Revisiting Evidence on the Role of Funding Adequacy in School Opening During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Response to Weber and Baker (2025)

This study is a response to Weber and Baker's (2025) study titled: "Does School Funding Matter in a Pandemic? COVID-19 Instructional Models and School Funding Adequacy."<br><br>The purpose of this study is to update Weber and Baker's (2025) original analysis by including a measure of local partisanship and a proxy measure for union strength. This analytic decision is informed by the consistent finding in prior literature on COVID-19 and school reopening in the United States that partisanship and union strength are associated with reopening decisions (Singer, 2022). Weber and Baker did not include a measure of these factors in their original study.<br><br>This data repository includes original data files, code, and cleaned data (Stata format) for partisanship data by district (as measured by the Trump and Biden vote shares in 2020). It also includes code to replicate the analysis using Weber &amp; Baker's data (available at the link below) and adds the partisanship and union strength measure.<br><br>Link to original Weber &amp; Baker (2025) article: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/23328584251327581Link to original Weber &amp; Baker (2025) data repository: https://doi.org/10.3886/E220523Singer, J. (2025). What Can We Learn from the Research on Public School Reopening Decisions in the United States During the COVID-19 Pandemic?. Teachers College Record, 127(6-7), 46-65.