As I write this post, on a dreary late January afternoon, gazing out the window at the slushy remnants of another night of light snow, which changed to freezing drizzle, which changed to a day of intermittent cold rain, representative samples of fourth and eighth grade students in states across the country are sitting down to take the 2024 NAEP tests in reading and mathematics.
Although the results of these tests apparently won’t be reported until this time next year (a subject crying out for its own post), it’s not too early to start thinking about how those results will be framed.
Dollars to doughnuts, the primary focus of the reporting of these first post-post-pandemic NAEP results will be recovery; that is, how much proficiency in reading and mathematics has been recovered since the reporting of the initial post-pandemic NAEP results in the fall of 2022.
Then, of course, the relative success, or lack thereof, of each state’s recovery efforts will be considered in terms of equity, social justice, opportunity-to-learn, etc. as is customary and consistent with the purpose of NAEP. Drilling down further, no doubt there will be discussions of the science of reading, deeper learning, and the importance of doing math, but I’m guessing that even those discussions will be framed in terms of recovery from the effects of the pandemic.
Before we get too far down that road to recovery, however, perhaps even before the horse has left the barn, I am calling for an end to thinking and talking about student achievement and student learning in terms of recovering from the effects of the pandemic.
In short, I am calling for an end to the recovery effort.
Like those government-issued COVID tests kits that were still being mailed out in 2023, the effort to recover learning lost due to the pandemic is well past its expiration date. Money has been spent. Programs have been implemented. Tests have been administered. Any learning that will be recovered already has been recovered.
Let me repeat that:
Any learning that will be recovered already has been recovered.
What do I mean by that?
I am obviously not declaring that all is well, all learning affected by the pandemic has been recovered.
Neither am I saying that all learning that could have been recovered under different circumstances or might have been recovered with better planning and execution has been recovered.
Of all sad words of tongue and pen…
No, my claim is simply that whatever the recovery is, it is, and it’s time to move on.
The Road Beyond Recovery
We need a new perspective. We need to look at student achievement in 2024 through a different lens.
Because as strange and counterintuitive as it may seem, viewing 2024 student achievement in terms of recovery or through the lens of the pandemic is the equivalent of looking at the education world through rose-colored glasses.
We will begin to use the pandemic as a crutch, a scapegoat, the reason for all of our shortcomings. For sometimes better and sometimes worse, it’s what we do, a big part of who we are.
If only I had done, or said, or thought…
If only I hadn’t…
If only I had a little more time, money, luck…
If only for the pandemic, …
The sad fact of the matter, however, is that any shortcomings in learning that exist in winter 2024, any problems with the public education system that we are experiencing now are endemic and enduring. The problems are ours, they are real, and they’re spectacular – or at the very least, spectacles.
We may be facing ______
A. old problems that existed well before March 2020.
B. new problems created by the pandemic and/or our response to it.
C. a combination of A. and B. (i.e., old problems exacerbated or heightened in our awareness by the events that have occurred since March 2020.)
D. All of the above.
And to some extent, the “problems” we face today are simply the result of new and improved thinking about the purpose of public education, how school should be structured, what should be taught to whom, and how it should be taught.
Further, all of the above will be even more true a year from now when the NAEP 2024 results are released.
That is why it is time to set aside learning recovery and focus on reforming, refining, reinventing, reimagining, rejuvenating, or reclaiming public education in order to improve instruction and student learning for all students.
And it does matter what we call whatever it is we decide to do moving forward. Labels matter – perhaps not quite as much as the ideas and actions behind them, but more than I would like.
Rebranding Recovery
Knowing that labels matter, we probably should have put a little more thought into the term “recovery” from the beginning rather than spending so much time perseverating over whether learning was actually lost or whether term “learning loss” reflected a deficit mindset and placed too much blame on teachers and too much responsibility and pressure on the kids.
The term recovery, after all, has pretty negative connotations.
When disaster strikes, recovery efforts are what take place after search and rescue operations have been called off; that is, when all hope for a successful outcome is lost.
And look at the recovery disasters in our own little world: Reading Recovery, Credit Recovery. Enough said.
Most importantly, the best that recovery is ever going to do is to restore the status quo – a situation that nobody was happy with in March 2020.
Now there’s a deficit mindset.
But What About the Kids
Let me be perfectly clear, I am not arguing that it’s time to declare victory and move on.
Shifting the focus from the recovery effort and the pandemic does not reflect in any way, shape, or form a denial of the fact that there are kids in school today whose learning and achievement is not where it should be, some because of the pandemic, some for a host of other reasons. And the same will be true next year when NAEP 2024 results are released. We must not abandon those students.
I am simply and strongly suggesting that we have passed the point of diminishing returns in adopting the perspective that views the challenge of educating those students as one of recovery.
Chronic absenteeism, teacher shortages, disengagement by students, or too much engagement by the community, to the extent that they exist in a school, district, or state, are no longer pandemic problems – they are the new normal.
There is work to be done.
On the other hand, I also flatly reject as absurd the notion that children of the pandemic are a lost generationwho will pay a lifetime pandemic tax because of learning lost when schooling was disrupted. Oh, that the public education system were that impactful. Or that mathematical modeling of the past were that precise when built on shaky assumptions about the future and the present – past performance is no guarantee of future results.
We have all done the cohort math.
Kids who were in ninth grade in March 2020 will be sophomores in college or receiving their associate degrees and career certifications when the NAEP results are released next year. They may have missed out important life experiences and on some esoteric bits of information (like chemistry or early American literature), but they should be OK in the long run as they pursue their personal pathways. Any history they would have learned in school is being rewritten daily; and anyway, show me the people who prior to March 2020 were touting how much critical information students learned in high school.
Kids who were in Kindergarten will be preparing to enter middle school. Similarly, kids who were in 7th grade will be graduating from high school. If their schools were equipped to “catch them up” from learning lost during the pandemic, they did. If they weren’t so equipped, it’s not a recovery problem.
Kids who were born or conceived in March 2020 are at the very beginnings of their educational journeys. Let’s focus on making it a good one.
But seriously, winter 2025 for the release of the NAEP 2024 results. Sigh.
Image by 👀 Mabel Amber, who will one day from Pixabay
Embrace the Absurd 