@EdWorkingPaper{ai22-660,
title = "Assessing School District Decision-Making: Evidence from the COVID-19 Pandemic",
author = "Alvin Christian, Brian Jacob, John D. Singleton",
institution = "Annenberg Institute at Brown University",
number = "660",
year = "2022",
month = "October",
URL = "http://www.edworkingpapers.com/ai22-660",
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 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.},
}