For the people who believe that the parents are the problem, what specifically do you believe all of these Black parents aren't doing that parents from other groups are doing?
Making it a Black Parents vs Parents from Other Groups is a false trail.
A white single mom sending her child to these schools would run into the same issues that a Black single mom would. A 2 parent household (Black/White/Asian/Indian/Arab/Etc) sending their kids to these schools would run into the same issues.
What white parents do, along with many Asian, Indian, and Arab kids do - is send their children to "better" schools. Better is usually richer, and often whiter. Whiteness and wealth don't go hand in hand though, as nobody is trying to send their kids to 98% white schools in West Virginia.
Other groups either have the money to send them to private schools that don't these issues, or
they move to better neighborhoods (i.e. they have money to buy homes in better neighborhoods).
And this is literally what Black people do. Black people in the 50's, 60's, and 70's, and 80s that had the smarts to get the education and then get the jobs - moved out of hood*. And that's been the trend for decades. You don't become an engineer, programmer, doctor, lawyer, banker, small business owner, and stay in the same poverty stricken and crime ridden area. One might at first, but when you have children, the calculus changes.
*This parallels white folks from the farm using the GI bill to go to college, get skills, move to the city, and leave the sticks.
One can discuss that Black kids in "better schools" deal with a bunch of new problems as well.
The question is really about these high poverty schools
Baltimore just so happens to be a mostly poor and very Black city. The same issues also exist in the poor schools in DC, Philly, NYC, Boston, Chicago, Houston, etc.
Solution 1 - Money in the Schools
The technocrat solution is to pour money into the school. That's what the NAACP essentially wants.
Even if they wanted something different, money is really the only thing they can get with a lawsuit.
- Fix up the facilities
- New books
- School supplies
- Computers
- Additional training for teachers - new math, old math, whole language, phonics, science of reading, CRT, LGBT...on and on.
Solution 2 - Money in the hood
One could get real clever and pour money into the neighborhood - but we've seen that in action - it's called gentrification.
This the mayor of DC at a public elementary school.
This is what a gentrified school looks like.
Now are white parents gonna get into the PTA and change things around for the school, using their "money and connections"? LOL.
Sure these little girls are smiling, but a lot of white parents that have moved into gentrified areas, are not going to want to send little Connor and Kaitlyn into this type of environment.
3) Home Schooling
Black Republicans and Trumpers are talking about "homeschooling", private schools, religious schools.
These people usually don't live in the hood, or they do, and they don't have kids.
More importantly, we already went through the home schooling experiment with Covid, and plenty of college educated parents lack the ability to teach their children academic subjects.
If you lurk in home schooling groups, you'll see that a lot of parents are not up to the task.
This is on top of whatever other issues that happen with homeschooling.
4) Back in My Day/Better Parenting
Traditional Black Conservatives (Black people 50+) are talking about how back in the day, kids had respect for teachers, for their parents...
Better parenting is not a real answer. If playerish Daddy wasn't a player, and fast a$$ Mommy wasn't so fast - they would not have had a kid that they could not afford nor raise.
And even if it was a real answer - you need to have ongoing parenting classes for the parents, with real stakes, not just a certificate at the end.
If you could find the money, could you force the parents to learn? To change their behavior?
We can't do it with the kids, I'm not sure how we do it with parents.
Prison doesn't even always work for adults.....
So the real question, to me,
Is what can society/government do for the single Black Moms out there that don't know and don't care to know about the education of their children?
This is an issue with other groups, but it's commonly portrayed as a Black problem.
There are single moms in the Asian Community.
There are most definitely single moms in the Latino community.
There are single moms in the White community, a good chunk of the white underclass, aka white trash, are dealing with these issues.
The NAACP and most of the groups, actually trying to solve these issues, don't really want to engage with the full view of the problem, imo.
They'll acknowledge the neighborhood, the home environment, the parents, and call for more money - but there are a lot of D'Londa Brice's out there (The Wire Reference)
Abbot Elementary tried (and failed as usual) to cover this issue in the latest season. Kids doing bad, and the parent teacher conference revealed a horrible mother. Nothing could be done....
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