Are School Reopening Decisions Related to Union Influence?

Objective The COVID‐19 pandemic led to widespread school closures affecting millions of K‐12 students in the United States in the spring of 2020. Groups representing teachers have pushed to reopen public schools virtually in the fall because of concerns about the health risks associated with reopening in person. In theory, stronger teachers’ unions may more successfully influence public school districts to reopen without in‐person instruction. Methods We examine the relationship between teachers’ union strength and the reopening decisions of 835 public school districts in the United States using regression analyses. Results We find that school districts in locations with stronger teachers’ unions are less likely to reopen in person even after we control semiparametrically for differences in local demographic characteristics. These results are robust to four measures of union strength, various potential confounding characteristics, a further disaggregation to the county level, and various analytic techniques and datasets. We do not find evidence that measures of COVID‐19 risk are correlated with school reopening decisions. Conclusion Our findings that school closures are uncorrelated with the actual incidence of the virus, but are rather strongly associated with unionization, implies that the decision to close schools has been a political—not scientific—decision.