The easiest thing to do is to lay the blame on the thing we currently hold responsible for everything distasteful – COVID.

There’s some legitimate rationale to this argument. Virtual learning and the haphazard way individual school districts were led to figure out how to deal with a nationwide closure of public schools has resulted in the exacerbation of learning gaps and critical skill losses.

But COVID isn’t entirely to blame. In fact, according to ACT, this is the fifth year in a row that scores have been trending down.

Standardized tests have long been demonized across various sectors of society. Educators don’t like to “teach to a test.” Kids generally dread them. School districts often push back against the data they provide. And many parents see them as a necessary evil to push their children into the threshold that leads to college.

A lot of these complaints are not wrong. Standardized testing is not the be-all-end-all measure of a student’s success. It is, however, a tool to help measure students’ skill level and college readiness at the most objective level that we’ve been able to come up with to this point.

It isn’t perfect, for sure, but it’s what we have to measure how are kids are stacking up in English, reading, math, and science.

And based on the data ACT just released, we’re not looking so great. Not only have scores been in decline for the past five years, but more than 40 percent of high school graduates last year did not meet any of the ACT standards. Not English. Not reading. Not math. Not science.

COVID plays a role in all of this, yes. But it isn’t the biggest culprit.

This newest data about the state of our kids’ education is an indicator of a much, much deeper problem.

Before we start pointing fingers at our teachers, though, we need to take a serious look at the culture our kids are living in – and the role we play as parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and community members.

Our culture has inundated kids with the idea that hard is bad. And as a result our teachers are facing an uphill battle every single day, trying to convince kids that hard work is beneficial. All the while, we fail as a community to hold our kids to high bars and encourage them to meet them.

Parents should be teachers’ No. 1 advocates. Instead, we often find that parents become the number one obstacle, refusing to challenge their students, placing the entire onus of education on overworked and underpaid teachers, and then blaming a broken education system when things go poorly.

But the cultural failure doesn’t stop there.

Social media and our obsession with it has radically changed the way we – yes, adults included – process information. We’re addicted to our phones. We scroll mindlessly and waste hours of our days looking at filtered pictures of peoples’ lives that, more than likely, reflect very little about what their lives are actually like.

Our attention spans have been reduced to 30 second intervals of TikTok videos.

And if adults can’t move beyond that, how crazy is that expectation of our kids?

As a society we have elevated things like youth athletics and extracurricular activities to a level that blows our attention to academics totally out of the water. Kids are playing sports all year long with tournaments every weekend and late nights that steal their sleep and leave them unprepared for school the next morning.

Currently, it’s our kids’ education.

And that’s the wrong choice.

Our kids’ academic fortitude is on the decline. It isn’t because schools aren’t providing enough and teachers aren’t giving enough. It’s because we are not holding our society to a standard that celebrates perseverance, determination, and hard work that requires sacrifice.

Course correction is desperately required. Our future will thank us.

Cortney Stewart is a Lecanto High graduate with political science, international affairs, and intercultural studies degrees who has lived and worked around the world.