@EdWorkingPaper{ai22-575,
title = "Public Support for Educators and In-Person Instruction During the Covid-19 Pandemic",
author = "David M. Houston, Matthew P. Steinberg",
institution = "Annenberg Institute at Brown University",
number = "575",
year = "2022",
month = "May",
URL = "http://www.edworkingpapers.com/ai22-575",
abstract = {In spring 2020, nearly every public school in the U.S. closed at the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. Existing evidence suggests that initial decisions to re-open schools for in-person instruction were generally unrelated to Covid case and death rates. Instead, local political partisanship and teachers union strength were better predictors of school re-opening status in fall 2020. We replicate and extend these analyses using data collected over the entire 2020-21 academic year. We demonstrate that Covid case and death rates were, in fact, meaningfully related to initial rates of in-person instruction. We also show that all three of these factors—Covid, partisanship, and teachers unions—became less predictive of in-person instruction as the school year continued. Conversely, the relationship between prior student achievement and the rate of in-person instruction increased in salience. We then leverage data from two nationally representative surveys of Americans’ attitudes toward education and identify an as-yet-undiscussed factor that predicts in-person instruction: pre-pandemic public support for increasing teacher salaries. We speculate that education leaders were better able to manage the logistical and political complexities of school reopenings in communities with greater support for educators.},
}