Assessing School District Decision Making: In-Person Schooling and COVID-19 Transmission

Alvin Christian (), Brian Jacob () and John D. Singleton ()
Additional contact information
Alvin Christian: Department of Economics and Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy University of Michigan Ann Arbor, MI 48109
Brian Jacob: Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy University of Michigan Ann Arbor, MI 48109
John D. Singleton: Department of Economics University of Rochester Rochester, NY 14627

Education Finance and Policy, 2025, vol. 20, issue 2, 344-377

Abstract: Recent controversies have highlighted the importance of local school district governance, but little empirical evidence exists evaluating the quality of district policy makers or policies. In this paper, we take a novel approach to assessing school district decision making. We posit a model of rational decision making under uncertainty that emphasizes districts learning over time. We test the predictions from the model using data on a set of highly visible and consequential decisions facing school district leaders—the choice of learning mode during the 2020–21 school year. We find that district behavior is consistent with a Bayesian learning process in several key respects. Districts respond on the margin to health risks: All else equal, a marginal increase in new COVID-19 cases reduces the probability that a district offers in-person instruction the next week. This negative response is magnified when the district was in-person the prior week and attenuates in magnitude over the school year, suggesting that districts learn from experience about the effect of in-person learning on disease transmission in schools. We also find evidence that districts are influenced by the learning mode decisions of peer districts, but not their peers' experiences with in-person instruction and disease transmission, which implies that some important frictions exist.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1162/edfp_a_00433

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:tpr:edfpol:v:20:y:2025:i:2:p:344-377

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://mitpressjour ... rnal/?issn=1557-3060

Access Statistics for this article

Education Finance and Policy is currently edited by Stephanie Riegg Cellini and Randall Reback

More articles in Education Finance and Policy from MIT Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The MIT Press ().