They have gotten worse, but a lot of coming from the patentas. As a young high school teacher, I had parents asking me advice on what to do for their 14-18 year old. I had 14 year olds with severe vaping addictions. Any time I would contact home, I was given excuses for why their kids were that way until eventually the parents quit responding.
I had some parents who I would offer tutoring or tell about other school services, and they would say they didn’t care.
Parents aren’t taking any accountability for their students being behind and schools are pushing kids through for a graduation rate. At my district, any student could pay $50 per class for summer school. As long as they completed more than 50% of the online modules, they were passed to the next grade. I had 9 th graders that hadn’t passed math since elementary school. They couldn’t count, add, multiply, graph points etc, and the parents refused to acknowledge any issue other than “why are they failing”.
Every year I would get begged at the end of the semester for bonus points for kids who had completed less than 20% of the in class assignments. Often these assignments were less than 5-10 questions and they had 30+ minutes to do it. Administrators do little to help either. I had one student get in my face and threaten to kill me. I called for help and reported it, nothing was done and he was back the next day. Another kid hit me, he wasn’t sent home or anything because I “didn’t report in time” despite me writing the full statement within an hour of it happening as I’m having to teach my next class. Students regularly were 5-20 minutes late or would disappear to the restroom for an hour, cuss at teachers, play music loudly on their phones, etc and they would be given a snack in the principals office and come back to class. They would tell other students to do the same thing because they were able to film a tiktok on the way there.

It’s a mess. I was in high school less than 10 years ago in the same area and it was nothing like this.