I am in contact with TAs and professors who teach undergrads and grad students, a highschool teacher assistant, and a private tutor. Every time I ask them how their job is going, they describe how things are worse than they could have imagined, and it just keeps getting worse. They speak of the end times.
Teachers are being paid almost nothing, to teach kids who are increasingly combative (especially the male ones) and who are several years behind in basic competencies, grading homework done with chatgpt, only to be fought by parents who think history and math is "woke". While moving into a second Trump term.
Male students are emboldened to make wildly sexist threats. My highschool TA friend has been told things like "women shouldn't be allowed to vote" along with rape threats, and the students were not disciplined at all.
This is all anecdata, but every piece of data I can find backs this up.
The Nations Report Card site is the most coherent and readable source that combines this data, and is only up to date to 2022. Everyone I know expects the scores to be way way down when the 2024 report releases January 29th.
As of 2022, grade 8 reading scores were at a 28 year low, and [grade 4 was at a 24 year low[(https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reading/nation/scores/?grade=4).
As of 2022, grade 8 math scores were at a 22 year low and grade 4 scores were at a 13 year low.
For almost every subject, the pattern is the same. The 2022 test shows decades of advancement wiped away. Civics, US history, and things are especially for the youngest students.
I'm anxiously looking at the 2024 report card, releasing in just over three weeks.
Optimistically, this was a temporary drop due to covid, and generative AI isn't having the destructive impact I think, and every educator I know is just living in a bubble.
Realistically, we're probably in a state of continued educational decline.
Pessimistically, we're "cooked", as the kids say. Education is the most important thing. Knowledge lives in people, not in books, and if knowledge isn't passed on, it's lost. Knowledge can't be taken from writing if people can't read. This is a very scary future we're looking at.
TLDR: The vibes and the data agree, kids are doing worse at school. The 2022 report card was bad, and the 2024 report card releases in the end of January. Fingers crossed!