It Is Time To Think About the Parents.

There is no question that parents have a considerable influence on the academic success of their children. Parental educational level, involvement in parent-teacher conferences, encouraging reading at a young age, and disciplinary approaches all have an outcome on the child's academic achievement and success in life.

While schools and communities can develop strategies to compensate with mentoring or after school programs, there is no substitute for full parental engagement.

I was critical of some of the pundits like Mark Belling and Charlie Sykes who bemoan the situation but never have a solution.

An important contribution to the discussion comes from Rick Esenberg's most recent post: The water and air is just fine here.

Paul argues that it is futile to blame parents without supporting "any recognized programs to break the cycle" as if there was is written somewhere in the annals of natural law a principle that all social problems must have a government solution. I'm all for anything that will restore public safety in the city and reverse the demise of marriage and the rise of a culture that disparages middle class values. What I am not optimistic about is the idea that government can do what your family will not and that prosperity can simply be created by public spending. (emphasis added)

I am perfectly happy if this work is done by the private sector. It can be performed by private for- profit businesses, non-profits, the two of them together, or even the two of them in combination with the public sector.

The point is someone needs to do it. If I understand Rick correctly, he acknowledges that some kind of positive intervention needs to be taken.

I will be the first to acknowledge that government programs in this area failed.

Many have succeeded. The successful ones include partnerships between the public sector, non-profits and the private sector. They are referenced in the posts below.

For a review:

What Do We Do About the parents - Incarceration - Especially Blacks ...Every time we hear right wing analysis about societal problems, whether it comes from Mark Belling or his protege, Charlie Sykes, the rant is about the parents. The not so unsubtle message is that drug addled, unwed inner city residents, authority dissin' and probably black, are incapable of rearing their children.

and

From Rick Esenberg,

Shark and Shepard: Inconvenient truths?...Second, we probably can't expect urban school districts like MPS to do much better without changing the family environments of a large proportion of the students. Indeed, it seems, much of the additional resources that urban districts call for seem to be needed so the school can do for a child what her family has not.
The problem is that government does a lousy imitation of a family. It may take a village to raise a child - I think it does - but the state is not the village.

Is it the water or the air in Milwaukee?...There are ways to fix the problem. Blaming the parents and leaving it at that is no solution.