The thing about interrupted learning, is that we are treating it like this is the first time learning has been interrupted. Oh, we acknowledge the summer slide and consider year 'round school but we don't consider the many systemic interruptions that have brought us to the place where we just can't get the learning gaps to close. 

Our educational system is like a woman trying to get into a dress she bought because she intended to lose weight. It didn't fit when she bought it. It didn't fit after the first big fad diet. It didn't fit after the second, third or fourth weight loss attempt. And it does not fit today. 

Marginalized populations have consistently experienced community and societal factors that disrupt learning. From the Middle Passage, Western Expansion and broken treaties to Gerrymandering and redlining, the systems of inequities have been like the dress that never fit to start with. 

Until we look at the educational and societal systems that have only just begun to be recognized as inequitable, the dress will never fit. COVID "learning loss" is simply one more event that has disadvantaged populations who have endured one traumatic learning interruption after another. My generation is the first post Civil Rights Act generation and that means that the challenges to rising above poverty caused by enslavement, reservation life, immigration, etc. are only now beginning to be addressed. How do we examine the root causes that keep marginalized populations marginalized? How do we connect those root causes to the interrupted learning outcomes we see today?

First, we have to look holistically at poverty in our nation and decide to resource our communities without using an educational system to provide "wraparound services". Next, and most importantly, we have to look critically at intergenerational trauma and the adverse childhood events that impact teaching and learning with an eye toward critically reevaluating the systems themselves, rather than the students those systems serve. It's why culturally sustaining pedagogies have to be in our teacher tool belts. For example, understanding how slights endured in the fight to survive take up cognitive energy means one, that physical and mental health outcomes are impacted, but it also means that there is learning taking place, learning that is not measured on standardized tests. Different kinds of learning as well as missed opportunities to learn in formal settings across  generations has to be a part of every learning gap conversation, including the one around this latest interrupted learning. If we approach COVID learning loss as if it is something new and specific to COVID, we will miss an extraordinary opportunity to do a hard reset in which we reevaluate learning gaps, learning evaluation and learning itself.