You know how sometimes a headline will catch your eye and you’ll engage in a brief wrestling match with your intelligence and judgment: Is this clickbait? Is this AI? Could this, in any sense of the word, be real?

Here’s the headline that triggered that response in me: Who’s Responsible for Toilet Training? Schools or Families?

Here’s the gist, from an Education Week survey: Most [teacher] respondents agreed that, compared with two years ago, students are struggling more with basic skills and tasks—from following instructions to tying their own shoes and, in some instances, personal care, including toileting.

Mind you—we’re not talking about children with significant disabilities or the occasional kindergarten accident. We’re talking about the expectation that children will handle their own bathroom needs when they’re five years old vs. the prospect of teachers dealing with toilet assistance for 30 children, some of whom are still wearing pull-ups.

In addition, of course, to literacy, numeracy and putting on their snowsuits.

I have lots of teacher friends. Those in early childhood classrooms have been concerned about those basic skills and tasks for more than a few years now. They’re not calling it a learning recession—which is a stupid label—but they are noticing downward trends in the markers of independence that students bring to school. They’ve got stories.

Anne Lutz Fernandez, commenting on the “learning recession” designation in a new report gets this exactly right: Teachers and professors nationwide have been sounding the alarm for some time about the declines in student skills, knowledge, and behavior they’ve been seeing firsthand, much of which can’t be measured by standardized tests. But test scores are all that many political and educational leaders heed when it comes to school success.

I’m old enough to remember the rollout of No Child Left Behind—the dismay, once we realized that third grade would become the first year when children would be defined annually by their test scores. We were accustomed to standardized assessments—Michigan was giving the statewide MEAP test in 1970, in 4^th, 7^th and 10^th grades—but it was easy to see that the general public would soon rely on test scores as the only reliable indicator of student progress.

It was also easy to see that those annual tests would begin to drive instruction, re-focus curriculum and put pressure on schools to raise scores. What we didn’t foresee, initially, was the long tail: statistical voodoo that calculated an individual teacher’s ‘value added,’ for example. Or closing down schools, often community centers in poor neighborhoods, with low test numbers. Or the pre-test pep assemblies, the frantic search for curricula that would boost scores, the third grade flunk rules.  Not to mention the cheating.

What I find interesting in the “learning recession” talk is the approximate date that the test scores began going down: around 2013. Which would be the time when all K-12 students had experienced the Brave New World of NCLB and its subsequent federal incarnations.

Seniors graduating in 2013 would have taken all the standardized tests and experienced all the efforts to <cough> raise the data bar. From that point on, it should have been a steady upward climb. But no.

It was also, of course, just about the time 7^th graders began asking for their own phones and one-to-one Chromebooks were district selling points. There is resistance to blaming sagging test scores on technology—when you spend a huge percentage of a district budget on tech hardware, software and training, it’s hard to admit you’ve been bamboozled.

Anne Lutz Fernandez, again: The problem with this phraseology [learning recession] is that it frames the crisis as one not of culture or human systems but one of business and economics. A key legacy of the accountability regime and its heavy reliance on standardized testing is the inability of politicians and pundits to see or discuss the work of schools in other terms.

Bingo. We might begin by admitting that test scores aren’t truth. And if test scores peaked and then diminished, it might have something to do with that fact. Nobody—including 3^rd graders—wants to be defined by a number. When you’re old enough to understand that your test scores are more important to your school (and, perhaps, your teacher) than you, motivation for trying hard might diminish as well.

But that’s a cultural issue—like five year-olds who have not mastered toileting yet. If there is a recession, it touches many ordinary skills that are part of growing up and self-management, and it reflects on the world our youngest schoolchildren inhabit.

A culture fraught with disrespect, parental indifference to schools and learning, a lack of healthy play and human relationships. A country where AI memes serve as news, and political leaders lie and lie and lie. Where teaching is no longer defined as a profession.

If there is a learning recession, fixing it won’t happen by ratcheting up the stakes, once again. It calls for a new vision of which learning is important, and a new commitment to the children of this nation, as well as public education, which is—or used to be—America’s best idea.