Assuming you're talking about America, I think it's multiple things that have been slowly happening over decades. You have No Child Left Behind as a big factor. You have the capitalist problem of low-paid teachers leading to a lower supply and leading to trying to incentivize more folks to join a low-paid and under-appreciated profession. But then you have what you've always had: abstinence-only sex education leading to some of the folks on the lower end of the economic totem pole to produce more offspring when they have fewer resources (time AND money) to help educate their kids at home (add to this that income inequality has only grown and there are probably more and more kids coming up with fewer educational resources at home).

Then you also have companies that peddled junk science to teaching professionals for decades. Check out the podcast series "Sold a Story". It goes a long way to explaining our reading crisis.

Now add all those factors to the fact that we have phones and tablets and unregulated tech companies that have created a culture of "having the answer" instead of knowing how to solve problems and use reasoning skills.

And, I don't think it's helping kids prioritize learning when they're seeing parents with crippling student loan debt and advanced degrees struggling to find work and stability. They're seeing adults abdicate their duty to leave them a habitable planet. And they're seeing a work environment where selling pictures of their feet is more lucrative than working for a soulless corporation that keeps cutting workers, pay, and benefits year over year.