Tony Sewell, a former teacher and consultant at Reading University, said young people fail their exams because they do not do their homework and are disrespectful to teachers.
He said black children in the 1950s and 1960s may have been "burned out in a racist schooling system" but that was no longer the case.
Sewell is director of the charity Generating Genius, which selected 60 African-Caribbean children from poor backgrounds over four years, and worked with them to get them in to university.
Writing in Prospect magazine, he said: "What we now see in schools is children undermined by poor parenting, peer-group pressure and an inability to be responsible for their own behaviour.
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