> I don't wanna trot out "think of the children" bullshit here but it's hard for me to not notice that this trend has been happening since smartphones became normal and schools have increasingly become utterly toothless with regard to enforcing standards in education, i.e. "you need to know this shit in order to move to the next grade up." Nobody does that anymore. Just fudge the scores with extra credit or make-up assignments and send them up the chain to be a different teacher's problem next year.
I agree in general that we need to have higher standards but that complaint predates smartphones by decades. One of the big challenges here is that consistency was all over the place historically but we have better measurements now and higher expectations for students, and some of the cases where students were allowed to slide were misguided but well-intended attempts to mitigate other problems – for example, many standardized tests had issues with testing things like social norms or English fluency more then subject matter literacy so there’s a temptation to make them less binding when it should be paired with things like improving tests or providing ESP classes so, say, a recent immigrant’s math score isn’t held down by their ability to read story problems.
One other thing I’d keep in mind is that this is heavily politicized and there are massive business conflicts of interest, so it’s important to remember that the situation is not as dire as some people would have you believe. For example, PISA math scores are used to claim Americans are way behind but that’s heavily skewed by socioeconomic status and tracking in some other countries – when you start adjusting for that, the story becomes less that American students as a whole are behind but rather that our affluent kids are okay but we need to better support poor kids.