It's not just the United States

Kids are getting dumber in Germany too: "As test scores hit record lows, US and Germany chart opposite paths in education."

BERLIN — German education officials faced a conundrum this year all too familiar in the United States: Student test scores had been sliding for more than a decade, fueling calls for sweeping reforms.

One prominent education leader from Hamburg, arguing for reforms, recently described the country’s learning trajectory as an “inverted smiley face” with gains in the early 2000s followed by a decade of decline that began before the pandemic. The test scores of American students have followed much the same path, as have those of their peers across much of the world.

You can't blame Covid.  Much of these declines coincide with the widespread availability of smartphones and the rise of social media.  Schools tried to leverage technology and it just made things worse.  Now Massachusetts is following the lead of Mississippi and Louisiana.