It’s October already! There are many things that are challenging right now, but as a data nerd, I will confess that one thing that is throwing me off is not having usual SBAC results to crunch and share with y’all. (Though I have been working on a citywide synchronous/asynchronous instruction time analysis that I’ll hopefully share out via Crunched in upcoming weeks.) I’ve been thinking a lot about how COVID-19 has impacted our existing K-12 data systems. All schools in Oakland are still in 100% remote learning mode. The state is using public health data to decide when schools can reopen, but how are schools getting data to decide what to do for students?
Why this matters:
Figure 1. Graph from OUSD/GO’s #SchoolAfterCOVID survey showing daily communication families received, disaggregated by ethnicity. (#SchoolAfterCOVID Survey Results)
Figure 2. Table from LAUSD’s student engagement report showing weekly participation rate breakdowns across different races. (LAUSD Student Engagement Online During School Facilities Closures)
Since many of our traditional measures are no longer available to us, we need new forms of disaggregated data. For example, say a school does wellness calls to all students and tracked the amount of time spent on each student. They can then disaggregate this data to see if the most vulnerable students are getting more or less time than their peers and adjust their programs accordingly. In fact, we could do this for everything, from academic reading interventions to number of 1:1 interactions.
With the current lack of publicly available data, I’m struggling to get a data pulse-check on how students are doing citywide, and I’m sure others in the Oakland community (think of the busy parent!) are left searching and wondering, too. As our schools work to innovate and redesign their systems for a school year with remote and (maybe) hybrid learning, I hope we build in and/or tweak existing data systems to better serve students, educators, parents, and the community. In my next blog, I’ll offer some more specific ideas on how we can get there.
My name is Carrie Chan, and I’m Educate78’s data analyst (aka resident data nerd and cruncher). As a former OUSD student, I care a lot about Oakland public schools. This blog series, “Crunched!”, takes a data-driven approach to important, relevant questions facing Oakland public schools, sharing out easily digestible data takeaways. Please email me with ideas, requests, or feedback.