Bill Cosby’s ‘Tough Love’ Is Counterproductive at TIME offers a wise perspective on all advocates of “tough love” for public schools. Here’s an excerpt:

Then there is education. “Interview some schoolteachers. How many parents, on parent-teacher day, actually show up?” Cosby asks. “Not to Dunbar or some school where people are saying they want their child to become an engineer or philosopher or whatever else that requires one to do some homework. Go to a school where people are not doing well. How many parents show up?”

Of course parents should be more active in schools. There is no need to rehash the statistics that outline the educational-achievement gap in the black community. But the issue of education revolves not just around what the parents do, but what our elected officials and people in authority do as well. In the midst of massive school closings, where is the call for social responsibility for the city and state officials? In Cosby’s native Philadelphia, 23 schools are being closed to alleviate a deficit in the city budget. This negatively affects the involved and uninvolved parents, and of course the children who attended those schools. It is hard to say yes to education when our society doesn’t place enough value in it to keep the schools open.

To be fair, Cosby is not alone in thinking that black people in America need to do better. His views gained a great deal of traction, and elected officials have taken to challenging the black community to improve. Just last month, President Obama gave a speech at Morehouse in which he said, “There are some things, as black men, that we can only do for ourselves.” The problem is that such exhortations can embolden others to do the same, with much less understanding, like Gene Marks’ offensive post on Forbes called “If I Were a Poor Black Kid,” which completely ignored the structural and institutional problems that black youth have to contend with.

There are a great deal of problems in black America and our American society in general. But if Cosby is really interested in combating apathy, it’s important for him to realize that there are larger, outside forces that can cause a sense of hopelessness in affected areas. Without a total picture of what certain communities have to contend with, Cosby’s supposedly well-meaning advice is not just tone-deaf but useless as well.