Extreme Temperatures and Educational Inequality: The Protective Role of Family and School Socioeconomic Resources

This study examines the intersection of extreme temperatures and socioeconomic status (SES) in shaping disparities in children's academic performance. As climate change accelerates, extreme weather events are becoming more frequent, disproportionately affecting populations from lower SES backgrounds who are more vulnerable to environmental stressors. Existing research suggests that extreme temperatures negatively impact academic performance, but little is known about how these impacts differ across socioeconomic groups or whether family or school contexts provide more effective protection. This study addresses these gaps by investigating how SES at two institutional levels moderates the relationship between exposure to extreme temperatures and children's test scores. Using data from the Italian National Institute for the Evaluation of Education (INVALSI) linked with daily temperature records from the E-OBS gridded dataset, I analyze over 2.5 million students across five grade levels from 2013 to 2022. By exploiting within-individual-municipality variation over time through two-way fixed effects models, I estimate how exposure to extreme temperatures in the year prior to the test affects academic performance and how SES at the family and school levels moderates these effects. Results reveal that extreme temperatures significantly reduce test scores, with these effects varying systematically by socioeconomic status. When examining both dimensions simultaneously, family resources and school SES composition both emerge as significant moderators, each providing independent protection of similar magnitude. This study advances understanding of the stratifying effects of climate change on education and provides evidence that targeted interventions at the household and school levels may offer effective protection for disadvantaged students.