re: "Stop blaming black parents for underachieving kids"

I was the HC of an 8 th grade football team for 11 years. My team was generally split pretty evenly from a black/white ratio. I had 7 assistant coaches. Usually, by week three of practicing, all 7 of my coaches and I were picking up 2-3 black kids a day so they could get to practice. Around 3/4 of the black kids on a roster of 65-80 players.

We practiced four nights a week. At the end of every practice(8:00pm), the white kids usually had a parent waiting to take them home and if not, they rarely waited more than 5 minutes. Yet....every night,there were at least ten and often up to fifteen black kids waiting for someone.....anyone.....to pick them up and take them home. "Can I borrow your phone coach?" Every night ,mine and other coaches phones were needed by these kids to try an contact parents. Sometimes, the parent would tell their kids to "get coach to bring you home" or some other way of bucking their parenting responsibility. Each of us ended up driving one or two home a night after 9 pm, when it was obvious nobody was coming. Luckily, 3 of my coaches were black friends of mine who knew the kids parents and lived closer to where the kids lived than myself. They also knew that the majority of these parents just did not give a shite. In fact, they enjoyed having their kids be somebody else's responsibility while they sat on their arse at home. It was really sad. Some really good kids who had great potential but little home guidance.

I have never been a teacher but I can deduce that what I saw and experienced over 11 years in that arena was a microcosm of the actual school/education situation for those kids. Sadly, it seems that so many black parents treat school as nothing more than a babysitter instead of as an opportunity.