You don't have to try hard at all, if you are a parent, educator, or student, to remember just how confusing and scary and depressing and suffocating that first year of the pandemic was. You likely feel it still, in your own singular way, that time marked as much but what did not happen as what did. The graduations conducted via Zoom. The school plays and proms that never were. Now multiply that experience. Deepen it. Throw in corruption and violence and hunger and a mental health crisis and a series of haphazard policy decisions without any true plans, and you begin to get a sense of true enormity of what we endured, and what not everyone survived.
In "The Stolen Year: How Covid Changed Children's Lives, and Where We Go Now," NPR education reporter and parent Anya Kamenetz doesn't content herself to merely chronicle the uniquely catastrophic educational mess of 2020 and 2021. Instead, while weaving real stories of families affected by the pandemic (including, at times, her own), she explores how a century of systemic ineptitude and indifference towards our American school systems led us to fail our children on an unprecedented scale. It is a sobering, frustrating, often heartbreaking book. It's also an essential read for anyone who lived through that time, and who wants to learn how to avoid a repeat of it in the future.
