A company should judge a training program by how staff perform when their usual support fails, as well as in normal weeks.
The reasoning comes from a working paper on a parenting program and children's school tests. Four researchers at the University of Chicago and the University of California, San Diego wrote it. The National Bureau of Economic Research issued it in October 2026. The paper has not been peer reviewed. The Kenneth and Anne Griffin Foundation, the Arnold Foundation and the National Institutes of Health paid for the research.
The paper follows an experiment that began in 2010 in Chicago Heights, a relatively low-income suburb of Chicago. Families with children aged 3 to 5 were assigned by lottery to a parenting program, a preschool or a control group. The control group got no teaching from the study. The parenting program held 18 workshops a year on how parents can teach their children at home. Parents were paid for attending, for homework and for their children's test results.
The early gains faded. Before Covid-19, the children in the parenting program and the control group scored about the same on state school tests. Then Illinois moved its public schools to remote teaching in March 2020.
After the closures, the parenting program's effect came back. The paper measures scores in standard deviations, a unit that compares a change with the usual spread of scores. Scores in the control group fell by 0.30 standard deviations. Scores in the parenting group fell by only 0.11, a difference the authors call statistically significant. The preschool group fell by 0.25, about the same as the control group.
The analysis covers 338 children with state test scores from both before and after the closures. Of these, 136 were in the parenting program and 202 in the control group. That is half of the children in tested grades in both years, because many left public schools or their district's testing missed them.
For scale, a 2023 review of 42 studies in 15 countries measured how far students fell behind during the pandemic. The average shortfall was 0.14 standard deviations. The review's authors put that at about 35% of a school year's learning. The working paper's authors say the children in their study likely lost more because most of the families were low-income, Black or Hispanic.
The authors call what the parents kept "latent human capital", meaning skill that is still there but does not show. In their reading, schools did so much of the teaching that the parents' part could not be seen in test scores. When the schools closed, the parents' part showed.
The effect came mainly from families whose rewards for homework and test results went into a college savings account. That money could be used only if the child went on to college. The authors reason that this reward was still active during the closures. Families paid those rewards in cash at the time showed a smaller effect that was not statistically significant.
The authors apply the idea beyond schools. They write that it is "pervasive in fields ranging from corporate management to public health". As an illustration, they picture a tightly run employer whose fixed procedures might hide an employee's initiative until a reorganization. They suggest that technology shifts, policy changes and economic shocks can serve as "stress tests" for earlier programs. The paper's own evidence covers only these children's school tests.
Using a disruption as a stress test for staff training goes beyond the paper. An outage, a reorganization or a new system takes away the usual support for a while. Those weeks are when a company should compare trained and untrained staff. The comparison uses records the company already keeps, so its cost is some of the HR and operations teams' time.
What to do first:
- Head of HR: when a training program has more applicants than places, pick who goes first by lottery and keep the list.
- Head of operations: in the week after an outage or reorganization, compare the output of trained and untrained staff on that list.
- Chief financial officer: before cutting a program whose test gains have faded, ask for that comparison from the last disruption.
Children whose parents had attended more of the workshops lost less during the closures, the paper finds.
