President Obama: Education Should Be Top Priority for Black America

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