Obligatory Sold a Story podcast link.
I can't help but feel that a lot of this is deliberate, the end result of decades of dismantling the public education system to further divide kids into the upper class in private schools, religious fundamentalists in home schooling, and everyone else abandoned to keep the population uneducated and in worse economic precarity.
Somebody please tell me that the kids are alright 
That threads is a mixed bag. A lot of comments correctly blaming NCLB and the general switch to testing and metrics over teachers autonomy, even some “there are larger socioeconomic issues at play here” takes. But also a lot of blaming parents, blaming kids instead of the systems. And I don’t buy “oh it’s TikTok/YouTube/Instagram”; people been saying the newfangled media is rotting brains since the printing press was invented. Not to get all tooting my own horn, but my kid is reading a couple grade levels above his age and he watches plenty of YouTube. It’s about getting the fundamentals and encouraging them to explore their interests. And yes, some parents check out of the IEP and special ed processes, but if you’ve got single working parents or dual income households and all these processes take time you don’t have and involve meetings you’ve got to try to get out of work to attend, well yeah of course they’re not going to follow through.
The scapegoating and inability or refusal to identify the systemic issues gets to me tenfold more than the sorry state of education.
I looked at another thread in that sub and there was literally someone who went "it's all ipads -> tiktok is a Chinese conspiracy to dumb down its enemies." I only saw 2 posts that had anything deeper.
Still can't believe that TikTok conspiracy is still so widespread when the US government hasn't been hiding its ties to the app.
they do have poor comprehension.