Chapotraphouse

Well, I'll at least blame them for forcibly infecting kids with COVID over and over again without lifting a finger to reduce airborne transmission

There are definitely some reasonable arguments in the article, including a few grim data points:

In 2005, a study showed that preschoolers were frequently being expelled for misbehavior, and at rates more than three times that of school-age children.

Before the 1980s, American children usually had recess breaks throughout the day. By 2016, only eight states required daily recess in elementary schools. And when researchers studied what had become of lunchtime, they learned that children often had just 20 minutes to not only eat but stop to use the bathroom after class, walk to the cafeteria and wait in line for food.

However, the fact that it barely mentions alternative hypotheses outside of two handwavy paragraphs (one of which is paraphrasing RFK's plan) is absurd. I mean, look at this:

Some parents may see children who simply need to toughen up. The world that awaits is not easy either. What they may not realize is how much children have begun to see school as an endless chore to be endured — the means to some promised end on the other side of childhood. This makes it only harder for them to learn the very skills they need most as adults.

Anxiety and depression seem inevitable when school is a field in a game for economic survival, played by children hoping to secure enough stability to last the rest of their lives. In a 2020 paper, Yale researchers found that nearly 80 percent of high schoolers said they were stressed; almost 70 percent reported being bored.

Sounds to me like the problem is the economic system which molds the schools to become worse and puts ever more pressure on the students, but you won't find any harsh words about capitalism in this article. The dynamic would be pretty different in a world where both jobs and basic necessities of life were guaranteed. And that's to say nothing of the stress of imagining a future when the world is careening into fascism and climate disaster as people struggle to put food on the table. Even if the schools were better, how can you expect most children to be optimistic when staring down the barrel of that gun?

Also, at the very beginning of the article it drops this statistic without any qualifications or further explanation:

The numbers on autism are so shocking that they are worth repeating. In the early 1980s, one in 2,500 children had an autism diagnosis. That figure is now one in 31.

Wow, it's almost like we've learned more about autism and also have more screening in place so that more people can get diagnosed! It'd be laughable that a statistical argument which wouldn't pass muster in a high school class could make it past editing if this weren't in the paper of record and people didn't take it seriously.

edit: almost forgot the casual anti-union snipe at the end, which appears in an incomplete sentence because editing is dead:

The chief defender of that project, the Democratic Party, is ill-suited to addressing this crisis. Not only must it navigate teachers unions who may be skeptical of still more grandiose ideas on how to fix schools. The party has also become the political home of the meritocratic elite, the people perhaps least likely to see flaws in the system that crowned them as winners.

then you either forgot what it was like or had an incredibly outlier experience