NAACP: Now Advocating Against Colored People

The once righteous civil rights organization is now in thrall to the teachers unions.

From the horrors of lynching to the injustice of forced school segregation, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People has been there fighting for the rights of black people. But that has changed, at least in the realm of education.

At their national convention in Cincinnati in late July, the delegates of this once venerable civil rights organization voted for a resolution that called for a moratorium on the expansion of charter schools in the U.S. Embarrassingly, the NAACP’s talking points and verbiage come directly from the teacher union playbook with all the inherent fibs, half-truths and exaggerations intact. For example, a part of the resolution informs us that charter schools “have contributed to the increased segregation rather than diverse integration of our public school system” and that weak oversight of charters “puts students and communities at risk of harm, public funds at risk of being wasted, and further erodes local control of public education.” Every word in those quotes is a lie including “and” and “the.” (H/T Mary McCarthy) But when you are in bed with the teachers unions, speaking the truth is not a high priority.

Unacknowledged by the NAACP is that access to charter schools gives blacks and other minorities a great opportunity to escape lives of poverty and/or crime in many urban areas. Most studies show that charters (which are public schools) outperform traditional public schools, and that minorities and the poor are the biggest winners. Typical is a study released by Stanford researchers in 2013 that showed black students gained the equivalent of 14 days of learning by attending charter schools and  that black students living in poverty saw even greater benefits,  gaining the equivalent of 29 days in reading and 36 days in math. Also, a 2015 poll showed that 72 percent of black parents favored charter schools, with just 13 percent opposing.

So why is the NAACP taking this stance?

There are 380,500 reasons, according to education reformer/writer RiShawn Biddle. That’s how many dollars the anti-charter National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers have donated to the NAACP over the last five years. No one is more outraged at the blatant NAACP sell-out than Dr. Steve Perry, founder of the highly successful Capital Preparatory Magnet School in Connecticut, where100 percent of its high school graduates go on to college. Speaking angrily about the NAACP on Roland Martin’s TV show, Perry said, “They couldn’t be more out of touch if they ran full speed in the other direction… This is more proof that the NAACP has been mortgaged by the teachers union and they keep paying y’all to say what they want to say… The group that has most benefited from school choice in general and charters in specific are African-American males… You want to stop the school-to-prison pipeline? Then stop sending Black boys to failed schools that keep funding the NAACP through teachers union dues.” Not to be missed is an appearance by Perry on a podcast with RiShawn Biddle. Perry does a 17 minute rant that the NAACP and all who favor the status quo should be forced to listen to.

The NAACP and its teacher union benefactors never get around to explaining the above-mentioned Stanford study or why there are over a million kids nationwide on charter school wait-lists, desperately trying to escape their zip-code mandated school.

They never get around to explaining why, in a Quinnipiac poll released just last week, New Yorkers believe by a 2-1 margin that access to charters should be increased. In fact, in the same survey, 51 percent said they would prefer to send their child to a charter school.

They never get around to explaining why test scores just released by New York State show 94 percent of Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy students – almost all minority – passed the 2016 math exam and 82 percent passed the reading exam. By comparison, just 38 percent of students in traditional public schools met state reading standards this year, and 36 percent did so in math.

They never get around to explaining why, in California, 52 percent of students attending charters that serve a majority of high poverty kids are in the top quartile of all public schools statewide as opposed to just 26 percent of similar students attending traditional public schools.

As Steve Perry puts it, the national organization is “old and out of touch.” RiShawn Biddle adds that the NAACP is basically saying, “Black lives don’t matter.” The only good news for the NAACP is that many of its locals, which are much more in touch with the needs of black people, are very much pro-charter.

As for the teachers unions, their professed sympathies for the plight of minorities via their incessant “progressive” chatter go on unabated. But at the end of the day, many of their policies are really more in line with George Wallace, whose primary goal was to keep blacks “in their place.” It’s truly disgraceful.

Larry Sand, a former classroom teacher, is the president of the non-profit California Teachers Empowerment Network – a non-partisan, non-political group dedicated to providing teachers and the general public with reliable and balanced information about professional affiliations and positions on educational issues. The views presented here are strictly his own.