Considering that we're about 3 generations removed from any sort of "well educated" people, none of this is at all surprising in the least.
The teachers are dumb, because they were raised in government schools.
The parents are dumb for putting their children into government schools, because they themselves were raised in government schools, because their parents were raised in government schools, and their grandparents as well...
The kids are dumb, because the ones teaching them are dumb.
And so the cycle continues...
Get your kids out of the Godless government schools.
More important than that, parents need to take responsibility for their actions and force their children to take responsibility for their actions as well.
Although, it is possible the mother is a widow, I doubt it. The mother likely did not take responsibility for her actions when she got pregnant. She likely did not take responsibility for the early raising of the child. She did not take responsibility to make sure her child was learning as he went from grades K-8. She did not take responsibility when he skipped all of his classes. She did not accept responsibility by asking for a parent-teacher conference herself. She did not force him to take responsibility when he failed and did not graduate high school.
There is a culture here which causes failure. If the mother took her kid out of school to teach him at home, the kid would still not learn. Don't believe me? What happened when all the kids went home instead of going to school due to the silly lockdowns? Are all the scores for Chicago going to rise? Are all the kids in Chicago finally getting a good education now that all the teachers are on strike?
At the same time, kids of another culture seem to be doing wonderfully well with public education and beating out all the other cultures so badly that all the universities are handicapping their culture openly and blatantly. Are the kids of this culture stupid? Are their teachers stupid?
If the community has lousy schools, the community needs to take responsibility for their lousy schools and stop trying to find someone else to blame it on. The community needs to take responsibility for their lousy culture. This starts with parents taking responsibility.
Many parents can't raise and teach their own children and telling them to teach their children themselves doesn't solve any problems and usually makes things worse. Many parents can't even feed their own children and many parents send their children to school for one reason only - free breakfast and lunch, and in some places dinner as well.