K-12 schools across the country are open for the spring semester, even as America faces serious outbreaks in almost every state and a more contagious strain—more contagious for both children and adults—begins to spread. At the national level, we are still overwhelmingly unable to track how the virus is spreading in these settings.
Read MoreMany school districts across the nation will once again open for in-person instruction later this month. But data on how COVID-19 spreads in schools remain inadequate. At the request of one of my readers, I’ve updated my annotations of state K-12 data reporting, first published on December 6.
Read MoreRounding out the issue with a couple of updates on school data. Updates include: new cost estimates for school COVID-19 safety, a report advocating for mass testing, and a break for college data.
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In total, 35 states report case counts in all public K-12 schools. 6 states report in an incomplete form, either not including all schools or not including specific case counts. 9 states do not report school COVID-19 data at all. These states are: Alaska, California, Georgia, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and Wyoming.
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On November 18, New York City mayor Bill de Blasio announced that the city’s schools would close until further notice. The NYC schools discrepancy is indicative of an American education system that is still not collecting adequate data on how COVID-19 is impacting classrooms—much less using these data in a consistent manner.
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Emily Oster, Professor of Economics and Public Policy at Brown University, collaborated with software company Qualtrics and several national education associations to build a COVID-19 school dashboard which focuses on case rates, not counts. I spoke to Oster this past Tuesday, only four days after the dashboard’s public release. She explained more detail about the project’s methodology and her future plans for tracking COVID-19 in schools.
Read MoreNew school data for mid-September include reopening indicators from the CDC, New York City, and Los Angeles.
Read MoreNew York state is launching a dashboard that will provide data on COVID-19 in public schools. This dataset promises to be much more complete than any other state’s reporting on COVID-19 in schools. But I haven’t been able to closely examine these data yet, because the dashboard has yet to come online.
Read MoreSince last week’s issue, four more forms of official state reporting on COVID-19 in schools have come to my attention. Plus, national sources on reopening plans and college cases.
Read MoreSince I reviewed COVID-19 data in public school systems last week, a few things have changed. A couple of updates to state sources and independent dashboards.
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