• Media type: E-Book
  • Title: Assessing School District Decision-Making : Evidence from the COVID-19 Pandemic
  • Contributor: Christian, Alvin [Author]; Jacob, Brian Aaron [Author]; Singleton, John D. [Author]
  • Corporation: National Bureau of Economic Research
  • Published: Cambridge, Mass: National Bureau of Economic Research, September 2022
  • Published in: NBER working paper series ; no. w30520
  • Extent: 1 Online-Ressource; illustrations (black and white)
  • Language: English
  • Keywords: Coronavirus ; Epidemie ; Schule ; USA ; General ; Analysis of Education ; Arbeitspapier ; Graue Literatur
  • Reproduction note: Hardcopy version available to institutional subscribers
  • Origination:
  • Footnote:
  • Description: 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 in-person, 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
  • Access State: Open Access