Politics, Covid, and In-Person Instruction During the First Year of the Pandemic

Abstract

In spring 2020, nearly every U.S. public school closed at the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. Existing evidence suggests that local political partisanship was a better predictor of in-person instruction than Covid case and death rates in fall 2020. We replicate and extend these analyses using data collected over the entirety of the 2020–21 academic year. We affirm that local political partisanship was an important initial predictor of county-level in-person instruction rates. We also demonstrate that, under certain conditions, Covid case and death rates were meaningfully associated with initial rates of in-person instruction. We reveal that partisanship became less predictive—and prior average student achievement became more predictive—of in-person instruction as the school year continued. 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: public support for increasing teachers’ salaries.