Pittsburgh Post-Gazette columnist Tony Norman considers the school achievement gap between black kids and everybody else, and says you can’t really pin the blame the schools, the teachers, the unions, or anybody else. Here’s the biggest problem, according to Norman:

What’s missing is the active, radical involvement of every parent of a black child in the Pittsburgh school district.

This goes way beyond showing up for parent-teacher nights. This means supervising homework, modeling an appreciation for learning from the first day that child comes into the world, limiting media distractions that reinforce negative stereotypes and ruthlessly enforcing an ethic of achievement that prevents the pathology of failure from taking root.

This means parents have to stop making excuses. Instead of blaming teachers for intellectually incurious children, they have to become involved in their children’s education.

While demanding competent teachers is fine, parents have to demand more from themselves and even more from their children, because they begin life at a disadvantage. Parents of black students have to become insistent stakeholders who personally reinforce the value of education even if they’re not educated themselves. A home with more video games than books is a home guaranteeing failure.

Once an active partnership built on mutual trust, respect, empathy and expectation between parents, teachers and students is established, there won’t be any significant racial achievement gap to speak of in a few years.

It shouldn’t matter, but Tony Norman is black. Tony Norman is also right. I don’t care if you’re black, white, brown, or lime-green, Tony Norman’s great line is true: a home with more video games than books is a home guaranteeing failure.

But politicians and policymakers can’t talk about this. Nobody wants to blame parents and the culture in their homes for failing their children, because there is no mechanism for forcing parents to care. So they take it out of the hides of teachers. Tony Norman has the guts to say in this column — do read the whole thing — that you could put the best teachers in the country in classrooms, but if the kids come from families who don’t care about their education, it won’t do much good.

[H/T: SM]