Edsurge Releases U.S. K-12 Districts COVID-19 Response Guide and Tableau Trend Analysis Viz
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Ready or not, the start of the 2020-2021 school year is upon us requiring K-12 districts across the U.S. to implement their reopening plans. In the preceding months, planning largely took place in a vacuum: what were other districts thinking? What had been learned? What might be missing from a district’s own plan? While data points in the form of announcements and shared frameworks was available via district websites, the content was scattered. A holistic, organized view was missing.
Over the summer, the award-winning education and technology news organization, EdSurge, addressed this gap. Partnering with Social Context Labs, they developed a repository of nearly 400 K-12 district plans from across the U.S. Collected plans with detailed services were coded, categorized, and saved to a database.
The powerful potential of this COVID-19 response plan data centers on its ability to be aggregated and analyzed. With support from Salesfore.org and Tableau’s Solutions Engineers, Tableau dashboards were developed to provide a visual analytic interface into the data, opening up previously unattainable insights.
As a result, EdSurge recently released the guide, “What’s the Plan? K-12 School Districts are Preparing to Resume and Reopen“. It allows interested districts or casual internet users can interactively explore the data, right from the Edsurge website. A holistic perspective is now within easy reach.
As an example of the insights available, on August 19, of the 375 district plans collected, 54% supported some level of remote instruction while 38% planned for in-person instruction. 35% planned for a remote-only reopening.
Other examples of collected information and the percentage of districts incorporating it range from the type of safety precautions districts are taking, what will technology and connectivity support include, and, for teachers, what type of professional development on new delivery methods will be available. The Tableau viz allows users to drill-drill down to the individual districts represented, and link to view their actual plan.
Access to the tool as well as Edsurge’s analysis and commentary on trends is available from the their website.
Dan Bradley
Dan Bradley is a Principal Solution Engineer for Tableau’s Higher Education Field Education Team. Based in Chicago, he works with higher education institutions in the Central and mid-Atlantic regions of the U.S. In addition to technology, Dan has a background in education administration, including an M.S. in Higher Education Administration and Policy. Dan's mission is to help the people of higher education become data-reflective practitioners who can see, understand, and act on their data. *Opinions are my own and not the views of my employer*
