Because this is apparently a week that involves a lot of me lowering my head slowly and deliberately to my desk a la Peggy Olson, First Lady Michelle Obama decided to trot out some very old talking points in her commencement address to the 2013 graduating class at Bowie State University:

“Today, instead of walking miles every day to school, they’re sitting on couches for hours, playing video games, watching TV. Instead of dreaming of being a teacher or a lawyer or a business leader, they’re fantasizing about being a baller or a rapper,” Obama continued. “Right now, one in three African American students are dropping out of high school, only one in five African Americans between the ages of 25 and 29 has gotten a college degree.”

But priorities should change, she said, because “getting an education is as important if not more important than it was back when this university was founded.”

While those statistics are absolutely worrisome, I’m pretty sure that the challenges of preparing a competitive resume, getting equal access to standardized test prep, navigating the admissions process, and managing the cost of financial aid are also relevant issues to this conversation. Some of those barriers have been priorities for her husband’s administration. Mrs. Obama acknowledged the odds that a number of the graduates faced to get to and complete their educations Bowie State, though she focused on the cost of tuition and difficult family situations more than other structural issues that might affect students’ abilities to get access to a college education. And she framed their success as a matter of personal will and determination. I can also see why she might have wanted to continue a conversation of long standing within African-American communities given the setting, and as part of her larger, and important historical lesson about the obstacles that black students have faced to get educated in America.

But this particular talking point, which both Mrs. Obama and the President use relatively frequently, could do more to address the structural elements that prop up a culture that values athletics over academics. Personal motivations may be a problem, but the massive public investment in college athletic facilities, the fact that coaches are some states highest-paid public employees, and the allocation of both scholarship money and admissions spots to athletes who are unlikely to complete their academic degrees before entering professional drafts. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to dismantle “the slander that a black child with a book is trying to act white,” but I’m not sure the fantasy career aspirations of black children are the only, or even the main thing, at issue here.

And if we’re going to talk personal motivations, wanting to be “a baller or a rapper” is not a dream that’s solely the property of African-Americans. America has three major televised singing competitions right now, American Idol, The Voice, and X-Factor, all of which promise that it’s possible to rise from anonymity to remarkable fame and a career in music, and the first of which actually became notorious for airing auditions of people who had neither the skills to realistically pursue their aspirations, nor the self-knowledge to recognize the gap between their abilities and their ambitions. Participation is hardly limited to African-American singers by design or choice. There are plenty of white folks who hope to make it big in the manner of Taylor Swift in the same way African-American boys might be dreaming of growing up to become Jay-Z.

The same is more true for sports than Mrs. Obama’s remarks would suggest. In Division I men’s basketball, 1,443, or 27 percent, of the 5,265 players who participated in the 2011-2012 season were white, while 3,158, or 59 percent were African-American. During that same season, in Division I baseball, the figures were most striking. 8,304, or 82 percent of the 10,093 players, were white that season. Clearly, in the college athletic programs that feed into careers in professional sports, there’s a great deal of white interest and participation, even if it isn’t evenly distributed by sport. Miami Heat star LeBron James may be an argument for skipping college in pursuit of a professional athletic career right out of high school, but so is Washington Nationals left-fielder Bryce Harper, who earned a GED and didn’t even finish high school in a classroom setting, all so he could focus on baseball instead, even though the idea that any ordinary person could emulate either of their paths is equally improbable.
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In an impressive expansion of the term “pornographic,” a Northville, Michigan woman, Gail Horalek asked that Anne Frank: The Diary Of A Young Girl (The Definitive Edition) be removed from the school’s curriculum because: “It’s pretty graphic, and it’s pretty pornographic for seventh-grade boys and girls to be reading. It’s inappropriate for a teacher to be giving this material out to the kids when its really the parents’ job to give the students this information.” The passages that she’s dubbed “pornographic” are actually more anatomical, given that they discuss Frank attempting to learn more about her own body, than they are “designed to arouse lust,” the conventional meaning of pornographic.

But rather than quibble over the definition, in rendering a verdict on Horalek’s complaint, Robert Behnke, the assistant superintendent for Instructional Services in Northville, stood by the inclusion of the edition of the book in the seventh-grade curriculum on the grounds of its relevance to the unit on courage in which it was taught. And he reminded Horalek that existing school regulations mean she can get pretty much what she wanted. The full email he sent to parents, posted by one of them on a message board, reminds the community:

The committee also suggested the district take steps to further communicate information about the units of study within the middle school literature courses, and where possible, provide booklists to parents with the notation that reading selections can always be reviewed by parents prior to making a literature selection. As always, in the event that a concern surfaces during a unit and is brought to the teacher’s attention, adjustments can be made to move the student to another literature selection and/or an alternative assignments can be discussed.

A communication regarding the seventh grade English Language Arts units of study and booklists is being created and will be shared with parents in the near future. Communication on units of study and booklists from other grades also will be forthcoming.

At Northville Public Schools we are proud of the partnerships we have forged with parents in the best interest of all students. Keeping in mind that families within the Northville community have varying perspectives, and that our students have varying levels of sensitivity and maturity — which are often best accommodated by their parents — the district strives to provide choices for parents and students where appropriate and possible when it comes to programming and courses. As a school district, we also encourage parents to use supplemental learning activities and books that reflect their own family’s values and perspectives to support reading and literature analysis taking place in the classroom.

If Horalek wants to be the person responsible for introducing her daughter to issues of sexuality, the Northville Public Schools give her every right to do so. If she’d Googled the book when her daughter’s syllabus came out, she would have found references to the removal of the Definitive Edition from the curriculum in the Culpeper County, Virginia school system on some of the same grounds she complained about. If she’d searched the text of the diary on either Google Books or through Amazon, she would have seen the passages that made her uncomfortable before her daughter even started reading the book. Maybe Horalek couldn’t have predicted what might have made her daughter uncomfortable in a classroom setting, but if she thinks there are certain subjects that should be reserved for parental instruction, there were any number of ways Horalek could have checked the book to see if it threw up red flags for her.

I’m not opposed to the idea that parents should play a role in their children’s education, or that parents have some sense of what makes their children comfortable or uncomfortable—though I don’t think that knowledge is complete. But it seems to serve the interests of the most people to give those parents and those children appropriate exits from the mainstream curriculum, and resources to help them supplement the curriculum they want to opt out of.