The high school my kids go to changed completely across covid. From no discipline problems to daily fights, vandalism, and generally (many) students ignoring anything short of police presence.
Teachers are quitting in droves in a top tier school district. The only saving grace here is that it's a district that people want to get into, so they get pulled from somewhere else. I can only imagine what's going on elsewhere.
Students depend upon doing well on that test, and the college board has crammed the class full of a whole lot of topics.
I had a group of students who were in love with game theory even before the class, and as an individual I love the topic, too. But all the time I could spend on it was half a class period, and only the very boring cases involved in analyzing oligopoly behavior... Because we had to get back to all the edge cases in monopolistic competition and practicing how to write answers to free response questions in the very formulaic ways that we can be sure the graders will give credit for. I feel like I was forced to teach a less engaging and useful class than I'd have liked to.
My wife subbed at one of their elementary schools once when taking a break from full-time teaching to care for our kids.
It was on lockdown that day—and, apparently, many days—over credible threats of violence. Nobody told her this, so she found out when she poked her head out the classroom door and got yelled at by a cop for opening the door. Early elementary kids swore at her and refused to do any work, and there was nothing she could do about it. Admin couldn't handle minor stuff like that because they had multiple fights that day to deal with, despite the lockdown. The other teachers told her they were threatened with violence on the regular—by, like, 3rd graders—and occasionally attacked.
It was fucking insane.
Teacher quality has always been a distribution, with some good and bad outliers, but the vast majority are sufficient.
What hasn't always been the case is the inability to get rid of kids who are extremely disruptive and make it impossible for education to take place. There also seems to be a bigger share of that disruption now than two decades ago, when I was teaching. I think a lot of it relates to feedback loops: in the suburban schools in my area, as well as the elite public high school in my area (requires an academic test for entrance), these problems don't exist. The problems only seem to exist in the schools where there are higher concentrations of antisocial expectations/behavior. This does tend to correlate with poverty, but poverty doesn't apprar to be causative, merely correlated:
I would point out that poor kids who test into the elite public high school tend to do just fine. But, they are all there for a reason (i.e., it is a self-selecting group of people who want to test), and also worked hard enough to pass the entrance exam.