For many decades, the Education Establishment has shown itself unable or unwilling to improve public schools. I suspect they actually prefer wallowing in failure; this serves their ideological goals – namely, Americans should settle for mediocrity because that's how we make the world more equitable.
A big topic now is how will students recover from the Covid pandemic. Sounds reasonable, but the Washington Post ran a long article full of double talk: on the one hand this, on the other hand that. This smorgasbord of expert opinions pointing in every direction gives each teacher and administrator a choice of excuses for letting their school remain stunted.