For half a century the UN's principal agency on education, UNESCO, has sought to shape the world's educational landscape through a once-every-generation global report (e.g. the Faure report of 1972 and the Delors report of 1996). The latest of these reports -- the Sahle-Work Commission's "Reimagining our futures together: A new social contract for education" -- was developed and released amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. This article considers the ways the pandemic entered into the production of educational futures -- and pasts -- in this tradition of UNESCO global reports. It argues that the uneven distribution of pasts and futures is one of the key, already-existing systems of difference that set the stage for a disruptive event like the COVID-19 pandemic.