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

Abstract

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, most schools across the United States abruptly transitioned to remote, virtual learning in the spring of 2020. For the 2020-2021 school year, however, public school districts' instructional mode decisions (in-person, hybrid, and remote) varied across districts and throughout the school year. This study focuses on factors that informed school districts' instructional mode decisions and how student access to in-person instruction, in turn, distributed across districts and students (and their families). Levering the leading nationwide data set gathered by the COVID-19 School Data Hub ("CSDH"), supplemented by district per-pupil spending information as well as various state-level data, this study analyzes the percentage of in-person instruction for the 2020-2021 school year offered by 11,063 regular public school districts from 42 states. Core findings underscore that school districts with Republican governors and in rural areas provided comparably more in-person schooling. Conversely, school districts with higher enrollments and higher percentages of underrepresented minority students provided less. Furthermore, COVID-19-related death rates and the likelihood of in-person schooling were positively related. These findings, while mixed, nonetheless raise troubling equal educational opportunity doctrine questions.