It's sad, but I keep getting confirmation that these issues are getting worse. A few months ago, I started tutoring an honors student from the "best" district around. He was taking honors pre-calc & AP Stats, but his first SAT math score was low 500s. He couldn't figure out why.
It was only a few weeks after this post that I decided I needed to be done with my brief return to public education (cyber). I discovered an obvious case of plagiarism and had been trying to reach the student involved. There's a team called the family mentors - not teachers, not counselors, not admin - just a point of contact for families who track the household's work process. They are important positions, but have no authority over teachers. This girl's FM asked to talk to me about the messages I had left the student. She thought I needed coaching on how to handle a plagiarism case. She didn't know I had been in education for over 30 years. Nor did she know that during my homeschooling years, I did some part time work for a Christian cyber school and was in charge of all the plagiarism cases in the school. Not only did she question how I knew it was cheating and try to tell me what to do, but she also railroaded me into meeting with her supervisor. They both tried to convince me to drop the whole thing because they didn't want the student feeling the weight of responsibility. Ummm, no way. Thankfully, my assistant principal was 100% with me and I had no reason to obey the FM dept. I met with the student regularly for weeks, made sure she understood the material, retested her on the assignments with plagiarism (with a penalty), and it was fine. I put in a ton of work to make sure she understood. And in the end, the student was thankful. And if she went to college, she understood enough Alg2 to get a decent SAT/placement score.
Plagiarism is rampant in schools today, especially now that everything is done on a device. AI gives very wordy, advanced answers. Think using a Calc concept in Alg 1 or 2. (Sometimes it's still wrong.) And I've seen many lazy teachers who just ignore this because addressing plagiarism is extremely time-consuming and students/parents deny, deny, deny. I'm not totally opposed to AI or to using it effectively in education, but kids don't understand that they'll need to know how to do things without AI in the real world. Will they all need Alg2? Of course not. But they will need to apply some skill somewhere. And what if it's the same skills they are not learning to do when they should?