Remote instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic and school suspensions

This paper analyzes individual-level data for nearly 900,000 public high school students in Texas to investigate the association between remote instruction in the 2020–2021 academic year with student suspensions in the following academic year. Both the predicted probability of and length of suspension first increase then decrease with the number of weeks of remote instruction. This pattern largely holds when the analyses are stratified by student grade, gender, race, and ethnicity. The estimates suggest a nuanced association between remote instruction and student behavioral outcomes that should be considered in future decisions regarding in-person instruction.