Author Reply to “Revisiting Evidence. . . During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Response to Weber and Baker”

First, we are grateful for the author’s interest in our work, and pleased to find they were able to replicate our results.

Second, we believe the attenuated results the author finds confirm our primary conclusion: school funding is an important factor to consider when studying the pandemic instruction models delivered by schools. Previous work used simple, inadequate measures of school spending in their models; when the models in these studies showed these measures of spending were not statistically significant factors in determining pandemic instruction, the authors erroneously concluded school funding was not a factor.

Our measure of spending adequacy—which, importantly, accounts for many of the differences in spending necessary to achieve a common outcome with a variety of different students in different contexts—yielded results which show school funding did, in fact, matter a great deal. Now, even after accounting for political partisanship, our finding stands.

Third, while we are intrigued by these new results, and while we are pleased they conform with our findings, we urge caution in interpreting them. Funding adequacy is certainly affected by funding capacity: in other words, districts with lower property wealth value and resident income are not going to be able to as easily fund their schools adequately as districts with higher property values and incomes.

However, adequacy is also a result of policy choices, many (but not all) at the state level—and those choices may be reflected in political outcomes. It is quite likely, for example, that a “red” state will choose to have a less robust system of school funding than a “blue” state. It is difficult, therefore, to disentangle adequacy from political partisanship. To the extent that adequacy and politics are endogenous, models using measures of both factors will face issues of collinearity, making it impossible to determine precisely how much each affected pandemic schooling decisions.

In the end, we believe the most important finding of our work is that school funding did matter during the pandemic, much in the same way it has been shown to matter for student outcomes. The author’s findings appear to support this conclusion. Again, we thank them for their interest in our work.