This was one thing I was starting to really dislike about the article - as if they hadn't quite plugged the output into the input. It's rather a chicken and egg - it was obviously started by many years of oppression, but now both the culture and the lack of social mobility are cause and effect - it's a big cycle, that needs to be tackled on both fronts not individually - black culture is a huge rebellion against the norms perpetrated by the square America, the same America that has locked them out of it, and in doing so making the only dignified reaction to reject it. Of course a disillusioned youth is going to ignore an education that is perceived as teaching culturally irrelevant principles and skills.

An (sort of) example from here in the UK is that in a local comprehensive school, teachers were getting a lot of flak for having less great English results than the local Catholic Grammar school. This completely ignored the fact that the vast majority of the intake at the comprehensive were people who did not speak English at home/spoke it as a second language, whereas of course the grammar school had their pick of the white, middle class students who'd passed the entrance exam. This of course is one in a multitude of reasons why school league tables are awful, but that's a tangent for another time.