When the pandemic forced American education online, it should have been as simple as flipping a switch. Instead, it became the moment when decades of educational complacency came crashing down.
The Switch That Wouldn't Flip
March 2020. Schools across America closed their doors, and educators scrambled to move learning online. After decades of investment in educational technology, digital learning platforms, and promises of "21st-century classrooms," this should have been a smooth transition. We had the infrastructure. We had the tools. We had been preparing for this moment for years.
Or so we thought.
What happened instead was a catastrophic revelation: American education had been living on borrowed credibility, and the pandemic called in the debt. The transition to online learning in the United States during the Covid-19 pandemic was, by many accounts, a failure, exposing systemic weaknesses that had been papered over for years. (1)
The Illusion of Digital Readiness
For years, schools had proudly showcased their technology initiatives:
Interactive whiteboards in every classroom
One-to-one device programs
Learning management systems
Digital curriculum platforms
Professional development in "blended learning"
Yet when push came to shove, the transition to remote learning was anything but seamless. Many schools, particularly the fewer-resourced ones, did not go into the pandemic with the digital integration they thought they'd had. In January 2020, a few months before the pandemic reached the United States, the Consortium for School Networking found from a national sample of more than 500 member districts, a majority reported they had digital learning initiatives but months of fully remote instruction have disabused many school leaders about their real digital readiness. (2)
Teachers struggled with basic technology. Students couldn't access materials. Parents discovered that "digital learning" often meant little more than digitized worksheets. The emperor of educational technology, it turned out, had no clothes.
What We Actually Discovered
The pandemic didn't just expose our technological unpreparedness, it revealed deeper, more troubling truths about American education:
1. We Had Confused Tools with Teaching
Having iPads and smartboards didn't mean we understood digital pedagogy. We had spent billions on devices while neglecting to fundamentally reimagine how learning happens in digital spaces. The pandemic also highlighted the real challenge in training the entire U.S. teaching corps to be proficient in technology and data analysis. (1) Teachers were trained to use technology, not to teach with it.
2. Our "Rigorous" Curriculum Was Surprisingly Fragile
When learning moved online, something shocking happened: much of what we considered essential curriculum simply... disappeared. If core learning objectives could be so easily abandoned or watered down, how essential were they really? The pandemic revealed that we had been mistaking busy work for academic rigor.
3. The Relationship Between School and Learning Was More Tenuous Than We Admitted
Many students thrived in remote learning environments, while others floundered completely. Teachers in two separate surveys estimated that only about 60% of their students were regularly participating or engaging in distance learning. (3) This variation exposed an uncomfortable truth: traditional schooling wasn't universally effective, and for some students, it may have been actively harmful. We had been conflating attendance with engagement, compliance with learning.
4. Our Assessment Systems Were Built on Quicksand
When students couldn't be physically monitored during tests, our entire assessment framework crumbled. In Houston, the number of students with failing grades exploded. In St. Paul, Minn., a high school student became almost as likely to be on track to fail a class as pass it. (4) If our evaluation methods could be so easily compromised, what were they actually measuring? The pandemic forced us to confront the possibility that much of our testing was measuring test-taking ability rather than learning.
The Credibility Crisis
Public confidence in American education plummeted to historic lows, and it wasn't hard to understand why. Gallup data from that period painted a grim picture: Americans became almost evenly split in their confidence in higher education, with approximately one-third expressing a lot of confidence, one-third some confidence, and one-third very little confidence. This shift from 58 percent high confidence in 2015 to just 36 percent represented a massive erosion of trust. (5,6)
But the crisis began in K-12 as parents got an unprecedented behind-the-scenes look at their children's education and didn't like what they saw:
Curriculum Transparency: For the first time, parents could observe lessons in real-time. Many discovered that what they assumed was happening in classrooms... wasn't.
Teacher Preparedness: Wide variations in educator comfort with technology and digital pedagogy became glaringly obvious. Teachers of low-income students and students of color were much more likely to report that their students were not regularly engaged in remote learning.
Educational Inequity: The digital divide revealed how unequal educational opportunities had always been, just in new and more visible ways. 51% of teachers in high-poverty schools reported that most of their students were participating daily in distance learning. For affluent schools, the number was 84%. (3)
Learning Loss: Achievement gaps that had been narrowing suddenly exploded, revealing how fragile previous progress had been. Research from 17 countries found that the COVID era had fundamentally altered the way most people viewed education, with Americans wanting "different" rather than just "better." (7)
The Uncomfortable Truth About "Learning Loss"
The narrative of "learning loss" during the pandemic assumes that students were consistently learning at expected rates before March 2020. But what if they weren't? What if the pandemic simply made visible learning deficits that had been accumulating for years?
The numbers told a devastating story. The 2022 NAEP data showed average math scores for 9-year-olds had sunk by a staggering seven points between 2020 and 2022, the only such decline since the long-term test was first administered in 1973. In reading, scores saw the biggest drop in 30 years. Two decades of growth for American students in reading and math had been wiped away by just two years of pandemic-disrupted learning. (8,9,10)
But here's the uncomfortable question: if students could lose two years of learning in one year of disrupted schooling, how solid was that learning to begin with? Real understanding, deep knowledge, and critical thinking skills don't evaporate so easily. What disappeared wasn't robust learning but the artificial scaffolding that had been propping up the appearance of achievement.
The results were particularly devastating for already vulnerable students. Black 9-year-olds experienced a 13-point score decrease in math compared to a 5-point decrease among White 9-year-olds. Students in schools that spent more time in remote learning typically have lost more ground, and in general, historically disadvantaged students have fallen further behind. (10,11)
The Silver Lining: Forced Innovation
Despite the chaos, some remarkable things happened during pandemic education:
Teachers who had never considered themselves "tech-savvy" rapidly developed digital skills
Innovative educators discovered new ways to create engagement in virtual environments
Students gained independence and self-directed learning skills
Families became more involved in the educational process
Alternative assessment methods emerged out of necessity
These bright spots revealed what was possible when educators were forced to innovate rather than maintain the status quo. After more than a year of pandemic digital learning, research shows that districts are beginning to find their footing in digital learning; 95 percent of the more than 300 districts surveyed now provide at least some off-campus broadband access, and 27 percent now provide free or subsidized home broadband access to low-income students. (2)
The Path Forward: Learning from the Revelation
The pandemic didn't break American education—it revealed that it was already broken. But this revelation, painful as it was, created an unprecedented opportunity for transformation.
Instead of rushing back to "normal," we should ask:
What did we learn about learning? Which students thrived in different environments, and why?
What really matters? If so much curriculum could be abandoned without consequence, what should we actually be teaching?
How do we rebuild trust? What would transparent, accountable, effective education look like?
What's the role of technology? How do we move from digitized worksheets to truly transformative digital learning?
The Choice Before Us
We stand at a crossroads. We can spend enormous energy trying to restore public confidence in a system that was already failing, or we can use this moment of revealed truth to build something better.
The pandemic taught us that change is possible when it's necessary. The latest NAEP scores are based on assessments administered between October and December 2022, meaning the record-low achievement continued to be observed nearly two years after most schools reopened for in-person learning after two years of much-heralded summer schools, intensive tutoring and other academic supports, and despite nearly $200 billion in emergency federal education spending. Most of the $122 billion that Congress allocated to help schools recover from the pandemic has gone unspent, with school systems spending less than 15 percent of the special federal funding during the 2021-2022 school year. (12,13)
The question is whether we'll have the courage to make necessary changes when they're not forced upon us by crisis.
American education's credibility crisis isn't really about the pandemic response. It's about decades of promises we couldn't keep and standards we couldn't maintain. The good news is that admitting this is the first step toward building something worthy of the public's trust.
The switch didn't flip in 2020 because there was nothing real connected to it. Now we have the chance to build the actual infrastructure—pedagogical, technological, and cultural—that can support genuine learning in any environment.
The question is: will we take it?
What's your experience with education during the pandemic? Did it change how you think about school and learning? I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
References
Smithsonian Magazine. "What the Covid-19 Pandemic Revealed About Remote School." July 20, 2023.
EdWeek. "Remote Learning Isn't Just for Emergencies." September 16, 2021.
Chalkbeat. "How did America's remote-learning experiment really go?" November 9, 2023.
The Washington Post. "It's time to admit it: Remote education is a failure." December 2, 2020.
Gallup. "U.S. Confidence in Higher Education Now Closely Divided." July 8, 2024.
Lumina Foundation. "Crisis of confidence in U.S. higher education: A call for renewed focus and reform." July 8, 2024.
elearninginside.com. "Study Reveals Crisis of Confidence in American Education." January 18, 2023.
NAEP Long-Term Trend Assessment Results: Reading and Mathematics. 2022.
The 74 Million. "'Nation's Report Card': Two Decades of Growth Wiped Out by Two Years of Pandemic." September 1, 2022.
Chalkbeat. "Latest NAEP results show striking drop in 13-year-olds' math and reading scores." November 9, 2023.
The Education Trust. "NAEP Results Show Dismal Learning Loss Due to Pandemic. What Can Be Done?" September 29, 2022.
The Washington Post. "The NAEP report card shows pandemic learning loss. Here's what to do." October 26, 2022.
The 74 Million. "New NAEP Scores Reveal the Failure of Pandemic Academic Recovery Efforts." June 26, 2023.