Department of Ed to Survey on Status of School Reopenings
- By Dian Schaffhauser
- 02/09/21
The U.S.
Department of Education will be running a survey to
understand the status of in-person learning at the nation's schools.
The Institute
of Education Sciences (IES) will oversee the project,
dubbed the "NAEP
2021 School Survey." Currently, the agency noted,
there isn't enough data to understand the status of school re-opening
or how students are learning. The survey is intended to fill that
gap.
The announcement
came on the heels of President Biden's Jan. 21 Executive
Order to ensure "the collection of data necessary
to fully understand the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on students
and educators, including data on the status of in-person learning."
Data collection will
be handled by IES' National
Center for Education Statistics and will include
questions about:
-
Whether schools
are open with full-time, in-person instruction, open with online and
in-person instruction or fully remote;
-
Enrollment by
instructional mode and attendance rates by race/ethnicity,
socio-economic status, English learner status, and disability
status;
-
Frequency of
in-person learning for students;
-
The average
number of hours of synchronous instruction for students in remote
instruction mode; and
-
Student groups
prioritized by schools for in-person instruction by selected school
characteristics.
Analysis will
examine findings based on student demographics, including race,
ethnicity, disability, English-language-learner status and free or
reduced lunch status or other indicators of family income.
"President
Biden is committed to the safe reopening of schools and to addressing
the educational disparities and inequities that the pandemic has
exposed and exacerbated," said Ian Rosenblum, acting assistant
secretary of the Office
of Elementary and Secondary Education, in a statement.
"To do that, we need more information about how students are
learning during this pandemic--and we simply don't have it right now.
The administration, educators, parents and education leaders need
meaningful data in order to achieve these critical goals, and this
survey will give them that."
"It's
critically important to get a sense of how students are learning,"
added James Lynn Woodworth, commissioner of the National Center for
Education Statistics. "NCES will use this data to both provide
the most accurate immediate view about school operating statuses and
to better interpret the impact of current school operations on the
results of the NAEP assessments scheduled to be conducted in 2022."
The survey will
collect data from about 3,500 schools that enroll fourth-graders and
an equal number of schools that enroll eighth-graders. Those are the
same grades that participate in NAEP testing, otherwise known as the
Nation's
Report Card. And, in fact, the same online data
collection systems and infrastructure used for NAEP will also be used
for this project.
The surveying will
take place monthly, starting this month, and continue through June
2021. Findings will be reported.
Additional
information is openly available on
the NAEP website.
About the Author
Dian Schaffhauser is a former senior contributing editor for 1105 Media's education publications THE Journal, Campus Technology and Spaces4Learning.