.
The effects would affect both the individual students, but also the entire economy, through secondary effects, said the education economist of the Ifo Institute, Ludger Woessmann, the "Handelsblatt" (the newspaper article can be found here).
"Nothing in the education economy is as well documented as the connection between education and income."
If the schools remain closed until the end of February, a loss in life income of the students of an average of 4.5 percent must be assumed, warned Woessmann.
Extrapolated to the national economy, the result of 18 weeks absence from school - twelve weeks in spring 2020 and a further six now - would result in a loss of 3.3 trillion euros by the end of the century, Wößmann calculated for the »Handelsblatt«.
Should Germany not get the pandemic under control and should therefore keep schools closed until the end of March, it would even be more than four trillion euros.
“This massive damage will in all probability occur despite the digital lessons,” predicts the Ifo researcher.
A study in the Netherlands showed that the eight-week school closings there resulted in an average of around 20 percent loss of learning in the annual final examination of a school year.
It also does not change the overall picture that children of parents with higher educational qualifications are sometimes well supported in homeschooling and neglected little.
In the case of the Netherlands, the losses for children from educationally disadvantaged backgrounds are significantly greater than a fifth.
And it is known that "especially weaker pupils in Germany have reduced their learning time particularly sharply during school closings," said Woessmann in the "Handelsblatt".
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