For decades now, education policy debates have focused on “progressive education” vs. “back to basics.” You can hear echoes in current efforts to figure out what happened to Maine schools during the pandemic, and how we might recover from that dismal experience.

While most adults had more or less adequate ways of coping with pandemic conditions, that wasn’t always true for schoolchildren in the early grades. Online education was far from ideal for first graders just learning how to fit in with other kids, and not having a teacher in the room multiplied the difficulties.

Those deficits were on display in the Legislature’s Education Committee discussion of the state’s shockingly poor scores in the National Assessment of Education (NAEP), which showed Maine ranking 38th in the nation.

It wasn’t always like this. The 1983 report “A Nation at Risk,” commissioned by federal Education Commissioner Terrel Bell, galvanized states to invest more in education, similar to the way the Soviet Union’s 1957 launch of Sputnik in 1957 focused Americans on science and technology.

Unlike subsequent reports, including George W. Bush’s misnamed “No Child Left Behind” initiative that punished “failing schools,” the “Nation at Risk” report led to substantial efforts in improving schools nationwide, in states led by Republican and Democratic governors alike.

Maine under Govs. Joe Brennan and John McKernan paid attention. When the NAEP was inaugurated, Maine was an early adopter. Maine had pioneered its own assessment tool, Learning Results, which for two decades helped schools improve curriculums and student outreach based on classroom-specific data. Learning Results was eventually abandoned, partly to save money and, more plausibly, because they required students to take two rounds of intensive testing, paired with the NAEP.

Maine regularly scored in the NAEP’s top 10 in math and reading. This encouraged the Legislature and local districts to allocate more funding and raise chronically low teacher salaries.

That was then. Now that Maine has fallen behind notoriously low-achieving states that nonetheless improved scores post-pandemic, some hard questions are in order.

That’s not the stance taken by the Department of Education.

Rep. Barbara Bagshaw, R-Windham, stated the issue plainly: “We have a problem, we have a big problem.” Then she added, on one side of the old debate, “The kids aren’t getting educated in the basics.”

Sen. Teresa Pierce, D-Falmouth, kept up the questioning, saying, “I’m trying to field the calls of people who are like, ‘Hey, we used to be at the top and it feels like we’re not.’”

The department’s response was underwhelming.

“Maine is engaged in groundbreaking work to enhance literacy and mathematics education,” said Beth Lambert, chief teaching and learning officer. “Our state’s approach goes far beyond what NAEP actually measures.”

This is unconvincing progressivism, effectively saying “We don’t focus on the basics anymore.”

After more questions, Lambert said, “Students, children, humans don’t come down to these easily grabbed metrics … It’s much more complex than that.”

This is special pleading. When Maine ranked high on the NAEP, it confirmed the hard work going into education. Now that it’s fallen precipitously, it really doesn’t matter, according to top educational leaders.

Like the progressive vs. basics debate, reading instruction has been dominated by the techniques of phonics and “look-say.” Phonics emphasizes pronunciation of words as keying the magical moment when kids start being able to decode symbols on the page. Advocates often claimed this was the only way to teach.

But “look-say” has a place too, because the sound of English words, notoriously, doesn’t match their spellings. Many are based on pronunciations not heard since the days of Old English, or “Anglo-Saxon.” Similarly, progressive and basics approaches can work well together. While often condemned by progressives, “rote learning” has a place.

Memorization is still one key to retaining what one learns. No amount of AI will ever replace the ineffable process by which most humans achieve their own “voice” when they write. But too much rote is boring. There’s plenty of room for creative approaches, especially for children having difficulty with focus or comprehension, common experiences often having little to do with “intelligence.”

What we need now is for the Department of Education to listen to legislators and devise a plan for improving student performance in math and reading, and submit it for public review; no more excuses.

If we did it back in the 1980s, there’s no reason why we can’t do it again. At a time when President Trump is bizarrely trying to cripple the federal Department of Education, we can rededicate ourselves to education as a state. It’s been said many times before, but it’s still true: Our future depends on it.