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 
Would make sense as the USA is locked into it’s encroachment into burger style fascism that you have generations who can’t think critically let alone read/write. Probably going to see an uptick in vilifying socialist countries that properly educate their kids. More libraries turned into private prisons for youngsters coming our way.