COVID-19 Safety Concerns, School Governance Models, and Instructional Modes: An Exploration of School Quality Perspectives during the Pandemic

ABSTRACT This paper explores how parents’ COVID-19 safety concerns relate to school governance models (SGMs), instructional modes (i.e. in-person, hybrid, online), and perceptions of school quality during the pandemic. Leveraging two waves of household survey data across 47 states and the District of Columbia, we first conduct a series of multinomial regression analyses to explore the extent that parents’ safety concerns relate to SGMs, as well as the extant that SGMs relate to instructional modes. We then explore the extent that parents’ safety concerns, SGMs, and instructional modes relate to perceptions of school quality. We also examine whether the relationship between SGMs and perceptions of school quality vary across instructional modes. We find that parents’ safety concerns varied widely across SGMs and that when considering these variations, SGMs appeared to be able to match parents’ safety concerns with appropriate instructional modes. Although charter and private schools were consistently associated with better perceptions of school quality, we did not observe frequent associations between instructional modes (e.g. virtual instruction) and perceptions of school quality. However, we did find that the relationship between SGMs and perceptions of school quality significantly varied across instructional modes, such that hybrid instruction tended to increase the likelihood of perceiving poor school quality at charter schools but decrease these perceptions in private schools. We conclude with implications for policy and practice.