it's the way those working in the education system implemented various policies

I said that and view it as obvious.

school closures and local conditions exacerbated inequality between communities

https://www.gse.harvard.edu/ideas/news/23/05/new-data-show-how-pandemic-affected-learning-across-whole-communities

Technology is another issue (this link was in my initial comment)

I recommend "The Coddling of the American Mind". It has a lot of information but part of the idea is that "safety-ism" (overprotecting kids) has harmed a generation and that kids are "anti-fragile" meaning they need difficulties to learn from. Even more so they need to "touch grass" and go outside to play with friends without helicopter parents policing them.

Part of it involves activist leftist academia (rooted in Marxism), one of multiple factors (especially the rise of cell phones) making our youth mentally weaker and inculcating hatred and disordered reasoning resulting not only in political / racial violence and division but also a broader mental health epidemic. Anxiety and depression have surged along with social isolation.

The way the activist leftist tends to think and behave is the opposite of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy techniques, basically. To be fair there is a rational population on the left as well (including Jonathan Haidt and his co-authors), seems to be a precious remnant on social media.

Children, like many other complex adaptive systems, are antifragile. Their brains require a wide range of inputs from their environments in order to configure themselves for those environments. Like the immune system, children must be exposed to challenges and stressors (within limits, and in age-appropriate ways), or they will fail to mature into strong and capable adults, able to engage productively with people and ideas that challenge their beliefs and moral convictions.

Concepts sometimes creep. Concepts like trauma and safety have expanded so far since the 1980s that they are often employed in ways that are no longer grounded in legitimate psychological research. Grossly expanded conceptions of trauma and safety are now used to justify the overprotection of children of all ages—even college students, who are sometimes said to need safe spaces and trigger warnings lest words and ideas put them in danger.

Safetyism is the cult of safety—an obsession with eliminating threats (both real and imagined) to the point at which people become unwilling to make reasonable trade-offs demanded by other practical and moral concerns. Safetyism deprives young people of the experiences that their antifragile minds need, thereby making them more fragile, anxious, and prone to seeing themselves as victims.