American students have experienced a historic decline in academic achievement. The only possible response — the only rational response — is a historic collective investment in children and young adults.The results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress reveal plummeting test scores nationwide, setting students back to where they were two decades ago. At the same time, we witnessed a sharp increase in educational inequity, with much larger losses in high poverty districts. Yet there’s a troubling disconnect between the scale of catch-up efforts in the last school year and the magnitude of the declines.
These losses won’t be fixed by few hours of tutoring or a helpful computer program. Schools and families need to take a hard look at where every student stands. And their communities need to step up to help in any way they can.
The best metaphor for this moment comes not from the history of education, but from the space program.
When President John F. Kennedy issued his moon challenge, NASA’s rocket designers calculated the thrust they would need to send a spacecraft to the moon and soon realized that they would need something far larger than anything they’d built before. The result was the Saturn V rocket.
Today, school district leaders are responsible for reversing learning loss of a magnitude none of them have ever experienced. And they have been given little guidance about what an adequate response might look like. No wonder many system leaders have been launching the equivalents of bottle rockets: an increase in summer school enrollment or tutors for a few more students.