Shortly after the pandemic halted in-person instruction in March 2020, media outlets began to warn that school closures would permanently mar the academic development — and future earning power — of school-age children. They bemoaned a “lost generation,” with one particularly hysterical report estimating that missed instruction during 2020 would result in the collective loss of 13.8 million years of life.

But faced with the undeniable reality that school disruption has been harmful — hitting vulnerable and marginalized kids the hardest — Joe Biden’s Department of Education supplied the same discredited Bush- and Obama-era prescription that has poisoned K–12 classrooms for the past two decades: more testing to measure the problem. And as the Right graduates from testing and charters to openly advocating for an end to public schools, establishment Democrats seem incapable of offering a robust counternarrative. What’s the point of defending public education if we’ve already lost?

In the neoliberal school reform era, America’s major parties forged a truce: Republicans accepted a liberal, secular language of equity, opportunity, and empowerment, while Democrats signed on to a privatization agenda that promised to erode teachers’ unions and democratically elected school boards. Foreclosing the possibility of wealth redistribution, prominent Democrats declared that alleviating poverty was a matter of making poor kids study harder.