Water Under the Bridge: Understanding the Magnitude of Learning Loss from the 2014 West Virginia Water Crisis through the Lens of Social Capital

Abstract

Investigating the 2014 West Virginia Water Crisis provides an opportunity to explore where limited research has been conducted. Due to schools in 9 counties being directly impacted by ‘do not drink’ orders, many students were kept out of the classroom for multiple weeks in January of 2014. While a decrease in test scores relative to the rest of the state was to be expected, this thesis uses a mixed methods approach to investigate the impacts of the crisis and understand why there may have been a discrepancy between how many weeks of school students missed and how much learning was predicted to have been lost. For the quantitative aspect, I used a Difference-in-Differences (DID) model to estimate the magnitude to which there was some divergence in mean standard deviations from the rest of the state’s standardized assessment scores. Based on the magnitude of the coefficient for the DID model being -0.062 standard deviations, there is an indication that across the nine counties impacted most by the chemical spill, students’ learning losses were worth approximately four weeks of missing in-class instruction compared to students in non-impacted counties. In reality, schools in the impacted counties lost between two and three weeks when accounting for harsh winter weather that afflicted some of the same counties impacted by the chemical spill. To account for the estimated additional week of lost time in the classroom, the qualitative content analysis of this thesis theorizes that there was another reason for students to miss school in the impacted counties; The breakdown of the social contract between citizens, the government, and industrial powers led to a substantial lack of trust amongst civilians. When applying this dynamic to social capital theory, I posit that there may have been an increase of absenteeism, due to the erosion of the trust component of the social contract, amongst some families in the impacted counties that would then encourage them to keep their children out of schools beyond their reopening; this would lead to a trend of lower test scores after 2014 compared to counties in West Virginia that were not impacted.