But I think you hit the nail on the head mentioning the current "your life is on file, no mistakes allowed" setup. To me, it is critical to let kids try things, including stupid things, and learn from their mistakes without having those mistakes affect every job search 20 years later.
I think the pendulum will eventually swing back, but the generation growing up in the current setup will have to try the same stupidities and learn similar things as adults, at a much higher cost. My 2c.
I was a teen in the late 90s, and was friends with a lot of the druggie/stoner/party crowd. By and large, these people do not have kids, because they can't afford to. A good many of them are dead now, either from overdoses, or drug-related accidents (like crashing their car while going 100 mph while high), or suicide.
The 55 years of American history post-WW2 was a bubble, where people could get away with a number of not-very-adaptive behaviors because the whole country was on top of the world. The last 20 years has rapidly exposed this as a bubble, and the folks who were swimming naked when the tide ran out didn't leave offspring to be part of the next generation.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3449224/
If you look at only populations who were likely to go to college in the first place - say, white (formerly) middle-class two-parent households, which is what the bulk of my high-school friends were, there's a positive correlation between educational attainment and fertility. Simpson's Paradox strikes again...
At least in the Bay Area teens appear to be way more buttoned down and smart than my generation. Don't get me started on the boomer generation. My teachers said my and even more my younger sisters generation were a very welcome relief from those guys.
But no, it's because they're rowdy kids doing 'bad things'.
And then there is the other 2/3 of society, who have been going downhill economically for decades.
Now kids grow up in an environment where much of their lives take place online, where dumb things you've said or done are available somewhere, forever, to be used against you. Is it any surprise kids are the way they are when they are shown that even something they said 10 years ago can be brought back and used against them to destroy their lives?
Is this common? What's the measurement? State testing methods? Seems nebulous.
I absolutely don't think the ranking was meaningful, but it at least says something about how many of my classmates had affluent parents who put a lot of pressure on them to succeed.
People have been true to their schools since at least 1963.
High school (and I'd argue undergrad) for 80% of people is a joke and a waste of time and for me was a time to learn how to network without networking. Always felt kinda funny sitting next to people in my hs,college, and now workplaces who had 'done everything right' their whole life but lo and behold were in the same place doing the same thing for the same pay. But thats probably just me being a douchebag more than anything
I think the documentation of a persons entire life from birth has removed the opportunity for kids to make mistakes and learn while they are young. It's unfortunate because I did a lot of dumb things as a kid, and while none of it was too serious, I was able to learn lessons without having it necessarily follow me around the rest of my life. Now they are all just entertaining stories.