The Pandemic Broke a Fundamental Principle of Teaching

We’ve all been focusing on getting kids back into the classroom, but what happens once they get there? As the Delta variant threatens to wreak more havoc, kids are returning to school, at least for now—and teachers are finding themselves in a race to undo the damage of the past 18 months. Many of us, for the first time in our careers, will have no idea what our students know on the opening day of school.

More than 340,000 American children who should have been in public kindergartens last year to a single day of virtual or in-person school. Absentee rates were in kindergarten than in other grades, and in lower-income families than , an alarming number of students across ages and income brackets never enrolled in the schools that were expecting them. And that’s just the students who missed the entire year. Millions more lost days, weeks, or months because of the pandemic; many who did attend .