The downfall of K-12 education is at the fault of the educators. Having been at my university for about a year now, it's difficult to grasp the sheer contrast between a proper high-quality education (where the professors are very clearly there to serve and help the student to the best of their ability) and my previous high school (which, given my current reference point, was unacceptable on so many levels). From my four years at Silver Creek High School, a public secondary educational institution based in multi-trillion dollar AI-driven Silicon Valley, it became abundantly clear to me that 50% of the educators were fully well-intentioned, capable, and very well deserving of high praise. The other half, however, were grossly incompetent and cognitively impaired. Many were emotionally unstable, incapable of teaching (correctly), power-tripping, and severely egotistic, seeing themselves as "higher" and "smarter" than their students by some delusional and nonexistent metric. Often, the "I've been doing this for X years" (yeah and you still suck at your job), "you will not do this in MY classroom" (it's not your classroom; it's the taxpayer's), denying mistakes during lectures and shoving the blame onto the student, or frequent use of "vulgar" language (I have nothing against swearing, but frequent cursing in an allegedly professional educational environment as a faculty member showcases, at minimum, some degree of instability and poor self control) are strong indicators of an educator being in the latter 50% group. Education, at least in large, is not declining due to increasing phone use or lower attention spans. Instead, we should shift our attention to the educators themselves. Perhaps students no longer pay attention because they found that The Organic Chemistry Tutor and modern LLMs are far better learning alternatives than incompetent morons who aren't worth allocating attention towards. Perhaps education is becoming worse simply because the people teaching are idiots. We desperately need mass-layoffs in K-12 public schools.