The gold-standard measure of educational trends has the word “progress” in its name. But the National Assessment of Educational Progress unveiled Thursday showed nothing but slippage over the last two years. Students saw the largest average decline in reading since 1990 and the first drop in mathematics ever measured in the half-century-old test.
We don’t speak often of educational emergencies, but America has one now.
A half-true refrain is that the pandemic caused this. While COVID-19 created tremendous challenges for schooling, decisions by adults exacerbated them. It is now incumbent on those same adults to make strategic investments that will enable kids, and especially the low-income kids most harmed over the past two years, to regain their lost foothold.
The biggest mistake of the pandemic, anyone with a brain can see in clear hindsight, was the closure of too many schools for far too long. Remote learning was a lame substitute for the classroom, especially for kids who were struggling to learn in the first place and also happen to come from more troubled homes. Yet, including here in New York, it was those very kids who wound up settling for remote learning for significant stretches.
Nationwide, stubborn racial achievement gaps grew. And students in the bottom 10th percentile dropped by 12 points in math, quadruple the learning loss of those in the top 10th. Anyone enraged about the rich getting richer and the poor losing ground during times of economic stress should be equally furious about this injustice.
Here in New York, the progressive prescription du jour is across-the-board reductions in class sizes. That would commit precious billions to an intervention with far too little impact. The far smarter course is to deliver much more learning time, in the form of longer school days and years, especially to the kids who’ve lost the most.
Education, once given, can never be taken away. Never given, it represents a robbery of future potential. On this scale, it’s a crime no less serious than many of those that grab daily headlines.
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