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 
I do reading tutoring for kids and it's pretty dire out there. Like obviously I get kids whose parents are forcing them to do it against their will, and they are just not gonna put in the effort. But holy shit they struggle to read books that were for kids when I was little, they pretty much just read the words one by one without any flow or continuity to any of it, and therefore it's very mentally taxing for them because they don't just absorb the sentences as they come in