US high school students lose ground in math and reading, continuing decline

I'm sure someone will figure out a way to blame this on capitalism.

(But seriously, this is the "tragedy of the commons" in action, where non-private schooling is a shared space and thus part of "the commons".)

I could absolutely argue capitalism is a contributing factor, primarily due to alienation and increased demands on labor. Income inequality pushing families to have less spare capacity and money to help their kids.

But I think the root causes here are more cultural. When I was coming up decades and decades ago we valued highly educated people, Americas rocket scientists and such. Over time, however, people started thinking education wasn't masculine, that it wasn't cool. Then social media hit the scenes and people started amplifying some of our worst instincts -- anti vaccine, anti intellectualism, pro conspiracy. What used to be your fringe neighbor became someone who could influence online.

Add the Vietnam, the gulf war, 9/11, Iraq and Afghanistan, and you've got generational trauma of sending generations of youth off to fight. That interrupts a lot of education and when those folks become parents they have different values towards education.

Plus, as you describe, schools are a commons. We systematically under pay and under value teachers, while over paying and over valuing admin.

And there is an anti collectivist culture in the US now. In labor and in community, there's much less "let me give up my time for the community" and much more "how can I get mine" mindset.

I think it's really complicated and a lot of different factors play a part. I don't think there's a single root cause, and it's going to take a while to unwind.

But we have done capitalism for centuries and this includes the time when education was high and also the rise before, so the problems now can be hardly caused by capitalism per se.

We have had capitalism since the late 1700s, or early 1800s. But I think you and I would agree it's not been a uniform experience across that time. Capitalism evolves and adopts new ideas, and experiences different opposition in different places. Since the early 70s in the US, there's been a very different regulatory and cultural environment for capitalism in the US.

Yes, but this only proves my point, that the problem is indeed not capitalism, but regulatory and cultural environment.

Nature uses the same mechanisms that make up capitalism. In other words, capitalism is the most natural system for distributing resources. Note I'm not saying best, or optimal, because best and optimal depend on some subjective value system (that distinguishes good from bad). My point is just that capitalism closely mimics patterns in nature.

Some of the communists seem to think that capitalism is unnatural, probably because it produces novel outcomes in human civilization, or maybe because it seems new to humanity (I'd argue humans have been using capitalist systems a lot longer than 300 years)

You can argue that, but you'd be wrong. Don't confuse mercantilism and trade with capitalism. They are outwardly similar, but very different internally.

The fundamental feature of capitalism is the inversion of commodity -> money -> commodity relationship into money -> commodity -> money.