The trend they are discussing was generated by better overall nutrition.
The decline in achieving educational goals is directly related to the end of corporal punishment and the beginning of the participation award culture. Schools lost control of students in the sixties and seventies when the flower children decided that spankings were evil and that continued through the 80's and 90's and now all the schools are riding that precious snowflake train. What you see today is the outcome: Armed police roaming the halls, teachers asking for and receiving CCPs based on being teachers in a public school, metal detectors at the doors, gang violence and drugs in the halls.
Tell me I'm wrong.
The rest is pure, unadulterated snake oil. Those wonderful curriculum ideas thought out by people who haven't spent their lives teaching children are garbage.
Back to basics. Give them the basics and teach them how to think and reason. Then move on from there.
I agree, but IMHO education is way more than nutrition here. Education has turned southward in the western hemisphere recently. Legislators and educators can't keep up with the world. (they couldn't 30 years ago, and it's not getting better) IMO there should be a global reform of education.
corporal punishment would be a step too far on enforcing a new doctrine though.