Opinion> Roland Martin> President Obama Education Should Be Top Priority For Black America

	17 Feb 2012 Props to NCAA for Banning Connecticut From March Madness March Madness is usually a wild and crazy time on the campuses of the nation's big-time college basketball … Read More.
	3 Feb 2012 Romney's Campaign GPS Ignores the Poor In the 1,257 GOP debates we've had to sit through, poverty and the poor has rarely come up. So it was no … Read More.
	27 Jan 2012 The Hypocrisy of America's Cuba Policy For more than 50 years, the United States has had an embargo against the island of Cuba, all because we … Read More.

President Obama: Education Should Be Top Priority for Black America

AIR FORCE ONE — Ask African-Americans what the most pressing issues for the black community are and you likely will hear all kinds of comments: health disparities, crime, economic development, ending institutional racism, the destruction of the family, etc.

But for President Barack Obama, there is no more fundamental issue than education and closing the achievement gap in the 21st century.

"If we close the achievement gap, then a big chunk of the economic inequality in this society is diminished. We've got to get our kids up to speed," the president said Thursday during a round table with members of the Black Press aboard Air Force One as he traveled to New York to speak to the NAACP.

The president said the keys to improving the state of education among African-Americans are focusing on putting better teachers in the classroom, having greater accountability in school systems, increasing resources, and expanding the use of charter schools nationwide.

"(Secretary of Education) Arne Duncan is pushing for more aggressive reforms than we've seen under any previous president, and we're putting more money into education than any previous administration," he said.

That is great, yet one subject the president and I disagree on is the idea of vouchers. I always have believed that there is no one way to educate a child. We should embrace public schools, private schools, charter schools, Internet-based classrooms, home schooling and, yes, allowing parents who are in poorly performing school districts to be provided vouchers to send their children to private schools.

Vouchers have been supported historically by Republicans and fought vigorously by Democrats, who tend to rely on major support from the various teachers unions, which are also dead set against vouchers.

"When it comes to vouchers, my concern has always been that, given the existing funding problems that we have with public schools ... a move towards vouchers would start unraveling, in many communities, a viable public-school option or would leave the public school only for those parents who weren't organized enough to take advantage of private-school options.

"I have not been a supporter of vouchers. I understand the arguments for vouchers, and I know that there are some great private schools out there that are doing some great work with poor kids, and so I admire them and I want to encourage them, but ultimately I think that we have to fix a public-school system where the overwhelmingly majority of children attend."

Yet for all children, especially black children, the education achievement gap isn't solely about the educational institutions.

It's also about parents assuming greater responsibility for the welfare of their kids and raising the expectations we have for them.

"All these innovative programs and expanded opportunities will not, in and of themselves, make a difference if each of us, as parents and as community leaders, fail to do our part by encouraging excellence in our children," President Obama said in his address to the NAACP later that night.

"Government programs alone won't get our children to the promised land. We need a new mindset, a new set of attitudes, because one of the most durable and destructive legacies of discrimination is the way we've internalized a sense of limitation — how so many in our community have come to expect so little from the world and from themselves.

"We've got to say to our children: 'Yes, if you're African-American, the odds of growing up amid crime and gangs are higher. Yes, if you live in a poor neighborhood, you will face challenges that somebody in a wealthy suburb does not have to face. But that's not a reason to get bad grades; that's not a reason to cut class; that's not a reason to give up on your education and drop out of school.'"

He added: "To parents, we can't tell our kids to do well in school and then fail to support them when they get home. You can't just contract out parenting. For our kids to excel, we have to accept our responsibility to help them learn. That means putting away the Xbox, putting our kids to bed at a reasonable hour. It means attending those parent-teacher conferences and reading to our children and helping them with their homework."

What President Obama said is not new. We have heard it every day and week from pastors, community leaders, educators and, yes, parents.

Now it's not about rhetoric. It's time for action. There was a time when black parents who picked cotton on plantations couldn't read, but they made sure their children could. Black history — and, yes, American history — is littered with parents demanding excellence from their children.

It's time we return to a 20th-century mindset in the 21st century.

Roland S. Martin is an award-winning CNN contributor and the author of "Listening to the Spirit Within: 50 Perspectives on Faith." Please visit his Web site at www.RolandSMartin.com. To find out more about Roland S. Martin and read his past columns, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.