Justification Memo

U NITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION

National Center for Education Statistics

June 3, 2021

MEMORANDUM

To: Dominic Mancini, Acting Administrator, Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs

From: James Lynn Woodworth, NCES

Through: Carrie Clarady, NCES

Re: Requested Emergency Clearance for School Pulse Panel Preliminary Activities

The purpose of this memo is to demonstrate the need for emergency review under 5 CFR 1320.13(a) to contact and recruit school districts and sampled schools to voluntarily participate in a new online panel study which aims to better understand how schools, students, and educators are responding in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. It is the first of two emergency requests that will be required to allow the new School Pulse Panel study to begin data collection on time to satisfy the requirements of EO 14000.

NCES requests emergency clearance to allow us to comply with the January 21, 2021 EO 14000 Executive Order on Supporting the Reopening and Continuing Operation of Schools and Early Childhood Education Providers which states that the Secretary of Education must “coordinate with the Director of the Institute of Education Sciences to facilitate, consistent with applicable law, the collection of data necessary to fully understand the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on students and educators, including data on the status of in-person learning. These data shall be disaggregated by student demographics, including race, ethnicity, disability, English-language-learner status, and free or reduced lunch status or other appropriate indicators of family income.” NCES first addressed these research needs with the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) 2021 School Survey (OMB# 1850-0957), which was fielded in the first half of 2021. This NAEP 2021 School Survey met the need of Executive Order 14000 by using an existing sample and survey instrument to quickly collect information on instructional mode offerings and enrollment counts of various subgroups of students using the various instructional modes. The School Pulse Panel intends to continue to collect this critical information, along with other priority items for the White House, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Department of Education program offices, throughout the 2021-22 school year. Normal clearance procedures would not allow IES to comply with the intent of this EO. NCES will publish a Federal Register Notice soliciting 30 days of public comment on this collection concurrent with data collection.

The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), in the Institute of Education Sciences of the U.S. Department of Education, will oversee the survey collection, which is designed to collect vital data with the least possible burden on schools. With the voluntary participation of educators and school leaders across the country, NCES will be able to report the national-level percentages of students who received instruction remotely, in-person, or in a hybrid instructional mode, as well as other important topics of interest that are related to COVID-19 impacts on the school environment. NCES will provide these data for various student groups in an online dashboard.

Data gathered in the survey will include:

• Instruction modes offered in 2021-22;

• Enrollment counts and attendance rates by instructional mode by race/ethnicity, socio-economic status, English learner status, and disability status;

• Use of technology, computer devices, and internet access;

• Federal relief fund use;

• Special education and mental health services provided; and

• Staffing

About 1200 public elementary, middle, high, and combined-grade schools will be selected to participate in a panel where school and district staff will be asked to provide requested data monthly during the 2021-22 school years. This approach provides the ability to collect detailed information on various topics while also assessing changes in reopening efforts over time. Given the high demand for data collection during this time, the content of the survey may change on a quarterly basis. The first step of this data collection effort is gaining compliance from sampled districts and schools, and this emergency request package will allow researchers to immediately begin contacting districts and schools to construct the panel of respondents and collect preliminary information.

Upon clearance of this emergency request to perform preliminary activities, a subsequent emergency package will be submitted to allow the first collections of data from sampled schools in Fall 2021, as regular clearance procedures would delay those data collections. Upon clearance of that package, NCES will submit a regular clearance package through the normal clearance procedures, complete with the attendant 60- and 30-Day public comment periods, in order to collect data throughout the 2021-2022 school year.

550 12^th Street, S.W., Washington, DC 20202

Our mission is to ensure equal access to education and to promote educational excellence throughout the Nation.