School quality and COVID-19-related compensatory measures

In response to the proven negative effects of COVID-19-related school closures on students’ learning, Germany launched a 2-billion-euro catch up program that provides financial resources for a variety of compensatory measures. However, many schools had already reacted to the pandemic beforehand and implemented appropriate measures. Against the background of the many funded initiatives as well as the individual initiatives that have been implemented in German schools, this paper examines what determines whether schools offer compensatory measures. Exploiting data from a teacher survey (N = 1648 teachers in 104 schools) in Germany, we tested the predictive power of various school aspects for the degree of compensatory measures realized at the school site to help students make up for possible learning losses due to COVID-19-related distance learning. Our findings from latent regression analyses and relative weight analyses, both at teacher and at school level, confirm the significant role of the existing culture of inclusion at a school for predicting a school’s degree of compensatory measures offered. At the same time a range of other investigated school aspects only indirectly predicted compensatory measures, particularly via the culture of inclusion at school. We discuss the findings against the background of the theoretical foundation and the methodological limitations of the present study.