Sept 27 -- The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), Department of Education (ED) invites comments by November 27, 2023 regarding the proposed School Pulse Panel 2024–25 Preliminary Field Activities.
The School Pulse Panel (SPP) is a data collection originally designed to collect repeated voluntary responses from a nationally representative sample of public schools to better understand how schools, students, and educators are responding to the ongoing stressors of the coronavirus pandemic. The School Pulse Panel is conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), part of the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), within the United States Department of Education. Due to the immediate need to collect information from schools during the pandemic to satisfy the requirement of Executive Order 14000, an emergency clearance was issued to develop and field the first several monthly collections of the SPP in 2021 and a full review of the SPP data collection was performed under the traditional clearance review process in 2022 (OMB# 1850–0969). SPP's innovative design and timely dissemination of findings have been used and cited frequently among Department of Education senior leadership, the White House Domestic Policy Counsel, the USDA's Food and Nutrition Service, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Congressional deliberations, and the media. The ongoing interest by stakeholders has resulted in dedicated funding to continue the SPP as an ongoing, quick-turnaround data collection vehicle.
For the 2024–25 school year, the survey may ask school staff about a wide range of topics, including but not limited to instructional mode offered; enrollment counts of subgroups of students for various subject interests; strategies to address learning recovery; safe and healthy school mitigation strategies; mental health services; use of technology; information on staffing, nutrition services, absenteeism, usage of federal funds, facilities, and overall principal experiences. It is planned that content will be rotated in and out monthly. This package includes preliminary activities, including a generic special district application and communication materials for district and school recruitment, that will be conducted to help with recruitment efforts for the 2024–25 sample.
Roughly 8,000 public elementary, middle, high, and combined-grade schools will be randomly selected to participate in a panel. The goal will be national representation from 1,000 responding schools in order to report out national estimates. School staff will be asked to provide requested data monthly during the 2024–25 school year. This approach provides the ability to collect detailed information on various topics while also assessing changes over time for items that are repeated from month to month. Given the high demand for data collection during this time, the content of the survey will change monthly.
This request is to conduct the SPP 2024–25 preliminary activities, including contacting and obtaining research approvals from public school districts with an established research approval process (“special contact districts”), where applicable, notifying sampled schools of their selection for the survey and inviting them to complete short Screener Surveys to establish a point of contact at their school. Additional materials may be added to this package after the 60-day public comment period is complete, in time for the subsequent 30-day public comment period that will begin in December 2023/January 2024. In spring of 2024, a clearance for main study data collection activities with schools and districts, including instruments for the first quarter of monthly collections, will be submitted 60-day and 30-day public comment. Subsequent quarterly content submissions will be submitted for 30-day public comment. Because the School Pulse Panel Survey is designed to collect data on timely questions, materials for SPP are cleared under two OMB Number sequences. Materials for SPP 2022 were cleared under OMB# 1850–0969, while 23–24 SPP were cleared primarily under OMB# 1850–0975. For 24–25 we return to OMB# 1850–0969.
The sampling frame for the School Pulse Panel is derived from the Common Core of Data (CCD), the universe of public schools supplied annually by state educational agencies to NCES. Public schools in the 50 states and the District of Columbia will be included in the School Pulse Panel sampling frame. A universe collection from the Outlying Areas (Guam, Northern Marianas, U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa) may be administered as well. Certain types of schools are excluded, including newly closed schools, home schools, ungraded schools, private schools, and schools with high grades of kindergarten or lower. Regular public schools, charter schools, alternative schools, special education schools, vocational schools, correctional facilities/juvenile justice facilities, and schools that have partial or total magnet programs are included in the frame. For sample allocation purposes, strata are defined by instructional level, type of locale (urbanicity), region, and percent minority enrollment.
SPP 2024-25 will produce rich data that are designed to provide real-time information on the state of the public K-12 education systems across the nation. As our nation’s schools continue to deal with the repercussions of the COVID-19 pandemic, federal agency policymakers need real-time, quick turnaround data to help inform resource need to assist with learning recovery efforts and ensuring a safe environment for students and staff.
School Pulse Panel:
https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/spp/
Draft data collection instrument and technical documentation:
https://www.regulations.gov/docket/ED-2023-SCC-0170/document
FRN:
https://www.federalregister.gov/d/2023-20964