What are the political consequences of this frustration? Across Virginia’s 132 school districts, we examined Youngkin’s performance relative to Donald Trump’s in 2020, in an effort to assess the effect of district school closures. As the figure below clearly shows, school closures were associated with significant movement toward the Republican candidate. In districts with local public schools open for less than a full month of in-person learning, Youngkin outperformed Trump by nearly 2 percentage points. When we controlled for other factors that could explain Youngkin’s overperformance—such as the percentage of the eligible electorate that is white in each school district and the district’s baseline level of support for Trump in 2020—the margin narrowed, but school closures still explained anywhere from one-half to one percentage point of Youngkin’s overperformance in a given locality…

Parental frustrations aren’t likely to abate anytime soon. First, the negative effects of remote learning on students’ well-being may persist. A recent study by economists with the National Bureau of Economic Research found steep declines in student learning during the 2020-21 school year; districts that relied more heavily on remote learning saw the steepest declines of all. And parents don’t need studies to know that school closures have been a policy failure.

Second, public schools are still far from their pre-pandemic normal. Public school schedules remain in flux—to say nothing of polarizing debates over masks and vaccine mandates. Virginia has been at the center of a wave of “mental health” closures: Burbio reports that nearly 10 percent of school districts in the commonwealth have curtailed in-person learning days to appease school employees.