The academic year is coming to an end for most schools pretty soon (I’ve been off for about a week, but I’m a college student), so we thought it’d be appropriate to check in on the state of state K-12 COVID-19 data. We’ve been keeping track of the metrics reported by states throughout the fall and spring, and you can find our annotations of those sources here.
We had a few metrics that we looked for in a school tracker (if one exists for a state at all, which we’ll get to.) These include cases, hospitalizations, deaths, tests, test positivity rate, and in-person enrollment. We also wanted to know if trackers were separating student cases from staff cases. While we didn’t expect every state tracker to account for all of these, a robust tracker should include at least a few.
Turns out, no state trackers reported all of our wished-for metrics. Most trackers—37 of them—just reported cases and called it good, and 24 of them separated cases by students and staff. There are too many states in this vein to list them all, but a few include Alabama, Indiana, Idaho, the Dakotas, South Carolina, and Oregon (which is my home state so I’m a bit more disappointed.)
But when we narrow it down to slightly more granular metrics like hospitalizations, the number of trackers that report them drop significantly. Only five states reported deaths: Colorado, Illinois, Kansas, North Carolina, and Virginia. Three reported hospitalizations: Illinois, Kansas, and Georgia. Two reported tests: Georgia and New York. (One caveat for Georgia: they’re not actually reporting cases in schools, they’re reporting cases in school-aged children.)
To assess how robust a particular state’s tracker was, we assigned it an index number based on how many metrics it reported. (The methodology for doing so can be found here.) Essentially, a higher number indicates a more robust tracker. With this methodology, the top five states were New York (19), Kentucky (14), Texas (14), New Hampshire (14) and South Carolina (13). The bottom three were Utah, Arizona, and Kansas (all 7.) The average was between 8 and 9, with a median of 9.
However, so far we’ve been talking about states with school trackers at all. 11 states do not track school cases (at the very least, we couldn’t find their school tracker). I’ll actually list these out: Alaska, Arkansas, California, Iowa, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Utah, and Wyoming.
In pointing this out, I’m not trying to shame the public health authorities in these states who are working very hard to get this pandemic under control. I’m trying to get the point across that statewide school data is still very fractured and very incomplete. And while we wait for a complete federal tracker, state data is really all we have. COVID-19 is still going to be a threat in schools as long as people under 16 can’t get vaccinated; we should at least know how much of a threat it’s turned out to be.
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.
As of this past Monday, K-12 teachers in every state are now eligible for vaccination. Teachers were already prioritized in most of the country, but Biden directed the remaining states to adjust their priority lists last week. The federal government also pulled teachers into the federal pharmacy program, previously used for long-term care facilities.
This is great news, of course—teachers should get vaccinated ASAP so that they can safely return to their classrooms, allowing schools to reopen in person with much lower risk. Vaccinations have become a stipulation for reopening, in fact, in some states like Oregon, even though the CDC has said this should not be a requirement.
But there’s one big problem: we have no idea how many teachers have actually been inoculated. Sarah wrote about why we need occupational data on vaccinations a few weeks ago:
For example, NYC has included “in-person college instructors” in eligibility for the vaccine since January 11. Wouldn’t it be nice to know just how many in-person professors have gotten vaccinated? It’d sure be helpful if Barnard ever decides to do in-person classes again. Or what about taxi drivers? Again in NYC, because that’s where I live, they became eligible for vaccination on February 2. From a personal standpoint, I’d like to know if I could send my taxi driver to the hospital if my mask slips.
The data situation hasn’t improved since February. New York’s report of vaccine coverage among state hospital workers is still the closest thing we have to occupation reporting. A recent article from EdWeek sheds some light on the issue, citing privacy concerns and a lack of data from vaccine administration sites themselves:
Some state agencies and districts have said privacy concerns prevent them from tracking or publishing teacher vaccination data. Others say vaccine administration sites are not tracking recipients’ occupations and they are not in position to survey employees themselves.
It appears that state and local public health departments were even less prepared to track occupations of vaccine patients than they were to track those patients’ race and ethnicity. But without these numbers, it may take even longer for students to return to classrooms, as evidenced by this quote from Megan Collins, co-director of the Johns Hopkins Consortium for School-Based Health Solutions:
“We’re seeing a substantial disconnect. There are states not prioritizing teachers for vaccine that are fully open for in-person instruction, and others that are prioritizing teachers for vaccines, but aren’t open at all,” Collins said. “If states are going to use teacher vaccinations as a part of the process for safely returning to classrooms, it’s very important then to be able to communicate that information so people know that teachers are actually getting vaccines.”
Biden’s administration has also given schools more money for testing, allocating $650 million in grants to help public schools get access to tests, testing supplies, and logistical assistance. But of course, school testing isn’t being tracked either. New York continues to be the only state that reports detailed data in this area; see our K-12 school data annotations for more info.
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.
This past week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released a long-awaited guidance on school reopening.
While the CDC isn’t able to actually regulate what schools do, many state and local leaders look to the agency for advice on how to best follow the available scientific evidence. And, if you’ve been following the reopening debate, you know that there are a lot of differing opinions on how to best follow the available scientific evidence. Pro-opening advocates hoped to see the CDC strongly insist that schools go in-person, perhaps with limited cleaning and allowing less than six feet of distancing. Pro-closure advocates hoped to see the agency insist that teachers needed to be vaccinated before they could go back to their classrooms.
Rather than strictly advocating for either closed or open classrooms, however, the guidance takes a moderate route. It emphasizes three strategies already familiar to school leaders: layering different COVID-19 protection methods (masks, distancing, ventilation, and so on); looking at COVID-19 cases in the surrounding community to determine whether it’s safe for you to open; and having multiple opening “phases” available depending on community safety. Frequent testing and vaccinations of school staff are included as “additional” options, which the CDC suggests schools should employ if they have the resources.
New York Times reporter Apoorva Mandavilli, who has covered the epidemiological questions around reopening, wrote a Twitter thread that further explains why this is a moderate route:
My big question of this guidance, though, was: what does this mean for data? As we’ve written in the CDD before, the Biden administration has the opportunity to correct a longstanding failure of its predecessor. Under Biden, national public health leadership could require that all public schools report their case counts, testing numbers, and enrollment numbers to the federal government—and publish these figures in a systematic way. But the new CDC guidance largely retains the status quo for school COVID-19 data.
“Every COVID-19 testing site is required to report to the appropriate state or local health officials all diagnostic and screening tests performed,” the guidance says. This requirement has been in place since last spring. Similarly, the CDC says that school administrators should notify parents, teachers, and staff when cases are reported—again, such internal reporting systems are already in place.
But there’s no mention of making these data public. The CDC is not promising a national school data dashboard, or even requiring state and local public health departments to put their data up on a portal with the rest of their COVID-19 figures.
You’d think that state and local agencies wouldn’t need such a push, over a year into the pandemic. But, as we’ve reported in the CDD before, the vast majority of states currently fail to publish K-12 COVID-19 data in a way that makes it possible to actually track transmission rates in schools.
While 34 states and D.C. regularly report counts of COVID-19 cases that have occurred in schools, 16 states report incomplete data—or no data at all. And for the states that do report case counts, most don’t report enrollment numbers, making it difficult to discern whether the virus is impacting a single family or running rampant in a school. (Four cases in a school with 4,000 kids in classrooms, for example, is vastly different from four cases in a school with 100 kids in classrooms.)
New York continues to be the model state for K-12 data, as it’s one of only four to report enrollment numbers and the only state to report school-specific testing numbers. As the CDC seems to consider systematic school testing “optional,” it seems likely that this will continue.
We can see that most counties in the U.S. have high enough community transmission rates—or, COVID-19 cases in the general public—that the CDC’s new guidance would categorize them as being in the “red zone,” a.k.a. too dangerous for schools to be open. But without case numbers for schools themselves, reported in a standard way, it’s hard to know whether the CDC’s assessment is accurate.
School data continues to be a massive gap in America’s pandemic tracking. Readers, I urge you to see what data are available for your state, county, and district—and push your local officials to be more transparent.
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.
The medical journal JAMA released an article written by three CDC officials about opening schools. The conclusion was that it appears that reopening schools safely is possible—but before we turn everyone loose, there are a lot of caveats. And critically, protective measures that need to be taken are not limited to the schools themselves.
When experts say that schools can be reopened safely, it means that so far, schools haven’t been driving community transmission the way other public spaces remaining open have. In a case study comparing 154 students who had been infected with SARS-CoV-2 and 243 who had not, schools posed much less of an infection risk than other social activities. The paper also cited two case studies, one from North Carolina and one from Wisconsin, where cases in general were fairly uncommon, and the vast majority of the recorded cases came from cases acquired from the community, not the schools.
It’s clearly inaccurate to say that COVID-19 simply hasn’t hit schools. Indeed, if it hadn’t, we wouldn’t need our school trackers. And while many US school outbreaks have mostly been small, it’s not impossible a future outbreak could be anything but. The JAMA paper cites an outbreak in Israel where out of 1161 students and 151 staff members tested, 153 and 25 cases were found in students and staff, respectively, within two weeks of reopening. “Crowded classrooms…, exemption from face mask use, and continuous air conditioning that recycled interior air in closed rooms” were cited as contributing to the outbreak. Additionally, school-related activities such as extracurriculars and athletics could also pose a higher risk.
For longtime readers of this newsletter or even for anyone who’s kept up with the news, the path to reopening schools may sound familiar. Measures taken need to include universal mask use, a robust screening program, physical distancing, and hybrid models of education to reduce classroom density (including online options). But, critically, the article also stresses that measures need to be taken in the surrounding community to reduce spread, singling out indoor dining in particular. Indeed, schools are not isolated islands; the health of students returning for school depends on if a community can control the spread. Schools themselves may not be driving much community spread, but if COVID-19 is running uncontrolled in the community, it’s still not going to be safe to hold in-person classes.
While it is exciting that schools reopening may be on the horizon, safe schools are nowhere near promised if governments and administrations aren’t willing to take necessary measures to control community spread. Closing restaurants and gyms is politically unpopular in many places. The economic incentives to keep indoor dining and to open movie theaters are hard to ignore. It may be a choice – open your schools and keep tight restrictions everywhere else, or loosen restrictions on dining and gyms and keep schools online. It’s not an easy choice. But, as the JAMA article points out, “Committing today to policies that prevent SARS-CoV-2 transmission in communities and in schools will help ensure the future social and academic welfare of all students and their education.”
Two days after the JAMA article was published, NYT columnist David Brooks published a column decrying teachers unions and insisting that schools reopen, citing financial concerns for students in the future and current mental health problems. He pointed out that typically, white students have had greater access to in-person learning than black and brown students, going on to say: “I guess I would ask you, do Black lives matter to you only when they serve your political purpose? If not, shouldn’t we all be marching to get Black and brown children back safely into schools right now?”
The response was swift, with many pointing out that the pandemic has disproportionately affected black and brown communities in terms of infection and death rates, and that they are more likely to live in underfunded communities where it might be a lot harder to keep students and staff safe. and that teachers maybe shouldn’t be blamed for not wanting to go back to work when there is still uncontrolled spread across the country. This Twitter thread sums up a lot of the backlash.
We do know that black and brown children have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic; Hispanic/Latino and Black children account for 38.2% of cases in their age group while Hispanic/Latino and Black people account for only 31.4% of Americans. If schools do reopen in person, it’s clear that actions need to be taken to address structural inequity that would prevent them from doing so safely.
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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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.
Perhaps the most newsworthy opening this week was in Chicago, where students returned to classrooms for the first time since last March. Chicago’s teachers union has waged an ongoing battle with Mayor Lori Lightfoot and district CEO Janice Jackson, whom teachers claim have not resolved ongoing safety issues in school buildings. The district is screening staff through optional rapid tests once a month; about 1,200 tests have been reported so far, including three positive results. Four Chicago students and 34 other staff members reported COVID-19 cases this week.
Meanwhile, President-elect Joe Biden announced a $175 billion plan aimed at getting students back to in-person learning. The plan includes $35 billion for higher education and $130 billion for public K-12 schools, with a focus on increasing testing, PPE for students and teachers, ventilation, and other safety measures for which educators have been calling since last spring.
Biden hopes to open “the majority of K-8 schools,” according to Education Week’s Evie Blad. A recent report by the CDC suggests that in-person learning for these younger students, when implemented safely, is not likely to seed an outbreak in the wider community. (College-aged students in the 18-24 range are more likely to cause such outbreaks.)
The report says: “CDC recommends that K–12 schools be the last settings to close after all other mitigation measures have been employed and the first to reopen when they can do so safely.”
But, as Blad points out, it will be difficult to track the impact that more school reopening would have on broader communities, as data on COVID-19 cases in schools are still limited and fractured. There is still no federal dataset on COVID-19 in American public schools. State datasets are fully unstandardized; and most states only report case counts, making it difficult to actually analyze how school outbreaks compare across schools.
As of our most recent K-12 state annotation update, only Delaware, New York, and Texas are providing enrollment numbers, and only New York is providing testing numbers. (Thank you to intern Sarah Braner for doing the update this week!)
In last week’s recommended reading section, I featured an op ed in Nature by school data leader Emily Oster calling on President-elect Biden to develop a unified, national system for tracking COVID-19 in schools. I wanted to highlight it again this week because I absolutely agree with Oster here. As important as her and others’ compilation efforts have been in filling the school data gap, no outside dashboard can replace the work of the federal government:
We need to be able to identify the virus spreading in schools and work out what went wrong. The data we do have suggest that outbreaks in schools are not common, but they do happen. We need a way to find them systematically.
And here’s one more school-related metric we should be tracking: teachers are starting to get vaccinated. According to a recent Kaiser Family Foundation analysis of state vaccination priority groups, 31 states have put K-12 and childcare personnel in their Phase 1 group. In Utah, teachers and childcare workers are even included in Phase 1A. California and New York, two of the biggest states, started vaccinating teachers this past week.
(If you want a heartwarming read this long weekend, I recommend this piece from THE CITY that profiles NYC teachers and other essential workers getting vaccinated in the middle of the night.)
But most states are barely reporting basic demographic data for their vaccinations, much less telling the public the occupations of those who have gotten shots. Without knowing how many teachers have been vaccinated, it will be difficult to factor these inoculations into reopening decisions—or determine how vaccination impacts future school outbreaks.
Many 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. The annotations are posted on a new resource page, which also includes notes on the four major national sources for COVID-19 school data. I’ll be updating this page every two weeks.
Here’s how the state data stand, as of January 1:
34 states and the District of Columbia are reporting COVID-19 cases in K-12 schools, in some form
7 states are reporting incomplete data on school outbreaks or cases in school-aged children
20 states are separating out school case counts by students and staff
5 states are reporting deaths linked to school outbreaks
1 state is reporting COVID-19 tests conducted for school students and staff (New York)
2 states are reporting in-person enrollment (New York and Texas)
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.
Rounding out the issue with a couple of updates on school data:
CDC issues new estimates for the cost of keeping K-12 schools safe: It would take about $22 billion for all public schools in the country to safely reopen in the spring, according to the CDC. The state-by-state estimates incorporate face masks, desk shields, cleaning supplies, transportation, and more. But these estimates are “significantly lower” than other estimates calculated by education organizations, as the CDC failed to include additional costs for face masks, food service, and contact tracing, according to U.S. News & World Report.
Rockefeller Foundation advocates for mass testing in schools: “Altogether, K-12 schools, their students, teachers and staff, will need approximately 300 million Covid-19 tests performed each month from February through June,” write the authors of a new Rockefeller report focused on safely controlling COVID-19 spread while vaccines are rolled out. The report provides detailed guidelines on testing and case studies from which readers can learn.
The College COVID-19 Outbreak Watchlist goes on winter break: After 15 weeks of updating his watchlist of colleges with high COVID-19 case numbers, Benjy Renton is taking a couple of weeks off. (From this dashboard, anyway.) Many schools have also suspended their COVID-19 reporting, as few students are on campus.
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Longtime readers might remember that, back in August, I surveyed the available data on how COVID-19 is impacting American schools.
At the time, very few states were reporting school-specific data, even as school systems around the nation began to reopen for in-person instruction. In that early survey, I highlighted only Iowa as a state including district-level test positivity data on its COVID-19 dashboard. This dearth of data disappointed, but did not surprise me. There was no federal mandate for states, counties, or school districts to report such data, nor did the federal government compile such information.
There is still no federal mandate for school COVID-19 data, despite pleas from politicians and educators alike. So, as school systems across the country close out their fall semesters amidst a growing outbreak and prepare for the spring, I decided to revisit my survey. I sought out to find how many schools are reporting on COVID-19 cases in their K-12 schools, which metrics they are reporting, and how often. To get started with this search, I used the COVID Monitor, a volunteer effort run by Rebekah Jones which is compiling K-12 case counts from government sources and news reports.
Overall, many more states are providing school data now than in August. But the data are spotty and inconsistent; most states simply report case counts, making it difficult to contextualize school infections. (For more on why demoninators are important in analyzing school data, see my October 4 issue.)
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.
Most states update their school data either weekly or biweekly. Only 7 states update daily.
Most states do not report counts of deaths and hospitalizations which are connected to school COVID-19 outbreaks. Only 5 states report deaths (Colorado, Kansas, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Virginia), and only 1 state reports hospitalizations (Kansas).
Only 3 states report in-person enrollment numbers: New York, Massachusetts, and Texas.
New York is the only state to report counts of COVID-19 tests conducted for K-12 students and staff.
And here are a couple of example states I’d like to highlight:
New York has the most complete school data by far, scoring 19 out of a possible 21 points on my index. Not only does the state report enrollment and total tests administered to students and staff, New York’s COVID-19 Report Card dashboard includes the test type (usually PCR) and lab each school is using. Test turnaround times are also reported for some schools. This dashboard should be a model for other states.
Indiana has a dashboard that I like because it is easy to find and navigate. You don’t have to search through PDFs or go to a separate dashboard—simply click on the “Schools” tab at the top of the state’s main COVID-19 data page, and you will see cumulative case counts and a distribution map. Clicking an individual school on the map will cause the dashboard to automatically filter. Indiana also reports race and ethnicity breakdowns for school cases, which I haven’t seen from any other state.
Texas provides detailed spreadsheets with case counts and on-campus enrollments for over 10,000 individual schools. The state reports new cases (in the past week), total cases, and the source of school-related infections (on campus, off campus, and unknown). The infection source data suggests that Texas is prioritizing schools in its contact tracing efforts.
Minnesota is one state which provides incomplete data. The state reports a list of school buildings which have seen 5 or more COVID-19 cases in students or staff during the past 28 days. Specific case counts are not provided, nor are specific dates on when these cases occurred. If I were a Minnesota parent at one of these listed schools, I’m not sure what I’d be able to do with this information beyond demand that my child stay home.
As cases surge across the country, more children become infected, and school opening once again becomes a heated debate from New York City to North Dakota, it is vital that we know how much COVID-19 is actually spreading through classrooms. How can we decide if school opening is a risk to students, teachers, and staff if we don’t know how many students, teachers, and staff have actually gotten sick?
Moreover, how can we understand the severity of this threat without enrollment or testing numbers? Reporting that a single school has seen three cases is like reporting that a single town has seen three cases; the number is worth very little if it cannot be compared to a broader population.
Volunteer sources such as the COVID Monitor and Emily Oster’s COVID-19 School Response Dashboard are able to compile some information, but such work cannot compare to the systemic data collection efforts that national and state governments may undertake. If you live in one of those nine states that doesn’t report any school COVID-19 data, I suggest you get on the phone to your governor and ask why.
Also, speaking of New York City, here’s an update to the 3% threshold I reported on last week:
one segment of my newsletter this week focused on the discrepancies around NYC's infamous school closure benchmark: a weekly average test positivity rate of 3%. thanks to different test reporting methodologies, the city's data hit this mark before the state's did. (1/6) https://t.co/Yp5FFu5Sck
On November 18, New York City mayor Bill de Blasio announced that the city’s schools would close until further notice. Students returned to remote learning, while restaurants and bars remain open—even indoor dining is permitted.
This closure came because the city had passed a 3% positivity rate. 3% of all tests conducted in the city in the week leading up to November 18 had returned positive results, indicating to the NYC Department of Health and de Blasio that COVID-19 is spreading rampantly in the community. As a result—and as de Blasio had promised in September—the city’s schools had to close.
But that 3% value is less straightforward than it first appears. In closing schools, de Blasio cited data collected by the NYC Department of Health, which counts new test results on the day that they are collected. The state of New York, however, which controls dining bans and other restrictions, counts new test results on the day that they are reported. Here’s how Joseph Goldstein and Jesse McKinley explain this discrepancy in the New York Times:
So if an infected person goes to a clinic to have his nose swabbed on Monday, that sample is often delivered to a laboratory where it is tested. If those results are reported to the health authorities on Wednesday, the state and city would record it differently. The state would include it with Wednesday’s tally of new cases, while the city would add it to Monday’s column.
Also, the state reports tests in units of test encounters while the city (appears to) report in units of people. (See my September 6 issue for details on these unit differences.) Also, the state includes antigen tests in its count, while the city only includes PCR tests. These small differences in test reporting methodologies can make a sizeable dent in the day-to-day numbers. On the day that Goldstein and McKinley’s piece was published, for example, the city reported an average test positivity rate of 3.09% while the state reported a rate of 2.54% for the city.
Meanwhile, some public health experts have questioned why a test positivity rate would be even used in isolation. The CDC recommends using a combination of test positivity, new cases, and a school’s ability to mitigate virus spread through contact tracing and other efforts. But NYC became fixated on that 3% benchmark; when the benchmark was hit, the schools closed.
Overall, 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. Science Magazine’s Gretchen Vogel and Jennifer Couzin-Frankel describe how a lack of data has made it difficult for school administrators and public health researchers alike to see where outbreaks are occurring. Conflicting scientific evidence on how children transmit the coronavirus hasn’t helped, either.
Emily Oster, a Brown University economist whom I interviewed back in October, continues to run one of a few comprehensive data sources on COVID-19 in schools. Oster has faced criticism for her dashboard’s failure to include a diverse survey population and for speaking as an expert on school transmission when she doesn’t have a background in epidemiology. Still, CDC Director Robert Redfield recently cited this dashboard at a White House Coronavirus Task Force briefing—demonstrating the need for more complete and trustworthy data on the topic. The COVID Monitor, another volunteer dashboard led by former Florida official Rebekah Jones, covers over 240,000 K-12 schools but does not include testing or enrollment numbers.
For me, at least, the NYC schools discrepancy has been a reminder to get back on the schools beat. Next week, I will be conducting a review of every state’s COVID-19 school data—including which metrics are reported and what benchmarks the state uses to declare schools open or closed. If there are other specific questions you’d like me to consider, shoot me an email or let me know in the comments.
The COVID-19 School Response Dashboard has surveyed nearly 1,000 individual schools and districts on their enrollments, case counts, and COVID-19 mitigation strategies. Screenshot retrieved on October 3.
The data sources on COVID-19 in U.S. K-12 schools vary widely, but most of them have one thing in common: they only report case counts.
Texas rescinded school data this past week due to errors. Florida recently began publishing school reports—which list out cases by individual school while failing to provide cumulative totals. But a larger problem for these states and others is that, when case numbers are reported in isolation, there is no way to compare outbreaks at different locations.
Imagine, for example, that you only knew that Wisconsin had seen 18,000 cases in the past week, while Texas had seen 28,000. You would assume that Texas is currently in more dire straights, with more people infected. But adjust for population—divide those case numbers by the populations of both states—and you find that Texas has an infection rate of about 95 people per 100,000 Texans, while Wisconsin has a rate of about 303 people per 100,000, over three times higher. Texas is slowly recovering from its summer outbreak, while Wisconsin is an outbreak site of major national concern.
In the case of school data, enrollment numbers are the key to these comparisons. Knowing how many students are infected in your district may be useful, but unless you know how many students are actually going into school buildings on a regular basis, it is difficult to translate the case numbers into actionable conclusions. The majority of states which report school COVID-19 data do not report such numbers, and even those that do may have incomplete data. New York’s dashboard, for example, currently reports 0 staff members in the New York City school district, which opened for in-person instruction last week.
Volunteer datasets similarly focus on case numbers. The National Education Association School and Campus COVID-19 Reporting Site, built from the crowdsourced spreadsheet of Kansas high school teacher Alisha Morris, compiles case counts from news outlets and volunteer reports. The COVID Monitor, a school dashboard produced by Rebekah Jones’ Florida COVID Action project, combines news and volunteer reporting with state-reported numbers. Both of these efforts are incredibly comprehensive in documenting where COVID-19 is impacting students and teachers, but without enrollment numbers for the schools, it is difficult to use the data for meaningful comparison.
Even the New York Times focuses on case counts. The Times’ review of school COVID-19 cases found extremely scattered public reporting, but the paper failed to include any denominators—not even the county case counts which this paper has been tracking since early in the pandemic. Alexander Russo, columnist at education journal Phi Delta Kappan and friend of this newsletter, recently commented on how such cases-only reporting may paint a misleading picture of the pandemic’s impact.
Clearly, we need denominators for our case counts. And a new dataset is out to provide this crucial metric. 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.
This project sources data by directly surveying schools every two weeks, rather than relying on sporadic news and volunteer reports. And it includes information about school reopening plans and mitigation strategies, such as whether masks, increased ventilation, and symptom screenings are in use. As of the dataset’s most recent update (for the two-week period of September 14 to 27), 962 schools in 47 states are included. These schools report an average student infection rate (confirmed and suspected cases) of 0.62% and an average staff infection rate of 0.72%; both rates are up from 0.51% and 0.5%, respectively, in the previous two weeks. For more initial findings, see this NPR feature on the dashboard, published on September 23.
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. (This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.)
Interview
Betsy Ladyzhets: What is your background in data and education reporting? What have you been working on during the COVID-19 pandemic that led you to this dashboard?
Emily Oster: I am, by training, an economist, so I have a lot of background in data analysis and some in data collection. But most of my work, virtually all of my work has been on health, not on education. I have written a couple of books on pregnancy and parenting, so I have this audience of parents. And during the pandemic, I was writing a lot about kids and COVID. And then that led me to be interested in issues around schools, and putting together this team to do the data collection for the dashboard.
BL: Who else is on the team?
EO: The partnership—the primary people who are doing the work and analysis—is Qualtrics, which is a tech company. And then, there are a number of educational association groups. The School Superintendents Association, the National Association of Elementary School Principals, the National Association of Secondary School Principals, that was the initial core team. Then, we’ve got a lot of distribution help from the charter school alliance, from a bunch of the independent schools associations. A lot of different educational groups have done distribution work.
BL: How did you develop partnerships with these different education groups?
EO: I had expressed in some public forum that I thought there should be more of this data collection, and someone from Qualtrics reached out and said, “We think there should be more of this, too. Maybe we can help.” And around this time, I was connected with a woman at the school superintendents association, who also said, “I think we should do this, maybe we can help.” Those were the two key pieces, and it came together from there.
BL: Yeah, it’s good to have—it seems like a very useful partnership, that you have the tech expertise but also the people who are actually interacting with teachers and students.
EO: Yeah. I think our biggest get for the dashboard, and what is potentially useful about it, is that we start at the school level. We know what the schools are doing. We’re in direct contact with them.
BL: I know from poking around the dashboard and reading the NPR article that the way you’re gathering data is with that direct interface, surveying schools. Why did you choose this method as opposed to looking at news articles or compiling data from public sources?
EO: It was really important for us to understand the context around school reopening before we asked about the COVID cases. We really wanted to know: how many kids do you have in school, are they actually in school or are they virtual, what kind of enrollment do you have? And also, what are you doing as mitigation? To come, ultimately, to understand what’s happening with cases, we really need to start by understanding, like, are you wearing masks? Are you distancing? Are you doing all of these things? So then, if we do see cases, we can go back and look and say okay, can we make any conclusions about which of these precautions are helping.
In particular, these enrollment numbers give us the ability to say something about not just cases, but rates. To be able to say, this is the share of people that are infected. Which I think is a very important number, and arguably more important for decision-making, than counts.
BL: Yeah, I was going to ask about that. Your dashboard, unlike a couple of other school COVID data projects, actually has denominators, so that you can compare case rates.
EO: That’s our thing. That’s our whole pitch. We have denominators.
BL: Why is it so important to have denominators?
EO: I think the importance of denominators is, it tells you something about the actual risk of encountering someone with COVID… If you’re going to send your kid off to school, and if you’re going to send your kid to a school of 1,200 people, I think it is useful to understand—are there likely to be 100 kids in the building with COVID? Is there likely to be one kid in the building with COVID?
And similarly, thinking about the risk to your kid, if your kid is going to be in the building for two weeks, what’s the average experience? Is there a ten percent chance they’re going to get the coronavirus over these two weeks? Is there a one percent chance? I think that that is the thing we should be making decisions on. We really need those denominators to get the rate.
BL: Absolutely. Could you tell me more about how the surveys work? What questions you’re asking, and how often you’re collecting data?
EO: There’s two different avenues for data collection… First, if you’re an individual school, then the way we’re collecting the data is that you enroll in a baseline survey on Qualtrics. We ask you about your enrollment, your opening model, what share of your kids are in person, how many staff you have, are they in person. And then, if you have in-person instruction, we ask you about masking and distancing, what you’re doing on those conventions. And then we ask maybe one or two demographic questions, like are you doing free or reduced-price lunch, or financial aid if it’s a private school.
That [initial survey] is followed up every other week with a survey that is very short. It’s basically, how many confirmed and suspected cases do you have in students and staff, and then [we ask schools to] confirm their in-person enrollment, just to see if there have been large changes in the opening model.
And then, on the district side, we’re asking all the same questions, but—in the case of the districts, there are a number where [superintendents] have said, “We’d like to enroll our entire school district in your thing, and we’re going to give you all of our data.” When we do that, we’re actually collecting the data internally in Excel. We send them an Excel sheet with their schools, they fill out that same information [as in the school survey], and then we come back again biweekly and ask them those same questions. It’s the same information, it’s just that rather than making them go through 25 versions of the same Qualtrics survey, we have it all in one.
BL: What mechanisms do you have in place for flagging errors? I know that’s a concern with this kind of manual back and forth.
EO: On the district side, there’s a cleaning procedure. When the surveys in, obviously we don’t change them, but we look them over. If there’s something that’s wrong, like the number of COVID cases is greater than the number of people, or they’ve reported three billion students enrolled, we go back to the district and ask, “Can you look at this?”
Then, on the individual school side, there’s a bunch of validation built into the Qualtrics survey operation. And we have some procedures which we’re working on ramping up which are going to do a little bit of hand lookup, just to make sure that we’re getting valid data.
BL: What is your sample of schools like so far? Is there a particular area, like any states or types of schools that you have more complete data so far, or any areas where you’re prioritizing in trying to get them to take the surveys?
EO: We’re an equal opportunity prioritizer. We’ll take anybody. There are a few states where we have better representation of private schools, because [private school associations are involved in roll-out]. We have more schools in Washington than elsewhere.
Particularly on the public school side, we’re very concerned about enrolling entire districts. That’s the easiest thing for us, it’s the most robust. It is also—we think it provides the most service to the district. And so we are spending a lot of time doing outreach to states and to districts, trying to get people to encourage their districts to enroll.
BL: Another thing I’m curious about is testing. Just yesterday, the Trump administration announced that they’re going to deploy 150 million rapid antigen tests around the country, once they’re made by Abbott, and they’re going to focus on getting those tests to students and teachers. Is testing something that you’re thinking about tracking?
EO: Yeah. We ask [the schools], are you doing any routine testing of anybody, and most them say they’re not. But I think it would be very interesting to incorporate. Part of my hope for this project is that, over time, as we get more people enrolled and we get more of a rhythm of reaching people routinely, that there will be questions we can add. We’ll potentially get to a place where we’ll say, “Okay, now, a bunch of districts are doing testing, let’s put that in.” And we’ll try to figure out, how common is that, and who’s doing it.
BL: There are also states that are reporting COVID data in schools. I know New York has a dashboard, that’s pretty extensive, while other states report numbers by county or district or just overall. Is your project doing anything with those public data, or with other volunteer projects that track COVID in schools?
EO: Not at the moment. I think that we are eager to—there are a number of states that have very good dashboards, and our goal, one of the things we are working on is, how can we basically pull that in? One of the issues is that most of those dashboards just report cases, and so in order to pull them into what we’re doing, we need to go behind this and say, okay, we need to go behind and actually figure out what the initial enrollments were.
BL: Which states do you think are doing the best job so far?
EO: I mean, New York’s is pretty good. Tennessee has a pretty good dashboard. South Carolina. There’s a few.
BL: I know New York is one—I think it’s the only one that has both testing numbers and enrollment numbers. (Editor’s note: I checked; this is true.)
EO: Exactly.
BL: Last question: how do you expect the dashboard to be utilized in future research, and are you seeing any applications of it so far?
EO: No, it’s literally been, like, four days. My guess is that we will see more—we’ll see some usage by districts, as they try to think about opening, that’s the first use case. Just districts that are opening, trying to think about what’s the right thing to do. My guess is that, in the long run, maybe we’ll see some research with this. That isn’t the goal of the project, but we’ll see.
BL The focus is on helping districts compare to each other.
EO: Exactly, yeah.
Analysis
I’m excited about this dashboard. First of all, it can’t be overstated: denominators are huge. Knowing that the estimated infection rate of K-12 students in the U.S. is under one percent is so much more useful from a decision-making standpoint than the actual number of cases.
Second, the school survey model is a novel method with advantages for one specific group: the very schools included in this dataset. This dashboard is not particularly useful for me, a COVID-19 journalist, right now; its sample size is small, and the data are not currently available for download by outside users. (Oster told me that she is planning to set up a validation feature, so that she and other partners on this project can track how their data are being used.) But the school administrators who fill out the project’s biweekly surveys will be able to see COVID-19 trends for their students and staff, compared to trends at other schools across the country. They are essentially getting free consulting on their school reopening plans.
I have one major concern, however. As Oster explained in our interview, the dashboard currently includes an abundance of private and charter schools in its sample, due to partnerships with private and charter school associations.
According to Education Week, public schools made up 70% of American schools in 2017-2018. In Oster’s dashboard, these schools are 67% of the sample size, while private, charter, and religious schools make up the rest of the sample. At a glance, this seems fairly representative of the country’s school demographics. However, the average public school has far more students than the average private school; without seeing the actual enrollment numbers of the schools included in this dashboard, it is difficult to determine how balanced the dashboard’s sample truly is.
In addition, the dataset’s sample so far shows a bias for suburban schools. The schools surveyed are 37% suburban, 28% rural, 26% urban, and 8% town. Suburban school districts tend to receive more funding than urban districts, and suburban districts are historically sites of school segregation. Finally, this dataset so far heavily represents private schools in Washington, with 106 schools, over 10% of the sample, coming from this state. West Virginia, Alabama, and Mississippi, all more rural states which rank in the bottom ten in U.S. News & World Report’s education rankings, are so far not represented at all.
A recent New Yorker article by Alec MacGillis draws attention to the low-income students of color who may be left behind in this era of remote learning. Students whose parents and guardians need to continue working outside the home, or otherwise do not have the resources to support kids with an array of Zoom links and homework platforms, may lose a year of education if their schools don’t reopen—and yet these students and their families are more vulnerable to COVID-19 if they do go back in person.
The schools which serve low-income minority communities are likely to need this dashboard more than any others. And yet these very schools may be left out of data collection, as their principals and superintendents may not have the bandwidth to fill out even the simplest survey. Extra effort could be needed to ensure that crucial schools are not left behind. The COVID-19 School Response Dashboard, and other future school data sources, must prioritize diversity in their data collection if they are to be truly complete.
COVID-19 Data Dispatch 