In 2023, Randi Weingarten told the New York Times Magazine that “all of us were wrong when we said, ‘Oh, no, there’s no learning loss.’” That is what accountability looks like — a union leader naming what went wrong while the donor class that starved public schools for decades reaches for a scapegoat.
Start with the children who were in elementary school when the pandemic hit. The latest long-term trend assessment from the National Assessment of Educational Progress — a separate exam from the main NAEP, so the numbers shouldn’t be mixed with other NAEP reporting — shows that math and reading performance for 13-year-olds remains below pre-pandemic levels, stagnating between 2023 and 2025. These children came through a once-in-a-century crisis and still showed up to learn. The board wants you to blame Weingarten’s union for fighting to keep children alive — the union that fought for smaller classes, ventilation, testing, and safety protocols, publishing a reopening blueprint with scientists and health professionals in spring 2020. The board’s allies dismissed it as impossible. The system’s failure was not the closures; it was the refusal to fund what came after. Federal ESSER funds expired in 2024 with no replacement, leaving high-poverty districts to cut counselors, tutors, and summer-learning slots. The system that refused to fund their recovery deserves the blame.
The news is better for 9-year-olds, whose story the board rushes past because it contradicts its narrative. Their scores climbed from 2022 to 2025 in both reading and math. Their reading caught up to 2020 levels, though math still lags behind. That recovery shows what happens when schools receive investment and support — exactly the policy the board’s donors oppose.
It is telling that much of the 9-year-old rebound came from the lowest-performing students — proof that targeted support works, not evidence that the pandemic caused irreparable harm. Scholars at the American Enterprise Institute, including Nat Malkus, show that the pandemic hit the lowest-scoring students hardest — and it did, because those students were already in the most underfunded schools, in a system the board’s allies built and refused to fix.
But the NAEP long-term trend data also exposes a decline that started long before anyone heard of Covid. With the single exception of 9-year-old reading, scores for every age group and subject are lower than they were in 2012. That comports with a decade of defunding, demonizing teachers, and hollowing out public schools while demanding they produce higher scores on ever-narrower tests.
The board reaches for “lower standards and expectations for students, cellphones in classrooms and social media, or other cultural factors” rather than naming the obvious: chronic disinvestment is the cause, not a symptom. Research from the Harvard and Stanford Education Scorecard project has documented significant learning losses predating the pandemic — losses that a test-based accountability regime focused on punishment rather than support failed to surface until it was too late. What the board calls “accountability” — the testing-surveillance regime that reduces children and teachers to data points — was itself a product of the defunding logic: starve schools, then punish them for the results. The unions — and the politicians who sustain them — are accused of hollowing out accountability, but accountability without investment is not accountability. It is cruelty with a spreadsheet. The same logic closed schools in Black and Brown neighborhoods for low test scores while the state refused to fix the leaky roofs.
One modest piece of good news: NAEP offers state-level reporting that makes it harder for any state or district to hide how its students are faring. That small step toward transparency offers a faint chance that the country will start holding its schools accountable again — not with punitive testing regimes, but with the investment that makes accountability possible.
Weingarten’s February 2021 Axios interview, in which she said “kids are resilient and kids will recover,” was the honest reassurance of a leader navigating a genuine crisis. The real “educational failure” is what we did to public schools long before the pandemic — and what we refused to do after. Start with the policymakers who defunded the system, then blamed the teachers who tried to protect the children inside it.