Data Gating
Illustration by Thuan Pham
High stakes decision-making isn’t for the meek, so many factors weigh heavily upon those whose stroke of a pen, oral command, or click of the “Send” button launch humans into unknown territory, into consequences that only the best prognosticators can envision.
Many historical choices come to mind: Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon (and those who later murdered him), Henry VIII’s divorce from the Roman Catholic Church, and Harry Truman’s order for the use of atomic bombs on Japan. What went through the minds of those making these premeditated decisions? What did those flow charts look like?
Experts believe that consideration of multiple variables, selective inclusion of those concerned, and careful implementation stages will provide acceptable outcomes, but no one believes everyone will be satisfied with directives that address complex issues, and that potentially affect billions of people. Certainly not when it pertains to our children’s well-being.
Educators across the globe are trying to scrutinize local data to determine what to do with students who are potentially disconnected from essential knowledge and skills that they would be gaining if sitting in a classroom, and with frustrated parents who need to be at work, and don’t remember the associative property of multiplication, or what happens when covalent compounds dissolve in water. Tensions are high as positive case rates are layered over cumulative incident rates while considering the impact of YLL, Years of Life Lost , while also battling the interests of teachers and unions: mathematical interpolation meets politics with the force of an Enhanced F5, bearing down on communities that are ill-equipped to cope.
One data analyst in Wichita offers a unique perspective on what schools should consider when evaluating whether or not to open doors to students. Joy Eakins has experienced Wichita Board of Education decision-making processes, and has been aggressively analyzing the data from which local, county, state, and federal agencies have been utilizing to provide direction to schools and parents during the Covid-19 pandemic. Here are some of her insights into this complex process.
Who’s Missing in the Discussion of School Gating Criteria?
By Joy Eakins
As a parent and a former school board member, one of the things I have watched with great interest this last year is the conversations our community is having around education and the role of public schools through the pandemic.
Central to many of those discussions has been the School Gating Criteria (SGC). People often ask me what SGC is – and the simplest answer is that the SGC is a set of measurements that help define the seriousness of the spread of COVID in a community. The criteria are supposed help school leaders chart their course forward and communicate with stakeholders about the steps they will be taking.
In Kansas, the SGC proposed by the Kansas Department of Education are based on 5 metrics: student absenteeism, county positive case rates, county cumulative incident rates, trends in these incidents rates, and local hospital capacity. Each of these metrics has a set of “gates” that determine what color that criteria is – green, yellow, orange or red. For example, if the two-week test positivity rate is below 5%, then the color for that metric is green. If it’s over 15% then it’s red. Once a final color determination is made, the SGC indicates what type of school activities will take place (in-person, hybrid or remote).
When you first read the SGC, it seems straightforward and simple to implement. But as they tried to apply it, the creators and users found several shortfalls that an effective data leader would have been able to predict and possibly prevent.
For example, the criteria are each assigned a color – but there is no guidance on how to combine those colors and come up with a single color to guide school operations. Boards and administrators saw times last fall where all 4 colors were represented on the rubric, and no one knew how to decide what color to assign.
Or what if the Trend in Rates is “Stable” for your county? In the SGC, the rubric states “Stable” is both orange and yellow. There is no guidance to explain how to choose here either.
With the Hospital Capacity metric, the data isn’t easily available, and the metric is confusing because it does not specify what kind of capacity should be considered – inpatient beds or ICU beds? And what if neither of those is the problem, but hospital staffing is?
I’ve documented additional issues with the SGC here, but the most glaring flaw is that the SGC only provides a picture of what is happening in the community at large – mainly to adults. As it turns out, the CDC found “there is little evidence that schools have contributed meaningfully to increased community transmission.” And, children are not at a high risk for hospitalization or death by COVID. In fact, in Kansas, not a single child has died from COVID and nationwide, children aged 5-17 are 16 times less likely to die from COVID than the comparison group of 18-29 year olds. (This is really astounding when we consider that those 85+ have a rate of death that is 630x higher than the same comparison group.)
What the adopted SGC fail to show is how children are doing when they are not physically present in school. And the data now coming out paints a dismal picture. Researchers investigated the impact of closing elementary schools in the Spring of 2020 found “an estimated 13.8 million years of life lost (YLL)” could be attributed to the closures, meaning that American children’s lives will be shortened by 13.8 million years collectively due to the loss of education last spring. They also found that had schools been left open, taking into account the virus spread and death rates at that time, the YLL would have been less than the 13.8 million years lost. These YLL estimates do not include the impact due to high school dropout rate increases or the impact of closed schools for older children. So this number is likely an understatement of the price our children will pay for the Spring school closure.
But the cost to students’ lifespan doesn’t end there. An estimated 57% of adolescents seeking mental health care receive it in a school-based setting, and 35% receive their mental health services exclusively in school. Schools are so important in helping children get mental health care that new research is showing adolescents age 12-17 saw a 31% increase in mental health-related Emergency Department visits and children age 5-11 saw a 24% increase last fall. It stands to reason that closing schools impacted the ability of those students to receive care, exacerbated their mental health, and increases YLL.
Children’s physical health is also declining. As children sit longer in front of computer screens, researchers are reporting that the positive gain we’d made in addressing childhood obesity and healthy living are being lost. This, too, will have long term impacts on the lifespan of our children.
And the impact to children is not equitable. Students who live in poverty are the least likely to have access to in-person school, technology, adequate internet, food, or adult supervision.
When Boards of Education meet to determine how much time students will spend in school, I would suggest they adopt indicators in their SGC that include the impact of remote and hybrid education on children, including
Reports on academic progress, for example the number of D’s and F’s for older students and progress indicators in math and reading for younger students.
The number of students dropping out in secondary schools.
The number of juniors and seniors in jeopardy of not graduating.
Student logins per class trended over time since the beginning of the school year and broken out by buildings and grades.
Enrollment trends over the school year.
Community indicators for children as they compare to the previous year:
Requests for mental health assistance
Suicide attempts
Crimes
Emergency Room visits
Overdose and drug related statistics
As school leaders look at this bigger picture, it will be easier to understand why the American Academy of Pediatrics advocates “all policy considerations for school COVID-19 plans should start with a goal of having students physically present in school.” Leaders and communities should absolutely do what is possible to mitigate risk for the adults and address the burnout our teachers are facing. At the same time, we need to realize that keeping kids in remote or hybrid learning is not just an inconvenience to parents as some union leaders have alluded. These policies have catastrophic impacts on the health and lifespan of the next generation.