Revisiting Evidence on the Role of Funding Adequacy in School Reopening During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Response to Weber and Baker

In the 2020–21 school year, during the COVID-19 pandemic, districts across the United States varied in whether and for how long they offered virtual, in-person, or hybrid learning to their students. Weber and Baker introduced funding adequacy as a determinant of school reopening decisions. While they documented a strong association between funding adequacy and learning modality decisions during the pandemic, their analysis did not control for local partisanship or union strength—well-established predictors of school reopening. I replicated their analysis and found that controlling for partisanship and union strength substantively attenuated but did not eliminate the association between funding adequacy and school reopening in the United States during the pandemic.