"That was very offensive to me. I’m not putting in myself, my hard work, his hard work, for you to tell me that he’s at second-grade reading."

Wrote the mother of a 5th grader, quoted in "Does It Hurt Children to Measure Pandemic Learning Loss? Research shows many young children have fallen behind in reading and math. But some educators are worried about stigmatizing an entire generation" (NYT).

[Some people] are pushing back against the concept of “learning loss,” especially on behalf of the Black, Hispanic and low-income children who, research shows, have fallen further behind over the past year. They fear that a focus on what’s been lost could incite a moral panic that paints an entire generation as broken.... 

Jesse Hagopian, a Seattle high school teacher and writer, said testing to measure the impact of the pandemic misses what students have learned outside of physical classrooms during a year of overlapping crises in health, politics and police violence. “They are learning about how our society works, how racism is used to divide,” he said. “They are learning about the failure of government to respond to the pandemic.” 

Mr. Hagopian said he believed that “learning loss” research was being used to “prop up the multi-billion-dollar industry of standardized testing” and “rush educators back into classrooms before it’s safe to do so.” 

Is this a fear of learning the truth, a questioning whether standardized tests reveal the truth, or dedication to the more important truth that knowing the truth discourages people. But is that true — does knowing that your 5th grader reads at a 2nd-grade level make it harder to move him forward in his reading skills? Does knowing that black and Hispanic students are further back than ever undermine the education efforts?  We ought to at least be truth-focused as we try to understand whether knowing the truth helps.