Throughout the coronavirus pandemic, a lack of centralized, national data on schooling has made it difficult for parents, educators, policymakers and researchers to make decisions and analyze trends.
On Wednesday, a team at Brown University led by Emily Oster, an economist and author, is launching the Covid-19 School Data Hub, a site that includes data from about 56,000 schools across 31 states. It is one of the most comprehensive efforts yet to document how schools operated during the pandemic, and, eventually, the researchers hope, measure the impact on children and the education system itself.
The site’s data will show when school buildings were open, closed or operating in hybrid mode. In 11 states, the hub can tally the number of students who participated in each mode of learning. It also includes counts of coronavirus cases discovered in schools in 30 states.