Retired public school teacher here (not union). The first thing you have to realize is that half of everyone is below average. That’s just math, no matter how much people try to deny it.
The second thing is that current students lost 2 years of education (good or bad) from the Wuhan disease.
The third thing is that standards and expectations of students and teachers has been dropping for at least the last century. Don’t believe me? Go to Gutenberg.org and download or just read McGuffey’s Sixth Eclectic Reader and see what was expected of 6th-graders back at the turn of the 20th century. Compare it to what 6th-graders are reading now.
Much has been lost in recent times.
Here is a reading of a transcript by Wyatt Earp on gun fighting in the late 1800s
You can tell he probably spent a bit of time reading McGuffey in school
Wyatt Earp on gun fighting.