Assessing School District Decision-Making: Evidence from the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic drew new attention to the role of school boards in the U.S. In this paper, we examine school districts' choices of learning modality-whether and when to offer inperson, virtual, or hybrid instruction-over the course of the 2020-21 pandemic school year. The analysis takes advantage of granular weekly data on learning mode and COVID-19 cases for Ohio school districts. We show that districts respond on the margin to health risks: all else equal, a marginal increase in new cases reduces the probability that a district offers in-person instruction the next week. Moreover, this negative response is magnified when the district was in-person the prior week and attenuates in magnitude over the school year. These findings are consistent with districts learning from experience about the effect of in-person learning on disease transmission in schools. We also find evidence that districts are influenced by the decisions of their peers.

The Politics of School Reopening During COVID-19: A Multiple Case Study of Five Urban Districts in the 2020–21 School Year

“…Houston and Steinberg (2022), however, show that when examining variation between districts within states, "counties with higher Covid case rates had lower in-person instruction rates" (p. 19). In addition, Christian et al (2022) found that in Ohio, marginal increases in a school's COVID-19 cases reduced the probability that school would be in-person the next week. Thus, earlier studies' reliance on countylevel data and national (rather than within-state) comparisons may explain why they found COVID-19 rates to be insignificant predictors.…”

The distribution of in‐person public K‐12 education in the time ofCOVID: An empirical perspective

“…Also focusing on districts' initial fall instructional mode decisions, DeAngelis and Makridis (2021) emphasize the influence of politics as well as how per‐pupil spending decreases and COVID‐related death rate increases correspond with in‐person instruction increases. Finally, Christian et al (2022) assess granular weekly learning mode data from Ohio public school districts and argue that, at the margins, COVID‐19 infection rates as well as decisions by peer school districts informed learning mode decisions.…”

“…Both Dee et al (2021) and Oster et al (2021), by contrast, draw on the more limited Burbio learning mode data set that includes information from only 1200 US public school districts (representing 46% of kindergarten through Grade 12 schools). Similarly, while Christian et al (2022) draw from the COVID‐19 School Data Hub (CSDH, 2022) data set, their study includes only Ohio public school districts. Second, while Oster et al (2021) explore how access to in‐person learning modes varied across student groups (as well as geography and school level), their analyses, while helpful, are largely descriptive in nature.…”

“…Brought into sharper relief with the benefit of hindsight is that school districts' responses to COVID‐19 in general, and decisions about student learning modes in particular, became politicized (Barrios & Hochberg, 2020; Christian et al, 2022; Grossmann et al, 2021; Haderlein et al, 2021; Hartney & Finger, 2020; Horowitz, 2020). Indeed, in their study of school districts' initial learning mode decisions for the 2020–2021 school year, Hartney and Finger (2020) find “a clear and substantial connection between politics and district [initial] re‐opening plans” (p. 3).…”

Single Family Schoolyards: Residential Zoning and School Segregation.

“…Further, school districts boundaries are frequently redrawn in the United States. In the overwhelming majority of cases, this is done by a school board, a governing body made up of elected officials drawn from the local community (Land 2002;Christian, Jacob, and Singleton 2022). In densely populated portions of the country, this redistricting often involves contiguous districts "trading" portions of land under the jurisdiction of each.…”