And schools in which at least 75% of students are Black and Latino offer fewer math, science and computer science courses than those with a low-minority population.

Those are among the racial disparities noted Wednesday in the Civil Rights Data Collection — the first released since 2017-18. Considering the data was collected when the vast majority of districts offered only virtual or hybrid learning, officials cautioned against making direct comparisons to previous years. But they also noted that among the many topics covered in the survey, including suspension rates, sexual harassment and school staffing data, course-taking trends might be less affected by the pandemic. 

“Sadly, the inequities that have long persisted in our education system are on full display,” said Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, noting the department’s efforts to expand access to STEM learning through with NASA, nonprofits and the private sector. “We spent years fighting COVID; now we must fight complacency.”

COVID disrupted all aspects of the U.S. education system, and that includes federal efforts to measure how schools are protecting students’ civil rights. Officials canceled the and moved it to the following year, without knowing how COVID would continue to upend normal school operations. Many U.S. schools did not return to in-person learning full time until . Prior to that, steep declines in areas such as out-of-school suspension or the use of corporal punishment are likely because many students were learning at home — not because schools stopped disciplining students. 

That doesn’t mean the data isn’t useful for examining gaps based on race and disability. Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Catherine Lhamon called the release “crucial civil rights data specific to students’ pandemic experience.” Others agreed that the data will help the nation better understand how the pandemic exacerbated inequities for vulnerable students. 

“It won’t be an apples-to-apples comparison,” said David Hinojosa, director of the Educational Opportunities Project at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “At the same time, the whole intent behind the collection of this data is for schools, communities and civil rights enforcement agencies to identify and correct any civil rights disparities.”

‘Discipline looked very different’

As the primary source of information on school discipline, the survey shows that despite school closures, students missed more than 2 million days of school due to out-of-school suspensions during the 2020-21 school year.

Black boys were suspended at higher rates than boys of other races — a longstanding disparity. Black boys represented 8% of the total K-12 population but 18% of those that received one or more out-of-school suspensions. Black girls represented 7% of student enrollment, but accounted for 9% of students with one or more out-of-school suspensions. White girls made up 22% of the student population, but represented 13% of out-of-school suspensions. 

This data was especially impacted by remote learning, noted Nancy Duchesneau, a senior P-12 research associate at EdTrust, an advocacy organization that focuses on educational equity. 

“Exclusionary discipline looked very different during virtual learning,” she said. “Students were locked out of accounts, or removed from virtual learning environments, without official suspensions or expulsions. These instances of unofficial exclusionary discipline will not be reflected in the data.”

Despite 2020-21 being an unusual school year, districts still referred 61,900 students to law enforcement, which officials described as alarming, and 19,400 students received corporal punishment. Earlier this year, the department urging schools to replace physical punishment with other methods.

The department also collected 2021-22 data and , districts can begin to submit responses for the current 2023-24 school year, putting the program back on its regular biennial schedule.

The 2020-21 findings confirm what some researchers captured during the pandemic — the decline in preschool enrollment, for example. In 2017-18, 1.4 million children attended a school district preschool program, but that dropped to 1.2 million, according to the latest data. 

“People did not equitably have access to the internet,” Hinojosa said, “and they weren’t going to have their 4-year-old in front of the screen where they couldn’t learn.” 

The survey, for the first time, included questions about students’ access to the internet and devices. Ninety-three percent of schools offer high-speed internet, and there’s little variation between high-minority and low-minority schools. But there were state-level differences.

Students in Alaska have the least access, where 59% of schools reported a high-speed connection, followed by Florida with 66%. Kentucky, Maryland, North Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia all reported 99% or more. 

While most of the questions focused on in-school availability, the survey also showed that 87% of schools allowed students to take home devices. 

Along with a series of national snapshots, the department also launched a with access to state and local data. That will allow for comparisons between states and districts that had different rates of in-person learning and home internet access, said Jennifer Bell-Ellwanger, president and CEO of the nonprofit Data Quality Campaign.

“We need this data even if it’s not as clear or clean as we might want,” she said. But she added, “It’s almost like a new baseline.”

Other top takeaways from the results are:

• Black students made up 15% of the total high school enrollment, but represented 6% of students enrolled in an AP math course. Latino students represented 27% of high school students, but 19% of those in AP math. 

• Boys were more likely than girls to take Algebra I, physics and computer science. But girls had higher enrollment rates than boys in Algebra II, advanced math classes, biology and chemistry. 

• White and Asian high schoolers were overrepresented in college dual enrollment courses, while Black and Hispanic students, English learners and students with disabilities were underrepresented. 

• American Indian or Alaska Native students were 3.4 times more likely than white students to attend a school with a police officer or security guard, but without a school counselor, social worker, nurse or psychologist. 

• There were 20,800 students disciplined for sex-based bullying or harassment in the 2020-21 schools year. White boys made up 24% of the total K-12 student enrollment but accounted for almost half of those disciplined for harassment or bullying on the basis of sex.

Since the pandemic began, Baltimore City Public Schools officials have with GoGuardian, a digital surveillance tool that promises to identify youth at risk of harming themselves or others. When GoGuardian flags students, their online activities are shared automatically with school police, giving cops a conduit into kids’ private lives — including on nights and weekends.

Such partnerships between schools and police appear startlingly widespread across the country with significant implications for youth, according to . Nearly all teachers — 89% — reported that digital student monitoring tools like GoGuardian are used in their schools. And nearly half — 44% — said students have been contacted by the police as a result of student monitoring. 

The pandemic has led to major growth in the number of schools that rely on activity monitoring software to uncover student references to depression and violent impulses. The tools, offered by a handful of tech companies, can sift through students’ social media posts, follow their digital movements in real-time and scan files on school-issued laptops — from classroom assignments to journal entries — in search of warning signs. 

Educators say the tools help them identify youth who are struggling and get them the mental health care they need at a time when youth depression and anxiety are spiraling. But the survey suggests an alternate reality: Instead of getting help, many students are being punished for breaking school rules. And in some cases, survey results suggest, students are being subjected to discrimination. 

The report raises serious questions about whether digital surveillance tools are the best way to identify youth in need of mental health care and whether police officers should be on the front lines in responding to such emergencies. 

“If we’re saying this is to keep students safe, but instead we’re using it punitively and we’re using it to invite law enforcement literally into kids’ homes, is this actually achieving its intended goal?” asked Elizabeth Laird, a survey author and the center’s director of equity in civic technology. “Or are we, in the name of keeping students safe, actually endangering them?”

Among teachers who use monitoring tools at their schools, 78% said the software has been used to flag students for discipline and 59% said kids wound up getting punished as a result. Yet just 45% of teachers said the software is used to identify violent threats and 47% said it is used to identify students at risk of harming themselves. 

The findings are a direct contradiction of the stated goal of student activity monitoring, Laird said. School leaders and company executives have long maintained that the tools are not a disciplinary measure but are designed to identify at-risk students before someone gets hurt.

The Supreme Court’s recent repeal of Roe v. Wade, she said, further muddles police officers’ role in student activity monitoring. As states implement anti-abortion laws, that data from student activity monitoring tools could help the police identify youth seeking reproductive health care. 

“We know that law enforcement gets these alerts,” she said. “If you are in a state where they are looking to investigate these kinds of incidents, you’ve invited them into a student’s house to be able to do that.”

A tale of discrimination

In Baltimore, counselors, principals and school-based police officers receive all alerts generated by GoGuardian during school hours, according to by The Real News Network, a nonprofit media outlet. Outside of school hours, including on weekends and holidays, the responsibility to monitor alerts falls on the police, the outlet reported, and on numerous occasions officers have shown up at students’ homes to conduct wellness checks. On , students have been transported to the hospital for emergency mental health care. 

In a statement to Âé¶čŸ«Æ·, district spokesperson Andre Riley said that GoGuardian helps officials “identify potential risks to the safety of individual students, groups or schools,” and that “proper accountability measures are taken” if students violate the code of conduct or break laws.

“The use of GoGuardian is not simply a prompt for a law enforcement response,” Riley added.

Leading student surveillance companies, including GoGuardian, have maintained that their interactions with police are limited. In April, Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey warned in a report that schools’ reliance on the tools could violate students’ civil rights and exacerbate “the school-to-prison pipeline by increasing law enforcement interactions with students.” Warren and Markey focused their report on four companies: GoGuardian, Gaggle, Securly and Bark. 

In , Gaggle executives said the company contacts law enforcement for wellness checks if they are unable to reach school-based emergency contacts and a child appears to be “in immediate danger.” In on the company’s website, school officials in Wichita Falls, Texas, Cincinnati, Ohio, and Miami, Florida, acknowledged contacting police in response to Gaggle alerts.

In some cases, school leaders ask Securly to contact the police directly and request they conduct welfare checks on students, the to lawmakers. Executives at Bark said “there are limited options” beyond police intervention if they identify a student in crisis but they cannot reach a school administrator. 

“While we have witnessed many lives saved by police in these situations, unfortunately many officers have not received training in how to handle such crises,” in its letter. “Irrespective of training there is always a risk that a visit from law enforcement can create other negative outcomes for a student and their family.” 

In its , GoGuardian states the company may disclose student information “if we believe in good faith that doing so is necessary or appropriate to comply with any law enforcement, legal or regulatory process.” 

Meanwhile, survey results suggest that student surveillance tools have a negative disparate impact on Black and Hispanic students, LGBTQ youth and those from low-income households. In a letter on Wednesday to coincide with the survey’s release, a coalition of education and civil rights groups called on the U.S. Department of Education to issue guidance warning schools that their digital surveillance practices could violate federal civil rights laws. Signatories include the American Library Association, the Data Quality Campaign and the American Civil Liberties Union.

“This is becoming a conversation not just about privacy, but about discrimination,” Laird said. “Without a doubt, we see certain groups of students having outsized experiences in being directly targeted.”

In a youth survey, researchers found that student discipline as a result of activity monitoring fell disproportionately along racial lines, with 48% of Black students and 55% of Hispanic students reporting that they or someone they knew got into trouble for something that was flagged by an activity monitoring tool. Just 41% of white students reported having similar experiences. 

Nearly a third of LGBTQ students said they or someone they know experienced nonconsensual disclosure of their sexual orientation or gender identity — often called outing — as a result of activity monitoring. LGBTQ youth were also more likely than straight and cisgender students to report getting into trouble at school and being contacted by the police about having committed a crime. 

Some student surveillance companies, like Gaggle, monitor references to words including “gay” and “lesbian,” a reality company founder and CEO Jeff Patterson has said was created to protect LGBTQ youth, who face a greater risk of dying by suicide. But survey results suggest the heightened surveillance comes with significant harm to youth, and Laird said if monitoring tools are designed with certain students in mind, such as LGBTQ youth, that in itself is a form of discrimination. 

In its letter to the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights Wednesday, advocates said the disparities outlined in the survey run counter to federal laws prohibiting race-, sex- and disability-based discrimination. 

“Student activity monitoring is subjecting protected classes of students to increased discipline and interactions with law enforcement, invading their privacy, and creating hostile environments for students to express their true thoughts and authentic identities,” the letter states. 

The Education Department’s civil rights division, they said, should condemn surveillance practices that violate students’ civil rights and launch “enforcement action against violations that result in discrimination.”

Lawmakers consider youth privacy

The report comes at a moment of increasing alarm about student privacy online. In May, the Federal Trade Commission announced plans to crack down on tech companies that sell student data for targeted advertising and that “illegally surveil children when they go online to learn.” 

It also comes at a time of intense concern over students’ emotional and physical well-being. While the pandemic has led to a greater focus on youth mental health, the May mass school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, has sparked renewed school safety efforts. In June, President Joe Biden signed a law with modest new gun-control provisions and an influx of federal funding for student mental health care and campus security. The funds could lead to more digital student surveillance.

The results of the online survey, which was conducted in May and June, were likely colored by the Uvalde tragedy, researchers acknowledged. A majority of parents and students have a favorable view of student activity monitoring during school hours to protect kids from harming themselves or others, researchers found. But just 48% of parents and 30% of students support around-the-clock surveillance. 

“Schools are under a lot of pressure to find ways to keep students safe and, like in many aspects of our lives, they are considering the role of technology,” Laird said. 

Last week, the Senate designed to improve children’s safety online, including new restrictions on youth-focused targeted advertising. The effort comes a year after a showing that the social media app Instagram had a harmful effect on youth mental well-being, especially teenage girls. One bill, the Kids Online Safety Act, would require tech companies to identify and mitigate any potential harms their products may pose to children, including exposure to content that promotes self-harm, eating disorders and substance abuse.

Yet the legislation has faced criticism from privacy advocates, who argue it would mandate digital monitoring similar to that offered by student surveillance companies. Among critics is the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit focused on digital privacy and free speech. 

“The answer to our lack of privacy isn’t more tracking,” the . The legislation “is a heavy-handed plan to force technology companies to spy on young people and stop them from accessing content that is ‘not in their best interest,’ as defined by the government, and interpreted by tech platforms.” 

Attorney Amelia Vance, the founder and president of Public Interest Privacy Consulting, said she worries the provisions will have a negative impact on at-risk kids, including LGBTQ students. Students from marginalized groups, she said, “will now be more heavily surveilled by basically every site on the internet, and that information will be available to parents” who could discipline teens for researching LGBTQ content. She said the legislation could force tech companies to censor content to avoid potential liability, essentially making them arbiters of community standards. 

“When you have conflicting values in the different jurisdictions that the companies operate in, oftentimes you end up with the most conservative interpretations, which right now is anti-LGBT,” she said.

But bowing to uncertainty sparked by the pandemic, officials will allow one-year changes to the criteria states use to identify those schools. That means the report cards states use to communicate student performance to the public could look quite different.

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To help measure COVID-19’s impact, states might also choose to rate schools on how much instructional time students lost or break out chronic absenteeism by whether students were attending school in person or remotely. The department will collect comments on the 31-page document until Jan. 17.

“This gives a clear signal to the field and to the states that we are restarting accountability,” said Jennifer Bell-Ellwanger, president and CEO of the Data Quality Campaign. “This data needs to be reported to families and the community.”

The nonprofit is among the organizations that have been calling for more statewide data on student performance during the pandemic — even though standardized tests were canceled in 2019-20 and several states saw low turnout for testing last school year. Others say the department, by allowing such a vast array of changes, could leave parents and the public more in the dark about how well schools have performed.

The department is recommending that states and districts update improvement plans to focus on the pandemic’s effects on the most vulnerable students. States can also give those schools more time to improve by not counting the 2019-20 and 2020-21 school years, and can change the achievement targets they need to hit to be removed from the state’s lowest-performing list.

“Uncle Sam is saying that not only is it okay to move the goalposts, states can install new goalposts if they want to, too,” said Dale Chu, a senior visiting fellow with the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute who helped implement Indiana’s accountability system.

In addition to the temporary changes, the document encourages states to consider long-term additions, such as adding new indicators of student success that could endure beyond 2022.

‘Behind-the-scenes tinkering’

Under the federal Every Student Succeeds Act, states must test students in reading, math and science and publicly identify their lowest-performing Title I schools and those where groups of students, such as English learners or students with disabilities, consistently underperform. Those schools, which receive extra funds to help students make progress, have up to four years to show improvement or face additional state intervention.

Maria Cammack, deputy superintendent of assessment, accountability, data systems and research at the Oklahoma State Department of Education, said state officials aren’t talking about adding new measures of school quality for one year, but want to be as transparent as possible about data elements that can supplement its high-stakes accountability system.

“Everybody wants to understand unfinished learning,” she said, adding that it can take a while for districts to report and interpret new information. “Any changes enacted for a single year breaks our ability to monitor change in performance in a time where we need to understand it most deeply.”

Bibb Hubbard, president of the nonprofit Learning Heroes, said she appreciated the department’s expectation that states include families in making decisions about changes to accountability. Parents, she said, rely on state report cards to understand their children’s progress in school and “want the truth, even if it isn’t good news.” States, she added, should research which measures parents find most meaningful.

Chu added that it could be hard for the public to keep up with “all of the behind-the-scenes tinkering.”

“If states add, modify [or] remove a bunch of indicators from their state report cards,” he said, “it will be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to get an honest accounting of how schools and students have fared.”

A key question for state leaders has been how to calculate whether schools have improved over the past few years in the absence of consecutive years of assessment data. Most states consider test score trends over multiple years as part of their accountability systems.

The guidance suggests states could replace the growth measure with a different indicator — like achievement gaps — but experts say such a change could significantly alter which schools are identified for improvement.

Growth is currently “by far the best” measure for differentiating between schools, said Cory Koedel, an economics and public policy professor at the University of Missouri–Columbia and an expert on growth measures. “I can’t even name what a plausible back-up plan would be,” he said.

Chris Janzer, the assistant director of accountability at the Michigan Department of Education, added that there’s no guarantee state testing will run smoothly this year.

“We don’t know what test participation is going to look like this coming spring, especially with Omicron raging now,” he said. “Will we have another wave in the spring that causes more school disruptions?”

For 2021 testing, the department waived the requirement that states assess 95 percent of their students. But if schools fall short of that percentage in 2022, it’s possible they would be identified as low-performing based on participation rates alone, said Janzer, whose state saw 70 percent participation last year.

Oklahoma had an overall participation rate of over 90 percent last spring, Cammack said, but in some districts, only about 30 percent of students took state tests, despite an assessment window that was three weeks longer than normal and included extended hours and Saturday sessions.

‘Meet the moment’

Stanford University scholar Linda Darling-Hammond, who serves as president of the California State Board of Education, acknowledged that 2022 probably won’t be a “neat and tidy year” in the realm of testing and accountability.

But she is among those who see the guidance as a way to “lay a path toward reauthorization” of ESSA. The department, she said, is sending the message that accountability is important, but that states should also “meet the moment” and consider changes that allow more room for other measures of student achievement and school performance.

Bell-Ellwanger, with the Data Quality Campaign, said the guidance presents an opportunity to add criteria that some say is lacking from many state report cards — such as more data on what students do after high school.

In December, her organization and Chiefs for Change, a network of district leaders, issued a report arguing that K-12 leaders could better prepare students for college and the workplace if data on college enrollment, jobs and other postsecondary trends were more accessible.

“As states signal that they are moving forward with recovery,” she said, “understanding college and career pathways and the economic mobility of students is important.”

The department’s guidance notes that states could also consider adding “opportunity to learn” standards — such as the extent to which students have access to qualified educators and a high-quality curriculum. A recent report from FutureEd, a think tank at Georgetown University, highlighted growing efforts to rate schools on questions of equity, which could range from whether students have access to advanced courses or even if schools have Black and Hispanic mental health providers on staff.

But the report noted that some measures might not be statistically valid and reliable enough for an accountability system that determines consequences for schools.

“They need to be predictive,” said Thomas Toch, the director of FutureEd and co-author of the report. “They need to confidently signal how students are likely to perform in school and beyond.”

But he added that just reporting data on some of those goals is still useful for the public even if they aren’t used to identify schools for accountability. The department’s guidance takes this “cautious stance,” he said. “Transparency has the power to focus educators’ and others’ efforts, even when they don’t face direct consequences for the information that’s collected.”

A new Florida Assessment of Student Thinking, which the state legislature still needs to approve, would involve three “progress monitoring” tests spread throughout the school year. DeSantis called the plan the “final step to eradicate Common Core from our assessments.”

Last year, the state dropped Common Core standards, which many Republicans associate with the Obama administration, and is phasing in . To comply with the federal Every Student Succeeds Act and receive federal funds, however, the state would still have to test all students in reading and math, produce end-of-year results and share the data with parents.

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The “announcement feels like somebody trying to make a point with teachers and parents, but the devil is in the details,” said Paige Kowalski, executive vice president of the Data Quality Campaign, a nonprofit that focuses on making education data clear to parents.

The governor’s announcement comes amid growing anti-testing sentiment and complaints from educators that testing takes too long, often offering unhelpful results after students have moved on to the next gradel. With state tests cancelled in 2020 because of the pandemic, teachers have also been relying more on programs such as NWEA’s MAP assessments to gauge how the pandemic has impacted students’ progress. Federal law doesn’t require states to test in the spring, and under an existing , some states, such as Georgia, are already trying interim tests throughout the year to minimize emphasis on end-of-year exams.

But experts say there are downsides.

“If they take the current test and cut it into three pieces, spreading it out over the year, it’s perhaps not that big a deal,” said Dale Chu, a senior visiting fellow with the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative education think tank. “But if schools didn’t like the ‘high-stakes’ nature of annual testing, they’ll be in for a rude awakening when the pressure’s on three times a year.”

Kowalski added that districts might not want to give up “benchmark” tests, such as MAP, Renaissance Learning’s Star or Curriculum Associates’s i-Ready, because teachers find them useful. If the new Florida Assessment of Student Thinking — or FAST tests — are layered on top of those, schools could find themselves giving more tests throughout the year instead of less.

Another possibility is that districts might stop paying for MAP or a similar test, leaving teachers with fewer data points to know if their “kids are on track,” Kowalski said.

Testing all students once a year in two core subjects sounds like a simple charge, she added.

‘But we haven’t been able to nail it,” she said. “How are we going to approach an innovative assessment system that you need a chart to explain?”

Patricia Levesque, executive director of Foundation for Florida’s Future — part of the Foundation for Excellence in Education launched by former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush — raised about the plan. One is whether teachers would be required to teach on Tallahassee’s timetable in order to be prepared for the three statewide tests and another is whether the spring test would simply replace the end-of-year test, giving teachers “less time to cover the full year of content.”

The testing program DeSantis is ending was a centerpiece of Bush’s two terms as governor.

DeSantis’s proposal applies to standardized tests for English language arts and math, but doesn’t eliminate high school end-of-course tests in algebra, U.S. history and biology.

Teachers unions , and Miami-Dade County Public Schools Superintendent Alberto Carvalho — even though he’s been at odds with DeSantis over his ban on universal masking in schools — the move.

Chu noted that even though the U.S. Department of Education required states to give tests this year, officials have allowed considerable flexibility with COVID-19 continuing to disrupt learning. Some states were allowed to delay spring assessments until this fall, the District of Columbia hasn’t conducted state tests for two years, and California allowed districts to choose which tests to administer.

“In today’s environment,” he said, “it’s hard to see the feds pushing back that hard.”

States didn’t have student performance data to report from the 2019-20 school year because tests were cancelled. But many also left the public in the dark about how many days of school pupils missed or which students were less likely to graduate, according to on state report cards.

Nineteen states either failed to break down graduation rates by race and ethnicity or didn’t report rates for groups such as special needs, low-income or homeless students, the Data Quality Campaign’s review shows.

“When we talk about the drop in students enrolling in community college, or any postsecondary option, all of those data points start with high school graduation,” said Paige Kowalski, executive vice president of the nonprofit organization. It’s important, she added, to have evidence of the pandemic’s higher toll on low-income and minority students. “We just had so little data about what was happening in schools.”

The federally mandated report cards are the primary way states make complicated school-level education data accessible to parents and other members of the public. Each year, the nonprofit releases which states it thinks are doing a good job of making the information easy to find and understand. Leaders say despite the pandemic’s disruption in testing — and waivers from the federal government dropping accountability requirements — states could have used their report cards to give families more insight into why some data is missing or to report on students’ access to at-home internet access. But most didn’t.

“Why do we continue to rely on Congress to tell us what we need to know?” Kowalski asked. “States did not use this as an opportunity to provide more information. They chose not to use it to shine a light.”

According to “Show Me the Data,” just nine states posted the percentage of students missing at least 10 percent of school last year. Another 26 reported chronic absence data from previous years or didn’t specify the year.

Hedy Chang, director of Attendance Works, a research and advocacy organization, said she suspects many state officials felt their 2019-20 data wouldn’t be accurate once students shifted to remote learning or that it wouldn’t be comparable to previous years.

“Districts were really confused about whether to take attendance or not and how,” she said, but added that states could have added an explanation rather than not release it at all.

Almost half of the states didn’t include all of the data required on educators, such as those teaching out of their field or those with emergency credentials. And many states still aren’t reporting results for at least one group of students, which Kowalski said will be important in the future to track which groups of students at each school were most affected by the pandemic and distance learning.

For example, even if they collect it, 13 states still don’t break down data by gender on report cards. Kowalski said teens in general have gone to work or picked up more responsibility at home to help families facing economic hardship. But, she added, it’s not “a stretch” to assume older girls assumed more additional household duties than boys and cared for younger siblings so their mothers could stay in the workforce.

Some states provide links on their report card websites that lead to additional information, but Kowalski said those looking for data shouldn’t have to hunt for it.

“To ask anyone, let alone a parent, to dig through and Google multiple websites and cobble together a full, robust picture of what happened in a school is absurd,” she said.

‘A financial footprint’

A few states tried to put the results in context instead of cutting back. Pennsylvania and Iowa used their annual report cards to be upfront about what was missing — and why — or point readers to waivers from the federal government showing which data wasn’t required.

And North Dakota posted the number and percentages of students in virtual, hybrid or in-person learning, long before the U.S. Department of Education started its own tracker a year after the pandemic began.

Ross Roemmich, the North Dakota education department’s director of management information, said all districts in the state use the same technology platform — Powerschool — making the data collection easier.

“When COVID hit, everything changed,” said Roemmich. “We knew that someday, the federal government would probably ask us which schools were face-to-face, hybrid or remote.”

Kowalski noted that just because states couldn’t hold schools accountable for results didn’t excuse them from reporting other data mandated by law — including per-student spending for each school. Several states made progress on that requirement, which went into effect last year. Thirty-six states reported the spending data for 2019-20, up from 19 the previous year.

Last year’s report cards likely won’t provide a lot of information on how states are directing federal relief funds. But Marguerite Roza, director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University, said going forward, the per-pupil spending data will help the public track whether districts direct funds toward schools serving the neediest students. “There will be a financial footprint to this,” she said.

Kowalski said she’d like to see all states add information on students’ access to devices and Wi-Fi to their report cards.

“We already knew devices were important,” she said, but added that during the pandemic, a computer and a reliable connection “became school.”