I can only speak for Texas, as I am a long-term prof here AND a parent of a teenager.
Grade inflation is real. My kid is in the top five in a class of 350 and there are 13 in her class with all As. Half of them are not writing well, as I have seen their papers.
The college students i see over my many years are writing more poorly, have lower resilience, and expect to hand in assignment as late as they would like. They tell me with a perfectly straight face that this was acceptable in their high schools.
Some districts here do perform amazingly. Katy, The Woodlands, near Houston, and others in the Houston south burbs. Some Austin suburb schools. In DFW, Frisco, Plano, Allen. Yes, there are others. Bu tin a huge state like Texas, I can list a majority of the well-performing districts.
The huge number of homeschooled are heart breaking Many are book-talented but socially stunted, few friends or major issue sin socializing.
Many private religious schools in this area, too. They all get bribes to continue in private schools, thanks to my governor, Abbott, being bribed by a west Texas billionaire, among others, via his re-election PAC. Meanwhile, public school and college budgets are flat again, which means they are actually declining. My college: no raises. Again. But we're building lots of new structures and more administrators and pouring money into athletics and "student enrichment, whatever the flock THAT is. I read comments on the internet all the time about "rich professors," and I laugh. PhD from the #5 school in the country in my field, 40 years experience, and I don't even make $100K. Every 5A and 6A head football coach in Texas makes six figures.
Corruption is rampant here. Nepotism hires, hires by wives of politicians, money being re-routed elsewhere, and now the dismantling of every faculty senate. What little guardrails were there to stop university corruption are gone, and at many colleges in Texas, it's party time...for administrators. Abbott had the state take over Houston and Fort Worth schools. Yes, there were and are problems. But what is happening there now are ideology tests and just reading scripts...provided by the right-wing Board of Education.
Texas, depending on where you check, is somewhere between 25th and 35th in the country for education. That takes into account graduation rates, per pupil expenditures, test scores, ACT/SAT and more.
I hear a lot more stories like this in other red states. So yeah, students are not doing as well, and the outlook looks worse.
Do we wanna talk Operation Enduring -------?
I don't know a single military soul who, time now, supports Trump. Granted, I work with CGOs and FGOs. Maybe the really junior guys and really senior guys like Trump. But at my level, he is just an embarrassment. The Iran stuff is pure theatrics.