The Biden administration will soon begin collecting data from thousands of U.S. schools to find out how they have been affected by the pandemic, including how many have returned to in-person instruction, officials said Friday.
Led by the Education Department, the effort will collect monthly data from 7,000 schools on a range of topics related to COVID-19. It’s the first federal effort to gather data on the pandemic’s impact on education.
President Joe Biden called for the data in a Jan. 21 executive order on school reopening. The Trump administration declined to collect data on the subject, saying it wasn’t the role of the federal government to do so.
Chief among its purposes, the data will provide a national look at schools’ operating status, including how many are offering remote learning. It will help answer a simple but previously elusive question: How many schools have reopened?
Answering that question is important for state and local officials working to reopen, and it will help measure Biden’s progress on his goal to have most of the nation’s K-8 schools opened within his first 100 days in office.
The survey results will also help officials understand and address education disparities that have worsened amid the pandemic, said Ian Rosenblum, an acting assistant secretary of the Education Department.
“To do that, we need more information about how students are learning during this pandemic — and we simply don’t have it right now,” he said in a statement.
Along with information about schools, the survey will ask how many individual students are being taught online, along with their attendance rates.
It also asks for breakdowns by demographic characteristics including race, socioeconomic status and whether they have disabilities.
That could shed further light on disparities that have emerged, including findings that school districts in which the vast majority of students are white have been far more likely to have in-person instruction.
