The Achievement Gap--A Familial Take

La Shawn Barber looks at the academic achievement gap and draws teh conclusion that the problem is not money or even the poverty status of poorly achieving black/latino students--it is home life. Looking at an LA Times story on the achievement gap and a report on relocating poor blacks to wealthier neighborhood schools, Barber notes:

You can move poor blacks into wealthier neighborhoods filled with white folks; you can poor billions more dollars into closing the achievement gap through the institutional approach; you can teach black kids myths about “black” Egyptians and how the Greeks stole their culture; you can teach in ebonics; you can come up with yet more idiotic educational theories; you can continue dumbing down the curriculum and decreasing the g-load on tests so it only appears minorities are improving; you can keep telling black kids they live in a racist world in which they’ll never catch a break; or…

…you can face reality. As long as blacks keep having babies without providing children stable, intact homes, as long as black parents keep turning a blind eye to the anti-intellectual strain that runs through the black subculture and in their own homes, and as long as they continue looking to the government to work miracles and fix problems, absolutely nothing will change.

Barber has long been advocating that blacks face up to the realization that their lifestyle and cultural choices are leading them along this path of substandard education despite efforts by government to help. I susptect that, to a certain extent, Barber is right. Poor people of other races, including dirt poor immigrants arriving on our shores unable to speak the language, routinely produce a next generation not only meeting academic requirements but succedding in the toughest of academic environments. The issue is not poverty or race,according to Barber, but parenting.