The submitted article suggests that this is not at all well known, and is an understudied issue. That's my impression too from years of doing research on education policy--most American teachers and school administrators have NO IDEA how much more young people could be learning in the school context, and indeed no idea how much learning the brighter kids do in the summer when they are away from school reading on their own.
The airlines aren't trying to be the best by a measure of getting to the destination absolutely the fastest and basing their efforts and predictions on that, they are trying to be predictable (and therefor reliable) by building in some contingency.
The school wants the pupil to get the best score it possibly can and there is no "too good". The airline doesn't need to get the plane home in absolutely the best time, just reliably within a specified time, in fact arriving too early is potentially a problem for various reasons (you as a passenger only see the single nominal arrival time published, internally they will be working to a time window aiming to arrive "at or after YY:YY" as well as "at or before XX:XX").