Are School Reopening Decisions Related to Funding? Evidence from over 12,000 Districts During the COVID-19 Pandemic

ABSTRACT

In theory, public school districts with more funding might be more likely to reopen in person if resources are a primary driver of their reopening decisions during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, it is also possible that these decisions are influenced by other factors including political partisanship, incentive structures, and special interests. Using data on over 12,000 school districts in the United States, we quantify the relationship between public school revenues and expenditures per student and their reopening decisions in Fall 2020. Across a range of statistical specifications, including comparisons of districts within the same county with one another, we find an economically and statistically significant positive association between remote instruction and revenue per student. Our models control for district-level demographic characteristics, together with county COVID-19 risk and partisanship variables. We also find that increases in the share of remote school districts in a state are associated with increases in the growth of counselors and social workers, relative to 2019, even after controlling for the overall employment decline in the state. Our results are consistent with models of rent seeking behavior by teachers unions with unintended consequences on children.

KEYWORDS:

• Reopening
• covid-19
• school choice
• education policy
• state funding

Acknowledgment

We would like to thank Emsi, specifically Kevin Kirchner, for providing us with the job posting data.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

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2. Agostinelli et al. (2020), for example, found that “school closures have a large and persistent effect on educational outcomes that is highly unequal” and that “high school students from poor neighborhoods suffer a learning loss of 0.4 standard deviations, whereas children from rich neighborhoods remain unscathed.” Christakis et al. (2020) found that missed instruction during 2020 could be associated with an estimated 13.8 million years of life lost associated with reductions in educational attainment based on U.S. studies.

3. Provide At Least $175 billion To Stabilize Education Funding & Reopen Schools Safely. National Education Association. Retrieved from https://educationvotes.nea.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Funding-PPE-one-pager-0920.pdf.

4. Weingarten, R. (2021). A road map to safely reopen our schools. American Federation of Teachers. Retrieved from https://www.aft.org/column/road-map-safely-reopen-our-schools.

5. Reconciliation Recommendations of the House Committee on Education and Labor. Congressional Budget Office Cost Estimate. Retrieved from https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2021-02/hEdandLaborreconciliationestimate.pdf.

6. Secretary DeVos Quickly Makes Available an Additional $54 Billion in COVID Relief Aid for K-12 Students, Teachers, and Schools. U.S. Department of Education. Retrieved from https://www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/secretary-devos-quickly-makes-available-additional-54-billion-covid-relief-aid-k-12-students-teachers-and-schools.

7. CARES Act: Education Stabilization Fund. U.S. Department of Education. Retrieved from https://covid-relief-data.ed.gov/.

8. Private schools pull students away from public schools. Axios. Retrieved from https://www.axios.com/private-schools-coronavirus-public-schools-d6aaf803-d458-4301-a3a7-71364b00a5b0.html.

9. Public School Funding Per Student Averages 80% More Than Private Schools. Just Facts. Retrieved from https://www.justfactsdaily.com/public-school-funding-per-student-averages-80-more-than-private-schools.

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11. Oregon’s Coronavirus Education Lockdown. The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved from https://www.wsj.com/articles/oregons-coronavirus-education-lockdown-11585697080.

12. Cyber charters in Pa. keep teaching amid confusion in coronavirus shutdown order. WHYY. Retrieved from https://whyy.org/articles/cyber-charters-in-pa-keep-teaching-amid-confusion-in-coronavirus-shutdown-order/.

13. COVID-19 IMPACT: School District Status. MCH Strategic Data. Retrieved from https://www.mchdata.com/covid19/schoolclosings.

14. Back to school statistics. Fast Facts. National Center for Education Statistics. Retrieved from https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=372#PK12_enrollment.

15. Local Education Agency (School District) Finance Survey (F-33) Data, v.1a – Provisional. Common Core of Data. National Center for Education Statistics. Retrieved from https://nces.ed.gov/ccd/files.asp#Fiscal:1,LevelId:5,SchoolYearId:32,Page:1.

16. We thank an anonymous referee for the suggestion to use district-level data. We have also experimented with county-level controls from the American Community Survey (2014–2018) through the U.S. Census Bureau, including: age, race, population, education, and household income. The limitation with these is that they become collinear when we include the county fixed effects.

17. U.S. Presidential Elections. MIT Election Data and Science Lab (MEDSL). Retrieved from https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/VOQCHQ.

18. USA Facts. US Coronavirus Cases and Deaths. Track COVID-19 Data Daily by State and County. Retrieved from https://usafacts.org/visualizations/coronavirus-COVID-19-spread-map.

19. Table 11. Summary Tables. 2018 Public Elementary-Secondary Education Finance Data. U.S. Census Bureau. Retrieved from https://www.census.gov/data/tables/2018/econ/school-finances/secondary-education-finance.html.

20. These data do not adjust for differences in cost of living.

21. Financial Turmoil: Open or Remote? What it Means for School District Budgets. Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University. Retrieved from https://edunomicslab.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Financial-Turmoil-Webinar-Mar3.pdf.

22. How COVID-19 triggered America’s first female recession in 50 years. The Economist. Retrieved from https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/03/08/how-COVID-19-triggered-americas-first-female-recession-in-50-years.

23. U.S. Parents Say COVID-19 Harming Child’s Mental Health. Gallup. Retrieved from https://news.gallup.com/poll/312605/parents-say-covid-harming-child-mental-health.aspx; Social Factors Most Challenging in COVID-19 Distance Learning. Gallup. Retrieved from https://news.gallup.com/poll/312566/social-factors-challenging-covid-distance-learning.aspx.

24. These data have been used in several recent papers to study the effects of stay-at-home laws and other child care quality regulations, like child-to-staff ratios, on the demand for child care labor (Ali et al., 2021a, 2021b).

25. Specifically, unobserved heterogeneity in the capabilities of a county – that is, factors that might make a county under-resourced – will be positively correlated with increases in social workers and counselors since there might be more mental health challenges. However, those unobserved factors should be negatively correlated with the ability to go remote since, by construction, they have fewer resources and going remote might be tougher.