I was a high school English teacher, I got canned because the administration, much like everywhere, pushed their own agendas regarding education that was not in the best interest of the students and I refused to play ball. I was even told directly that the reason my contract was not getting renewed was not due to my teaching. All of the administrators flat out LIED on all of the "evaluations" of my teaching and I had documentation to prove it, submitted to the union, and nothing was done about it.
Every English teacher I've met knows that the kids are going downhill, but there is NOTHING that can be done because the administration is terrible everywhere and the government has, effectively, made teachers powerless in comparison to the administrators and regulations. Basically, administrators are politicians, you get shitcanned if you don't pass kids or if you don't go with their idiotic theories that don't work.
As an example of one of the infinite things occurring during the 7-month period I was there: a kid didn't want to do his work/get out his book, instead he just stood up and told me to get laid. I sent him to the office and they sent him back with a warning.
Further, the problems start EARLY. I substitute taught in this same district for about 5 months before landing the full-time English teacher position at one of the high schools. The kids in the middle school were reading "books" that were rated for seven year-olds, and the principals at one of the middle schools in the city told all of the teachers outright that they were not allowed to assign homework to the kids. The vast majority of what is wrong with kids, at least in the area of English, occurs at the grade-school/middle-school level, and high-school teachers are left holding the bag of shit and look bad because the standardized tests the students have to take in high school are exponentially more difficult than the ones they have to take at any earlier grade level. Another example: the summer reading program for the freshman at the high school I taught at -- the required book was "The Giver"... I read this book when I was in like, second grade.
Anyways, one of the problems with English is that it is developed over time. If administrators and government regulations are forcing teachers to pass kids on / telling them (not directly, of course) that they get fired if they have too low of pass rates, etc... then there is a problem. I was teaching high school freshman (9th grade) and the average reading level of my classes was fifth grade. I had to teach these kids what A FUCKING NOUN WAS IN HIGH SCHOOL. If government regulations and administrators FORCE teachers to lower their standards just to look good on paper, this is naturally what occurs: kids get passed on continually when they know jack shit until there is nothing that can be done for them.
In a subject like math where there's a lot of things that can be done independent of each other, this is less of an issue, but one that is present, nonetheless. In a subject like English, it's just a shitstorm producing idiots who don't even have the capability to critically think, a skill gained and honed largely and primarily from the English subject matter. This is probably why you get so many dipshit threads on ATOT like "how to select a primary care physician..." because people who get out of high school are too stupid to know that you get phone numbers out of a fucking phone book.
Anyways, the problem isn't just English. This may be where you notice the most problems right now, but that's because the skills within it constantly build upon the skills it contains; a failure at any level of building those skills destroys any further progress. In a subject like math, you can do pretty damn well just knowing addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division as long as you take a few minutes to look at a formula (not to knock other subjects, it's just that a lot of the skills other subjects contain are independent of each other or rely on much more basic subject matter).
I guarantee you that the problems are going to continue to swell in every subject until people won't be able to add or subtract, won't know what DNA is, and won't know what year the U.S. revolution occurred. All they'll know is random, useless information from various subjects that have no cohesion because the government and groups of administrators got together and forced teachers to teach only to meaningless standardized tests, while forcing them to use teaching philosophies that don't work, and allowing the kids to get away with things like telling their teachers go get laid.
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