[yorwba]

There hasn't been a preciptious drop in outcomes either. There have been statistically significant drops in average test scores, but the large number of students who take those tests means that even small differences can be statistically significant. Generally, the average test score just fluctuates within a few percentage points over the long term. The differences between individual students are much larger. If you pick two random students in a year and compare their scores, they'll likely be much farther apart than the average scores of different years.

As a corollary, the variation that people personally experience at small scales (e.g. high-school teachers comparing the various students they encountered throughout their career) is dominated by changes in class composition. Some years, there are just randomly more bad students than in others. When the students seem to be getting worse over time, the teacher might attribute this to societal decline; when the students seem to be getting better, they credit their skill at teaching instead.

Thus things are constantly getting worse and the sky is falling, yet somehow it never makes contact with the ground, and when you compare with ancient records, it's more or less where it has always been.