One of the pieces of data that has been particularly difficult to find during this pandemic is how many public-school districts are holding classes in person, how many are using distance learning, and how many are using a hybrid version at any one time. Education Week is keeping track of how many states have issued mandates on K–12 in-person instruction because of the coronavirus, but even that’s not edifying, because most states have no order in effect and are allowing counties or individual school districts to decide.

This anecdote of the thinking in Vermont — a blue-leaning state with a Republican governor — is particularly frustrating:

Speaking in late January, Education Secretary Dan French said that while the agency had, at one time, considered providing some sort of tracker to report on how many schools were closed at any given time, it had ultimately decided it just wasn’t worth the effort required of school districts to report such information.
“We have to acknowledge that that requires time away for schools to actually do the work, and they’ve got a lot on their plates right now,” he said.
Besides, French argued, the monthly surveys give decision-makers the information they need.
“I don’t, from a state perspective, generally need to understand on a daily basis what’s going on in schools,” he said.

Really? You are the state’s education secretary, right? Is there some other state official who does need to understand on a daily basis what’s going on in schools that we could ask?

Vermont’s state government does issue a report twice a week updating when someone with COVID-19 was at a K–12 learning-community location while infectious, but that data just tell you an infected person was known to be at a school — not if there were any known cases of transmission within the school, or even whether the school building was open to students at the time.

The debate about reopening schools currently relies heavily on anecdotes and coverage of the country’s largest public-school districts, like Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York City, Chicago, Las Vegas, and Fairfax County. And covering those big, and mostly urban districts can illuminate part of the situation. But we would be well served by knowing, in each state, what percentage of schools had students back in classrooms in some form and what percentage remained closed entirely.