"We don't keep secrets and cover things up."

NAEP scores are bad.

On January 28, 1986, the space shuttle Challenger exploded, killing its seven crew members. It was a national tragedy. President Ronald Reagan delivered a speech later that afternoon, from the Oval Office, which was moving, somber, resonant with leadership and faith, patriotism and hope.

He said two things in that speech that feel relevant today, as we sift through the wreckage of our national hopes and dreams that America’s schoolchildren were on a path to academic recovery following the pandemic. Reagan said, about the US space program, “We don’t keep secrets and cover things up. We do it all up front and in public. That’s the way freedom is, and we wouldn’t change it for a minute.”

NAEP data are now public, so we can confront together that something is very broken in American public education. We can’t cover this up with platitudes or excuses or distraction. We must own this tragedy, even as it is of our own making. Fourth and eighth grade students have continued to lose ground in reading. Eighth-grade students are now worse off in reading than they were in 1992. Meanwhile, eighth-grade math scores are stagnant, with fourth-grade math scores rising slightly. I’ll have more to say down the road about bright spots amongst states, but this news is bad. School isn’t working; students aren’t learning.

Reagan went on to say, “I know it is hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen. It’s all part of the process of exploration and discovery…The future doesn’t belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave.”

We must be brave enough to admit when we’ve failed. For millions of American schoolchildren, and especially those at the bottom of the achievement spectrum, this failure is colossal and ongoing and disastrous.

In another January presidential address a few years later, President Bill Clinton said at his 1993 inauguration, “We know we have to face hard truths and take strong steps. But we have not done so. Instead, we have drifted, and that drifting has eroded our resources, fractured our economy, and shaken our confidence.” He went on to say, “There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America.”

There are schools teaching kids how to read and do math. But those bright spots are quickly becoming the bug, not the feature, of public K-12 education. The point here is not to abandon hope. First, though, we should sit with this feeling of unease, of disappointment, of having been wrong. Apologize. To students for failing them and to parents for misleading them. To teachers for telling them they had all the skills and experience they needed, when so clearly they do not. To the American taxpayer. To each other for choosing power and politics and pithy posts over what our kids need. We have drifted. It is now time to right the ship or watch it truly sink.

Tomorrow will be for solutions. Today we own the disaster.