There is a lot of interest in opening child care, but also a lot of fear. I realized (as many others have) that there are settings which have been open. And yet I did not see any reporting of data from these, systematic or otherwise.
There are teams collecting tons of data on this and I am hoping to see it early July! But until then I thought it might be valuable to even just aggregate the anecdotes I was hearing.
What did you do?
I distributed, in various ways, a simple survey of child care providers who were open during the pandemic. I got some amazing help from Winnie.com, who sent the survey out to all their providers. I also sent this out on Twitter, through newsletters, on Facebook, etc, etc. And then I collated responses.
Is this a scientifically valid sample and do you plan to publish the results?
No and no. This is crowdsourced. I didn’t sample randomly and I cannot be sure of the biases in responses. I am of the view (which not everyone will agree with) that some data is better than none.
Is the data perfect? Did you clean it?
No! Let me know if you see obvious errors. I did minimal cleaning – to remove places which reported fewer than two students during the pandemic or did not report any location data.
Okay, what did you find?
You can see all the raw data and some high level summaries here.
You didn’t do all the analysis I wanted!
I bet not! The raw data is in the sheet. Feel free to play around with it on your own. I also have some less clean data on teacher student ratios and typical populations which didn’t make it into the sheet so you can contact me if you want to access that.