What can we learn from the research on public school reopening decisions in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic?

Background: After the near-universal school closures in the United States at the start of the pandemic, lawmakers and educational leaders made plans for when and how to reopen schools for the 2020-21 school year. As school reopening plans and data sets aggregating reopening statuses became available, researchers moved quickly to assess how a range of public health, political, and demographic factors were associated with school reopening and parent preferences for in-person and remote learning.

Purpose: This paper provides a review of K-12 public school reopening decisions in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic. There are two important insights from this research. First, we can learn from the findings themselves: the way schools and districts reopened during the COVID-19 pandemic has lessons about how our school system leaders make decisions in times of crisis and how those decisions are shaped by different actors, interests, and contextual factors. Second, we can learn from the limitations of this research—specifically, some cautionary wisdom about rapidly responding to new research questions in education with large-scale quantitative studies.

Research Design: I review studies on K-12 public school reopening in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic. There are two distinct but related questions in the literature that I used to guide my review. The first is, “What factors are associated with the decisions that districts or schools made to reopening in-person instruction in the 2020-21 school year?” The second question is, “What factors are associated with the racial and socioeconomic divergence in preferences for and participation in in-person instruction?”

Conclusions: The existing literature identifies factors associated with reopening, including: partisanship, teachers’ union strength, district demographics, and COVID-19 rates. The association between these factors and modality offered was strongest at the beginning of the 2020-21 school year and weakened over time. Most studies do not capture how these factors may have been interrelated, nor do they provide evidence of the processes through which these factors influenced decision-making. Also, few studies consider operational decisions beyond modality. These limitations identify directions for research on educational decision-making during times of crisis. They also offer some cautionary wisdom about rapidly responding to new research questions in education with large-scale quantitative studies.