What Influenced District Decisions To Extend Distance Learning During The Pandemic. New Research Has An Idea (And It’s Not The Teachers Union).
Over at Forbes.com, a quick look at a working paper that offers a mew idea about what influenced the length of distance learning,
A new working paper from school finance experts Mark Weber (Rutgers) and Bruce Baker (University of Miami) asks the question, “Does school funding matter in a pandemic?”
Weber and Baker note that there has already been a batch of research done looking at a correlation between returning to in-person school and political affiliation or race or covid prevalence or union strength (as witnessed by the House hearing, the “unions kept schools closed” narrative is popular on the right).
Studies that look to a correlation between in-person learning and school spending have found no real pattern. But Weber and Baker suggest another approach.
They use a measure called “spending adequacy.” There’s some fancy math involved, but in a plain English write-up of the paper, Weber explains:
Every district has an adequacy target: the amount it needs to meet a particular educational objective. The amount a district spends under or above its target is its adequacy.
Funding adequacy can depend on the various challenges the district faces, including Finding that adequacy target amount is a task for researchers using “long-established empirical methods.” But the idea is simple enough. Let’s say East Egg and West Egg both spend $10,000 per student. But East Egg’s adequacy target is $7,000, and West Egg’s is $13,000. That means that even though they are spending the same amount, East Egg has hit and exceeded spending adequacy, while West Egg is coming up short.
Weber and Baker found a direct correlation. The more adequate a district’s spending was, the more likely it was to have more days of face-to-face schooling; the less adequate, the more likely to have more days of distance learning.