The United States of America has spent the last three years arguing about the pandemic’s effects on students’ academic and socioemotional well-being. Of course, this gave rise to the hodgepodge of tutoring services looking to accelerate their earnings, revanchist groups pretending to advocate for “parents rights” as a cover for dismantling democracy, and a plethora of people who coopted longstanding traditions from marginalized groups for their capital gains. These movements felt contingent on the idea that our kids were doomed (DOOMED!) if adults didn’t go back to a pedagogically rudimentary disposition (“back-to-basics”) to stop this “liberal” society from falling off a cliff with their COVID safety measures and mass school closures.

But, as David Wallace-Wells illustrates here, the picture is a lot more complicated:

And what it shows is quite eye-opening. American students improved their standing among their international peers in all three areas during the pandemic, the data says. Some countries did better than the United States, and the American results do show some areas of concern. But U.S. school policies do not seem to have pushed American kids into their own academic black hole. In fact, Americans did better in relation to their peers in the aftermath of school closures than they did before the pandemic.

Unlike what’s been parroted time and again, his interpretation of the data suggests that we should be concerned, but not for the reasons we kept hearing. There’s definitely more work to do on the hyper-local/district level in poring through data, but a country with thousands of school districts, myriad decision-making structures, and a pandemic that killed over a million people within its borders fared better than average. Of course, I’d also like to pore over the data on the local level with identity markers in mind, but the article also seems to account for economic subgroups and I’m left pondering how we can rethink our educational priorities.

Despite the jingoistic flag-waving some do whenever this topic is brought up, The United States has never been #1 on these international assessments. How does The United States expect to be #1 in education when we’ve never authentically prioritized education for every student in America?

When people say “learning loss,” they also pair it with the idea that students are losing their positions in life somehow. If the end goal is to get into a highly selective – or “highly rejective” (h/t/ Akil Bello) – college, then that feels more like an indictment on a society that keeps leveling up the accreditation stakes. While 10-15% of students at Ivy League colleges are categorized under “legacy,” this country has generally blamed the Black and Latinx students – who often come in with higher GPAs than the average – for attending these schools. The specter of multiculturalism in the hallowed institutions is enough to drive rejected students to Fox News and the like. Even after the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action, students who were used as a wedge to strike down affirmative action in colleges still felt the anxiety of college admissions.

This all points to how education as a construct is severely hampered by structures that existed prior to the pandemic. There’s a sizable subset of parents right now imagining phantom students that their children must be better than, which only breeds contempt for anything “public.” The “learning loss” narrative just puts students, parents, and communities on a hamster wheel with no off-ramp.

Saying a child is “behind” assumes a race for which we have no real finish line besides death. And we rarely accounted for those losses, even less so during this pandemic era.

But perhaps an undercurrent that hasn’t been studied enough is the breadth of lessons students learned about this country and the world along the way. We’re at an inflection point where students have stepped into their power in a multitude of ways. While some demonstrate having bigger visions for activism and and a renewed sense of humanity, others have embraced alpha male narratives with the latest get-rich-quick schemes, reflecting the darkness that the world has reflected on them. They learned a lot from the social movements in 2020, but also the pushback of 2021 and the red-pilled forces that emerged in our isolation.

In fact, they’re learning right now, well beyond the curriculum in front of them. The cacophony of dying children and bombs interject the petty memes and spontaneous dances of their social media feeds. Even as they swipe, it all seems out of control, and out of their control. But being “in control” doesn’t seem to solve much, either. Some say we’ve lost control, but many of us knew we rarely had it in the way we think we do. Maybe students are learning that quicker than the adults did.

As we head into the new year, we still have an opportunity to rethink what we’re doing. The best time was yesterday, but the better time is now. Our students deserve to have an education system that doesn’t punish them socially and economically for not attaining the highest possible score on a standardized test. While the majority of Americans appreciate the efforts of their local schools and the adults who serve them, the narrative of “failing schools” is only driving towards the dissolution of public institutions.

Given that out-of-school factors weigh more heavily on student achievement than in-school factors, now is a good time to look around us, build deeper and more sustainable connections with others, and collaborate with others towards a much better future and, perhaps along the way, we can regain much of what we’ve lost.