The NAEP scores and the myth of learning decline.

For the Wall Street Journal there was no pandemic. The problem was teachers and unions.

My drawings and paintings can be found on Instagram @klonskyart

The recent release of the NAEP scores show what we already knew.

NAEP is the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

What we already knew is that we have endured a crisis for more than two years because of a deadly disease that killed over one million people in the United States and millions more world wide.

Every aspect of our lives was impacted by Covid in various ways, almost all bad.

Who would expect that schools, students and teachers wouldn’t be affected as well?

But the release of recent NAEP scores has caused a storm of misinformation.

Our nation’s students have lost two years of learning according to the news.

This is a theory of learning and knowledge accumulation that defies common sense.

The NAEP doesn’t measure or show individual student performance.

NAEP is designed to measure the academic performance of the nation's students at grades 4, 8, and 12. A sample of students take part. And it does a pretty good job.

The NAEP isn’t intended for making individual classroom instructional decisions.

And no student lost two years of knowledge.

The NAEP isn’t comparing what a fourth grade student knew before the pandemic and what they know now.

The current fourth graders are different fourth graders.

They had different experiences. And they all learned.

Sadly many suffered from the isolation, from the family stress and even from the lack of an internet connection.

And certainly the inequalities of race and class that existed before the pandemic continued through it and continue to the present moment.

The pandemic disruptions only made it worse.

Yet test-driven accountability was a bad idea before the pandemic and it is a bad idea now.

There are the haters who are misusing the NAEP scores to try and settle scores of their own.

For them, there was no pandemic. There are only bad teachers and their unions that are to blame for a drop in NAEP scores.

The Wall Street Journal editorialized as much.

But the truth is that teachers, students and parents did amazing things through the most difficult of times.

It’s something we should celebrate.