I believe “Fighting the White Knight” helps explain the recent widening of the achievement gap. We created calamitous educational policies, later followed by even more atrocious plans and reactions, and yet somehow this post-pandemic growing gap in test scores nonetheless surprised us. COVID has been given the blame, but those assertions of blame are naive or even disingenuous.

Please believe me: The sad state of the gap cannot be laid at COVID’s door, even if COVID aggravated an already precarious situation. Simply, in poor US school districts, local funding had not provided enough. Not enough funding. Not enough academic choice. Not enough up-to-date resources. Not enough tutoring. In particular, not enough laptops, iPads and other technology. We had ignored the wisdom of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Across time and across the country, educational “reformers” had been trying to find solutions to the achievement gap that did not involve changing the US school funding system, hoping to find a magic fix for differences between zip codes, while deflecting attention away from the effects of local property-tax-based school funding. When the pandemic arrived, where were the computers and software required for remote learning? We know that answer now. We watched as districts scrambled to lay their hands on back-ordered Chromebooks and other tech, devices many of their students did not yet know how to use.

As I have observed before, property-tax-based funding favors Congresspeople, mid-level bureaucrats, and other decision makers. Middle-class (or better) employment allows parents to choose between more expensive, prosperous neighborhoods where education funding flows freely into schools that have all the support staff, technological devices and special services most parents could desire. Meanwhile, in less fortunate neighborhoods, laptops, iPads, desktops, software, books, aides, and tutoring tend to be much thinner on the ground. In the US educational system today, you still get what you can pay for. That can be a single language option on the curriculum instead of six different languages, and almost nothing for afterschool activities except sports, while luckier kids down the road get to pick between more than twenty after-school clubs, on top of the usual sports.

Eduhonesty: FUNDING needs to be front and center in our sights as we work to bring equity, fairness and improved performance to the US educational system. Frankin D. Roosevelt predicted the loss of learning in our poorer zip codes, even as so-called “reformers” pushed relentlessly for higher English and math test scores in schools without laptops or stable internet connections.

• * O.K., I admit that “covert attempt superteacher” bit is definitely too long to tag onto my subtitle!

HOWEVER — data only tells you what you did not know when you understand how to dig into that data. Data mining involves shoveling large quantities of numbers and people get lost in those numbers. Sometimes they choose to go astray, trying to bend the numbers to support what they intend to do anyway.

Of more importance, when you already know something, adding more data merely wastes time and money.

Eduhonesty: I could measure my height every day for a month. I wouldn’t grow any taller nor would I shrink. I know this before I pull out the tape measure.

A state test in the spring makes sense. But I believe a state test on top of two benchmark tests, both administered multiple times throughout the year, should be considered educational malpractice, except in the rarest of cases. Because every test sacrifices instructional hours that can never be recovered.

I’ve written this too many times. One more time into the breach, though, because many educational decision makers remain overly enamored of adding and analyzing data. Rather than learning the minutiae of learning gaps, we should be filling the gaps. We can’t fill those gaps while testing.

And we have to watch out for enthusiastic exhortations about the advantages of data.

One problem with discussions on the US educational system is the inherent breadth of the issues. It’s easy to mire down in multiple topics and lose focus. Sunday morning, I joined readers to discuss my book, “Fighting the White Knight: Saving Education from Misguided Testing, Inappropriate Standards and other Good Intentions.” We had a diverse group: people with no experience in education, a paraprofessional from a wealthy district, an urban charter teacher’s spouse, a retired teacher from another wealthy district, a university professor, and me.

I’d like to share one point from this morning that deserves much more attention than it has received.

Eduhonesty: As educators know, No Child Left Behind (NCLB) explicitly planned to evaluate US schools through expanded testing, designed to gain additional data on student progress. The Common Core set out to create a common national curriculum, and associated national test. That test was intended to homogenize data across the country.

Illinois provides a frightening example of what actually happened when various government entities used power and money to push NCLB and the Core on US students.

In Illinois, we abruptly threw all bilingual and special education students into the state testing pool, mostly dropping tests those subgroups had taken previously, but sometimes adding extra tests and thus subtracting instructional time. Over time, we changed the Illinois State Achievement Test (ISAT) into the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) to match new Core expectations. Then we changed PARCC into the Illinois Assessment of Readiness (IAR), because our PARCC scores pleased almost no one, except maybe a few vindictive psychopaths. Fierce arguments about changes to the IAR are currently underway. Some factions want to break the test into three parts. If this is done, the new IAR definitely will not be the IAR of the recent past.

Here’s the topic that never gets discussed, probably because there is nothing to be done: If we had left that first test, the ISAT, in place instead of playing test roulette, we would know a great deal more about student progress than we do now. When test administration and test content change significantly, the ability to make comparisons over time becomes lost. How does student achievement in 2024 compare to achievement in 2004, 2010 or 2020? Honestly, we don’t know. Answers to that question can be inferred, but the students of today are not taking anything close to the same test given to students in 2004. If 2024 students took the same algebra test as students from 2004, stakeholders could quickly say, “score are down 12%” and reliable, valid data would support that number. But despite burying ourselves in numbers, that reliable, valid data does not exist.

And the money that funded those national curricula, tests, and related professional developments and committee meetings, not to mention the money spent on purchases of test-related classroom materials? That money could probably have funded a permanent base on the moon. I honestly believe we might have spent enough $$$$$ to build a lunar colony — and sadly, if we had spent the money on the moon, and had left education alone, I believe today’s students would have come out academically, socially and emotionally ahead.

Recent reforms have provided yet another example of that old quote from the Viet Nam war: “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.” Except the village remains ravished and wrecked in pockets throughout the country, and it’s unclear who — if anyone — we saved.

P.S. Yes, we do have comparable data from a national test. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is a standardized test measuring academic performance given by the U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics. This test is only for students in grades 4, 8 and 12, however, and students do not receive test results.