If you heard the snippets of Barack Obama’s Father’s Day sermon at a Chicago church, you heard him call out African-American men (and women) for their interest in making babies but disinterest in parenting them. It is a singular cultural miasma confronting urban America, and it will be interesting to see if the Senator’s rising profile as a national leader can goad this community to more introspection and less scapegoating.

If you want an insight into the latter, peruse the African American Community Covenant, which the Minneapolis Urban League and African American Mobilization for Education have convinced the Minneapolis Public Schools to sign onto as the latest silver bullet in dealing with failing inner city schools.

It is a fascinating document because it places the bulk of the responsibility for poor African-American school performance, behavioral problems, and school failure on the public schools and society at large. It is merely a framework for a joint effort aimed at black achievement, requiring the district to swallow a lot of its pride—board member Tom Madden telling the Strib’s Terry Collins that its preamble was off-putting, but the goals are worthwhile.

Public schools certainly bear some of the blame for the state of black achievement. They have been slow to adapt to the challenges of educating in this cultural milieu and have been eclipsed by more nimble educational models (see below) unburdened by regressive unions and bureaucracy. But we only have to look at other urban districts and other racial and ethnic groups to realize this problem is neither unique to Minneapolis nor endemic among all urban populations.

If the Urban League and its brethren really think, as the covenant states, that the problem is a lack of a curriculum built around African American themes and a failure to recognize black kids learn differently than everyone else, they are kidding themselves. My daughter attends a majority African-American Montessori school on the North Side, and there is not a separate curriculum for black kids nor are there different expectations—each child is an individual, and the teaching is at once universal and customized.

But such schools are self-selecting cultures of parents that care enough to think about educational models and want their children in an environment rooted in proven success. The kids and families that the schools fail (or that fail the schools) are more deeply troubled—mired in multi-generational poverty, drugs, and criminality; in family and social units where education is derided and studiousness mocked.

The question is can or should we rejigger the schools enough to make up for lack of parenting, a values crisis of monumental proportion, and an external culture that refuses to acknowledge how bad things are for fear of being called racist?

There has to be more to this than endless cries of victimhood and demands for external solutions to internal problems—otherwise, we’d be making progress. It is not easy out there, and there are ways public institutions can be part of the solution. But Barack Obama laid out the diagnosis on Father’s Day. It’s a sickness no school or government program can overcome. First things first, I say.