Classroom heat widens the achievement gap

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Extreme heat events are becoming more frequent and intense with climate change. Children are particularly vulnerable to such environmental stressors. This column uses nationwide exam data from Japanese primary and secondary schools to explore how heat exposure affects student learning. Heat exposure lowers student test scores, with disadvantaged students experiencing a greater reduction in scores. Access to air conditioning in schools substantially offsets these adverse effects and especially benefits lower performers. Investing in school air conditioning could promote both efficiency and equity.

With climate change, extreme heat events are occurring with greater frequency and intensity. Children are especially susceptible to these environmental stressors, owing to their physiological immaturity. It is therefore vital to examine how classroom heat exposure affects learning, since cognitive skills are closely tied to later labour market outcomes and broader economic inequality.

In recent years, research has shown that climate change affects numerous societal outcomes, including health, agriculture, labour productivity, income, cognition, and conflict (Carleton and Hsiang 2016). Yet most studies measure only average impacts, leaving distributional effects – such as who disproportionately bears the burden of heat-related damage – and their implications for inequality largely unexplored. For example, Cho (2017) and Park et al. (2020) document the cumulative impact of heat exposure on student learning. However, both focus on high school students in Korea and the US who are preparing for college entrance and are more likely to come from higher socioeconomic backgrounds. This makes them less suitable for addressing a central question: who bears the greatest burden of heat-related learning loss?

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