Those adults who thought that the pandemic’s disruption to in-school learning would not produce serious negative consequences were kidding themselves.

Just how serious those negative consequences have turned out to be should serve as a wake-up call to parents, educators and communities alike.

The message from the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress is a real eye-opener, and that’s an understatement.

Perhaps students in this part of Pennsylvania did not fare as badly as children who attend some inner-city or small, predominantly rural schools, but parents here need to know, nevertheless, how their sons and daughters stack up educationally against schoolchildren elsewhere in Pennsylvania and beyond this state.

It would be interesting — and helpful — if school districts in the region could provide to their residents a frank evaluation, good or bad, of their pandemic remote-learning experiences.

In some areas, a troubling report might spawn some criticism directed toward teachers. However, during the pandemic, teachers providing remote learning had to navigate a myriad of unprecedented distractions — distractions absent, or nearly so, in formal classroom settings having stricter learning discipline than that available in many homes.

Sure, many teachers and school systems might handle the troubling situation differently, and better, if they were faced with the pandemic facts-of-life again.

However, when the pandemic began, teachers, like everyone else, faced “new territory” to which they had to adapt and try to produce the best results, despite sometimes being on the wrong side of the odds.

The challenge here, going forward, is to ensure this region — educational facilities, educators and families — does not become complacent because of having met the pandemic challenge in a much more successful, aggressive way than many other places.

What a recent article revealed by way of statistics should be fodder for future caution built upon the lessons and adjustments COVID-19 necessitated. It began: “The COVID-19 pandemic caused historic learning setbacks for America’s children, sparing no state or region as it erased decades of academic progress and widened racial disparities, according to results of a national test that provide the sharpest look yet at the scale of the crisis.”

“Across the country, math scores saw their largest decreases ever,” the article continued. “Reading scores dropped to 1992 levels. Nearly four in 10 eighth graders failed to grasp basic math concepts.

Not a single state saw a notable improvement in their average test scores, with some treading water at best.”

The assessment in question tested hundreds of thousands of fourth- and eighth-graders across the country this year. The exam, which last had been administered in 2019 — pre-pandemic — is seen as the first nationally representative study of the pandemic’s impact on learning.

What the assessment has revealed is cause for alarm. More importantly, it is an indicator of what needs to be done in classrooms, going forward, and how parents need to be supportive of the catching-up process as it proceeds.