School leaders asked for a nationwide data system to track coronavirus cases and school closures. The Department of Education wouldn’t create one.
IN JANUARY 2017, MERE days before former President Donald Trump's inauguration, the outgoing cabinet secretaries of the Obama administration sat beside the incoming cabinet secretaries – many still in the confirmation process – for a joint cabinet meeting that had become an important tradition to ensure a smooth transition of power from one administration to the next.
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The lengthy meeting was designed as a sort of role-playing exercise, in which they were given a series of potential national crises. The soon-to-be former secretaries huddled with their replacements and outlined how they dealt with similar situations during their tenure, what issues might arise and what protocols were in place to ensure each part of the federal government could tackle the crisis effectively.
As former Education Secretary John King tells it, one of the scenarios given to the room was how to deal with a pandemic. But not just any pandemic – specifically, how to deal with a respiratory illness that originated overseas and spiraled into a global pandemic.
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"We talked about the need to have clear, science-based communication with the public, and part of that included having good data," says King, who was paired with Betsy DeVos, now a former education secretary herself, but still in the confirmation process at the time of the transition meeting.
Three years later that exact scenario shuttered every school district in the country for more than 50 million children in the U.S.
"The idea was that they would be ready to put those plans into action if they were faced with these kinds of disasters," he says. "They just didn't do any of those things."
Now, a year into the pandemic, school leaders, policy makers and education researchers reflecting on the unprecedented upheaval in the U.S. public education system point to that lack of federal data collection and dissemination as the reason the majority of children in the country aren't back learning in classrooms full-time, five days a week. It's also, they say, one of the biggest reasons why the question of when and how to reopen schools for in-person learning is the most politically toxic debate to spiral out of the pandemic.
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The Trump administration didn't simply shy away from tracking school districts, their coronavirus infection rates and their reopening strategies. DeVos and White House officials said it was not her responsibility or that of the federal government – even though education leaders across the country had been all but begging for a comprehensive database to help them navigate the pandemic.
"I'm not sure there's a role at the department to collect and compile that research," DeVos said. "The data is there for those who want it."
Except the data wasn't there for those who wanted it – and everyone wanted it.
"I do believe part of the reason we're finding ourselves in this situation is because we haven't had the data in which to ground public discourse and some of the decisions," says John Bailey, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who previously served as special assistant to former President George W. Bush on education policy and labor issues.
"You hear a lot of epidemiologists talk about the original sin of the COVID-19 response in the United States being the lack of robust, aggressive testing to help us understand where it was going and what strategies for mitigating it were most effective," he says. "I think the same is true for education. If we had had some of this data and more robust data collection, things would be different."
For school leaders, standardized data was difficult to come by due to a lack of federal guidance for how states, counties and school districts tracked COVID-19 cases, which led to a patchwork of reporting requirements – some of which were publicly available, others not – that stymied efforts to draw any concrete conclusions to help city and school officials make complicated and contentious decisions about reopening and closing schools.
In fact, it wasn't until December – nearly 10 months after the virus first shuttered schools – that researchers had finally amassed enough data from the various state and county public health databases and directly from school districts themselves to draw more informed conclusions about whether and how the virus spreads in schools, whether schools are significant drivers of infection rates and what conditions may allow for schools to safely and successfully reopen for in-person learning.
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"I kept thinking it was so implausible that no one was doing it, that at any moment it would happen," says Emily Oster, an economics professor at Brown University who, in recognizing the void of school-specific data, partnered with AASA, the School Superintendents Association, to create a database of schools, their COVID-19 community transmission rates and how they're providing instruction.
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"We ended up getting started doing our data collection in August, after schools had already opened," Oster says. "And the reason for that was partly that I just kept thinking, 'OK, surely we're not actually going to not have this information. And even if it's not going to be the federal government, surely state governments will start doing this' – and they did to a larger extent, even though it took some time."
"It is such an egregious decision, and I just could not believe that this hadn't happened."
Other researchers and education policy experts stepped in to try to fill the void as well. The Center on Reinventing Public Education and Education Week's research center were among the very first to track how schools were operating since they first began closing last March.
"People have said to me that they think CRPE acted as the informal arm of the federal government by collecting data, and that's just ridiculous," says Robin Lake, director of the center, which is housed at the University of Washington – Bothell. "That never should have had to happen. This should have been a national data collection effort that was organized by the government to collect essential data about schools and connect that with health realities."
"We were happy to jump in and we would have regardless to try to be able to meet the need, but we're still not there," she says. "We still don't have the basic data that other countries have been collecting and learning from. So we're now forced to look overseas to learn about the connection between school closure and reopening strategies and health and safety."
In fact, the U.S. still has no clear understanding of how many students are receiving in-person education, full-time, five days a week. A handful of states still don't even know how each of its school districts are operating – virtually, hybrid or fully reopened.
The largest school tracking model, Burbio, which pulls data directly from school districts, estimates that about three-quarters of all students in the U.S. attend a school that offers some type of in-person learning – though that could mean anything from in-person for elementary school students only, or for students with disabilities only, or through a hybrid model in which students attend school in person just one or two days each week.
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"It's astonishing," Oster says. "We still don't know in many places how many kids are in in-person school. I think that's a big piece of data that's missing. And that's something DeVos could have done. That's the job of the Education Department."
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Other organizations have tried to pick off different aspects of the coronavirus' impact on schools, too. NWEA, the nonprofit provider of assessments, has been trying to capture the amount of academic learning loss, while the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers have been tracking educator layoffs – to name just a few of the ongoing efforts.
But because the Trump administration's didn't establish any type of national database, the school reopening debate spiraled into a political nightmare, Lake, Oster and others say, with local, school and public health officials weighing the benefits of keeping schools closed to curb the spread of the coronavirus with the serious academic, social and emotional learning loss, which is borne disproportionately by Black, Latino and Native American students.
"Talk about a missed opportunity," Lake says. "Part of the reason local politics have gotten so difficult is the fear and mistrust that has occurred throughout the country and the misinformation."
Lake posits that having the type of data school leaders were asking for sooner would have likely bolstered arguments to reopen schools.
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"That's the big catastrophe of not having that information," she says. "It let fears fester and it prevented schools from opening when they should have."
Oster agrees.
"There are some barriers to reopening that were going to be difficult to get past," she says. "But one of the things we have seen is that as more data comes out, more places have opened. Anything that would have let us learn that in a more official way faster would have been helpful."
Without it, though, school districts were largely swept up into whatever local flavor of politics their community adopted – politics that was driven in part by a reliance on data from other countries, whose governments, for the most part, had more aggressive risk mitigation strategies, or by a reliance on small-scale case studies from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, whose investigators were publishing reports that, for example, documented whether and how COVID-19 spread in 17 rural schools in Wisconsin.
As critics have noted, the experience of 17 rural schools in Wisconsin does little to nothing for crowded urban schools in Baltimore or Philadelphia trying to reopen.
The Biden administration is attempting to repair the data snafus, though White House officials and Education Department staff are more concerned at this point, a year into the pandemic, with helping schools reopen than establishing a comprehensive data system. On his first full day in office, the president tasked the Education Department's Institute for Education Sciences with collecting data to better understand how students are receiving education and breaking those findings down by race, income, disability and English learner status, among other things. The effort is already underway.
Wanting to provide school leaders with some tangible overview of all of the small-scale studies published in the U.S. and the larger, more comprehensive data collection done overseas, AEI's John Bailey published on Thursday a sweeping analysis of 130 studies.
Taken together, they bolster the narrative that schools should be able to reopen for in-person learning safely. The biggest take-aways: Coronavirus transmission in schools mirrors community transmission, but doesn't necessarily drive it, and wearing masks, physically distancing, frequent sanitization and good ventilation are the most important risk mitigation strategies.
But far more elementary questions remain.
"We don't even know, frankly, what percentage of the schools are open or closed or hybrid, or what percentage of students are in those modalities. We have estimates based on survey data, but we don't have real data," Bailey says. "This reopening issue has become so polarized, and needlessly so in many respects. It's made parents incredibly cautious because they don't know what data to believe and so they don't know who to believe."
Indeed, a bigger problem that Bailey and others foresee is how to earn back the public's trust in government data so they feel good about using it to make big decisions about things like reopening schools for in-person learning during a pandemic.
"People don't use data they dont trust," says Paige Kowalski, executive vice president of Data Quality Campaign, which advocates for better education data. "There is a story about the kind of trust we need to build so that people trust the information that they're getting so that they can act on it and make decisions."
The point is particularly salient as new variants of COVID-19 – variants that seem to be infecting children at higher rates than the original strain – are expected to become the most common coronavirus diagnosis in short order. The B. 117 variant, for example, is threatening to reshutter some schools in Minnesota. The state's public health department has already recommended curbing recreational activities and youth sports.
"We know the trust in our institutions and data has been declining, not just in education, but across everything," Kowalski says. "We have to build that trust back, and it's not going to happen overnight."
Lauren Camera, Senior Education Writer
Lauren Camera is a senior writer at U.S. News & World Report. She joined the News team as an ... READ MORE
Tags: Donald Trump, public schools, K-12 education, education, health, public health, children's health, students, coronavirus, pandemic, Department of Education, United States