Working Paper: NBER ID: w28455
Authors: Dan Goldhaber; Scott A. Imberman; Katharine O. Strunk; Bryant Hopkins; Nate Brown; Erica Harbatkin; Tara Kilbride
Abstract: The decision about how and when to open schools to in-person instruction has been a key question for policymakers throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. The instructional modality of schools has implications not only for the health and safety of students and staff, but also student learning and the degree to which parents can engage in job activities. We consider the role of instructional modality (in-person, hybrid, or remote instruction) in disease spread among the wider community. Using a variety of regression modeling strategies , we find that simple correlations show in-person modalities are correlated with increased COVID cases, but accounting for both pre-existing cases and a richer set of covariates brings estimates close to zero on average. In Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) specifications, in-person modality options are not associated with increased spread of COVID at low levels of pre-existing COVID cases but cases do increase at moderate to high pre-existing COVID rates. A bounding exercise suggests that the OLS findings for in-person modality are likely to represent an upper bound on the true relationship. These findings are robust to the inclusion of county and district fixed effects in terms of the insignificance of the findings, but the models with fixed effects are also somewhat imprecisely estimated.
Keywords: COVID-19; in-person schooling; education policy; community spread
JEL Codes: I1; I2
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| OLS findings (L00) | overstate true relationship (C51) |
| in-person schooling (I23) | increased COVID-19 cases (I19) |
| pre-existing COVID-19 cases (I12) | increased COVID-19 cases (I19) |
| low pre-existing COVID-19 cases (I14) | no contribution to increased spread (F62) |
| moderate to high pre-existing COVID-19 cases (I12) | increased spread (F62) |
| in-person schooling (I23) | COVID-19 spread (I14) |
| in-person schooling (I23) | increased spread (F62) |