When the Biden Administration announced on February 22 that it would require states to administer standardized tests this year, educators responded with surprise and outrage. The tests not only cause intense anxiety for students and teachers, but they’ll likely disrupt learning even further this spring.
The tests not only cause intense anxiety for students and teachers, but they’ll likely disrupt learning even further this spring.
Also, these tests are sure to indicate nothing more than what we already know: that students with access to resources during the COVID-19 pandemic have done better than those without.
Biden’s decision, far from being an anomaly, is the logical outcome of the rhetoric he deployed in his executive order calling for reopening school buildings to “mitigate learning loss caused by the pandemic.”
The fear of students’ “learning loss” has permeated much of the dialogue around public schools over the past year, across the ideological spectrum. Frequently, these voices profess to be concerned about disproportionate learning loss among students of color and students with families below the poverty line.
But the term “learning loss” is misguided. And it’s often deployed in support of policies that will harm students and teachers, particularly in schools that serve communities of color.
First of all, “learning loss” represents a problematic understanding of teaching, one rooted in a capitalist paradigm of schools as factories that build future workers. From this perspective, the pandemic is an issue for schools primarily because of the inefficiencies it creates for the machinery of production. Teachers, therefore, need to be closely supervised as they attempt to speed up their pedagogical “machines” to make up for lost time.
As an elementary school teacher, I feel that “learning loss” runs counter to everything I know about how students learn. Decades of research, as well as the everyday experience of educators, demonstrate that learning is a complex process rooted in students’ social, cultural, and human development, not a narrow series of skills that are either gained or “lost.”
Many students are struggling to learn during the pandemic, particularly students who are dealing with traumas in their lives and communities. But “learning loss” obscures the real reasons why students are suffering during the pandemic: that public schools have been systematically underfunded; students, teachers, and their families are being evicted; and family and community members are sick and dying.
“It’s super hard to make friends now,” one of my students told me. “And sometimes when I am angry I need a friend to talk to.”
Instead of addressing these foundational problems, the fear of “learning loss” addresses, specifically, a concern that many students will not test “on grade level.”
My students have certainly experienced losses during the pandemic. But the losses they’ve felt most acutely have little to do with academic standards. “It’s super hard to make friends now,” one of my students told me. “And sometimes when I am angry I need a friend to talk to.”
“[I want to] see my friends and have a regular lunch where you can talk to your friends and have fun outside,” another student said. One student told me how painful it was to not be able to visit extended family members; his aunt and uncle had had a new baby he couldn’t meet. Other students have lost loved ones to the virus.
“Grade levels” are not natural laws. They were designed by people, and their history is closely connected to neoliberal agendas focused on evaluating and tracking students and teachers. And this troubling history surfaces in what “learning loss” is now used to justify: the surveillance of students and teachers through standardized tests and the forced reopening of schools even in unsafe conditions.
In my home state of Massachusetts, education commissioner Jeffrey Riley announced in January that the state would mandate the weeks-long statewide test this spring, despite protests from educators, families, and community members.
Riley’s rationale echoed that of district and state officials across the country: “We really believe we need this testing,” he said in an interview, “because we need to know how much learning loss has taken place among our students.”
Organizing efforts by many unions and organizations, such as the family- and educator-led Massachusetts Education Justice Alliance, won a handful of concessions, including cancelling the graduation requirement for high school seniors and reducing the length of the tests. But Riley assured the public that the tests would still be statistically significant on the classroom, school, and district levels.
In other words, they could still be used to compare the performance of teachers, schools, and districts. (Riley also is trying to bring all students back to school buildings five days a week by April, despite strenuous objections by unions and families of color).
The government’s reliance on standardized tests will likely continue to grow. States and districts will almost certainly mandate increased testing regimens to track post-COVID-19 student performance, particularly in districts and schools deemed “underperforming.”
Communities and teachers unions must come together to protest these attempts at quantifying and controlling what happens in classrooms, which will make it harder for teachers to support students living through the aftermath of a pandemic.
“Learning loss” is an excellent rationale for a shock doctrine approach toward student, teacher, and family voices in education. And standardized tests are only one facet of this approach. An early sign of another facet came last May, when Andrew Cuomo announced that New York state would work with the Gates Foundation to “reimagine education” after the pandemic, including shifting away from classroom instruction toward a technology-heavy model.
The pandemic has been a boon for the education-technology industry. As a teacher, I have been inundated with offers from companies promising to supply all aspects of my curriculum. And my district has invested significant funding in these subscriptions, as well as unnecessary and expensive technology such as cameras that track teachers as they move around the classroom. Meanwhile, my classroom budget for the year is $0, and my school can afford only a part-time social worker.
The idea of “learning loss” will also likely be used to undermine teacher autonomy in the classroom. We will be told that the stakes are too high for us to be able to exercise our own judgment about the curriculum. Instead of rethinking our teaching in response to the post-pandemic landscape, policy makers will double down on the old standards.
Educators and families know that truly serving our young people over the next years will require a different approach, including teaching practices focused on building relationships and healing trauma.
The aftermath of a pandemic might provide the opportunity we need to win the kinds of schools our students deserve.
Students will also need support in developing a critical analysis of the events of the past year, through disciplines such as ethnic studies. Art, music, and other so-called “non-essential” classes will be even more necessary as spaces for students to reconnect with each other and process the massive upheavals in their lives.
The aftermath of a pandemic might provide the opportunity we need to win the kinds of schools our students deserve. Let’s not allow the concept of “learning loss” take away our power right when we need it most.