Five years after the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, student achievement levels are in free fall. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) results released in late January 2025, fewer than one-third of students nationwide scored at proficiency levels in reading and math. Achievement gaps by race, income, and other student characteristics have grown. Whatever may be causing this current decline in student achievement (whether lower teacher quality, looser accountability standards, or out-of-school factors like rising income inequality or increasing social media use), it did not start during the pandemic, but well before, in the early 2000s. Over the past five years, the Center on Reinventing Public Education has watched as the pandemic showed exactly how the education system's rigidities, hardwired inequalities, political nature, resistance to evidence-based practices, and inability to respond to individual student needs halted the progress of a generation of K-12 students. In a companion paper, the authors examine exactly what went wrong during the pandemic and why. In this paper, the authors discuss the problems anticipated pre-pandemic and propose solutions for the present--and the utter urgency of implementing them immediately.