Some amount of this has got to be due to Covid. I used to tutor a middle school boy, and he was probably two years behind where he should have been. Because of this, he was lacking the foundation that he needed to progress. It was so bad.

Tiktok also gained popularity the same time as covid. Someone needs to do a study on screen time over the last 5 years for school age children. We do know screen time is correlated to poor academic performance.