Tag Archives | NAACP

Black leaders from my generation won’t find inspiration at the NAACP

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On June 10, 2011 in Charter Schools, Education and Public Policy, General, Parent empowerment, School Choice

I made it a priority to join my college’s NAACP branch when I enrolled in the fall of 1997. But just a year later, I let my membership lapse. While I’m sure part of my disassociation was due to my participation in other activities, I do remember feeling disconnected from the 102-year-old civil rights organization.

I was reminded of that split after reading about the NAACP’s controversial lawsuit against New York City as well as the accusation from the group’s New York President, Hazel Dukes, that persons of color who support the decision to co-locate traditional and charter schools in the same building – essentially, expanding school choice – are “doing the business of slave masters.” Luckily, as the public affairs officer of a nonprofit organization that strives to provide school choice options to low-income students, and who also happens to be black, I didn’t take Dukes’ raw language personally.

By Tuesday, Dukes somewhat softened her tone in an interview with NY1, telling a reporter that she wasn’t against charter schools and that “parents have a right for choice.” The motive for the NAACP’s lawsuit, she said, is the pursuit of “justice and equality.”

But the lawsuit and Dukes’ initial remarks have cast the organization as out of touch and divisive. New York Daily News columnist Stanley Crouch captured it best when he wrote in his June 6 column:

The suit is proof of how low a great civil rights organization has fallen since its days of advocating for racial equality in the face of tremendous hatred.

… The NAACP significantly shifted the American racial consciousness in 1954 when it won the Brown vs. Board of Education decision before the Supreme Court. This began a systematic dismantling of Southern segregation once and for all.

So what has happened since? Not knowing when to hold or when to fold, the NAACP refuses to look at public education with any kind of nuance. If it did, it would understand that the UFT and its allies are only hurting the push for fair schools that began with the Brown victory more than a half-century earlier.

As a columnist for my college paper, I penned a piece expressing my frustration at the lack of baton-passing from Dukes’ generation to mine, asking the question, “Are there any black leaders emerging from my generation?”

In the years since that column was published, I’ve surmised that maybe it’s not prudent for my peers to look to the older generation for a tap on the shoulder. Dukes’ lashing out and the NAACP’s lawsuit reaffirmed that belief.

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Standing on the wrong side of empowerment

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On June 7, 2011 in Charter Schools, Education and Public Policy, General, Parent empowerment, Teacher quality

In a Wall Street Journal column today on the controversy surrounding the NAACP joining the New York City teachers union in an anti-charter school lawsuit, William McGurn writes:

For those who understand that our big city public school systems have become jobs programs for teachers and administrators, the NAACP’s response makes perfect sense. That’s because there are many African-American teachers in these systems, many of whom presumably belong to the NAACP … The NAACP is doing in New York what the United Federation of Teachers is doing, and for the same reason: protecting the interests of its members.

In an entry on redefinED last fall I discussed why middle-class African Americans feel such loyalty toward school districts and why this loyalty is fraying in Florida. Thanks to a variety of parental empowerment programs in Florida, African-American educators and local community activists are increasingly opening up financially-viable schools, and as these publicly funded private schools provide more middle-class teaching jobs, the middle class African-American community — which includes African-American politicians — is embracing them.

If the NAACP and New York City teachers union were more enlightened, they would understand that a centralized, command-and-control public education system is not in the best interests of teachers, parents, students or taxpayers. A public education system that empowers educators and local communities to create their own schools and empowers parents to match their children with the schools that best meet their needs is the best path to equal educational opportunity. Unfortunately both the NAACP and New York City teachers union are on the wrong side of history.

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No matter who is standing in the way

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On June 6, 2011 in Charter Schools, General, Parent empowerment, Parental Choice, School Choice

Kevin P. Chavous, a former Washington, D.C., councilman and board chairman of the Black Alliance for Educational Options, reflects on the NAACP’s fight against school closures and charter school expansions in New York City, in light of a Harlem rally of parents urging the civil rights group to drop its opposition. Writing in The Washington Post, Chavous asks how we got to the point “that the country’s foremost civil rights organization is the target of a protest by the people it was created to serve?”

Elegantly, Chavous adds:

As an African American growing up in the ’60s, I revered the NAACP. I will never forget when my mother took me to a NAACP-League of Women Voters rally at Butler University in Indianapolis, my hometown. My mother was active in both groups, which, at that time, were protesting the presence of Alabama Gov. George Wallace on Butler’s campus. Wallace was an avowed segregationist who famously stood in the doorway of the University of Alabama to block the entrance of its first black students, Vivian Malone and James Hood. Only 7 at the time, I distinctly remember carrying a sign that I pointed in Wallace’s face. I don’t recall what the sign said, but I knew he didn’t want boys like me to get an education. As the police pushed me aside, my mother and her fellow protesters praised me for marching like a man for equal rights. Later, when my parents sat me down to give me my own NAACP membership card, I was proud beyond words.

I reflected on that time when I saw a photo of young black students at the Harlem march against the NAACP. I could see myself in one of those photos — a boy standing with his mom, holding a sign and making a statement in support of his future. I couldn’t help but see the irony: me marching with the NAACP against Wallace, and today’s children marching against the NAACP. It just shows that black parents will fight for the progress and quality education that their kids deserve — no matter who is standing in the way.

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NAACP’s Dukes fumbles the message

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On June 2, 2011 in Charter Schools, Education and Public Policy, General, Parental Choice, School Choice

It is irresponsible to equate the values of parental empowerment and school choice today with the ugly history of Jim Crow. But Hazel Dukes, the president of the NAACP’s New York State conference, now is fighting back at school closures and charter school expansions in New York City with just such a message.

Dukes announced she would hold a counter protest tomorrow in front of the Harlem Success Academy, whose leaders last week led a rally asking why the nation’s oldest civil rights group would fight reforms designed to benefit poor blacks and Hispanics. Dukes said then, as she said today in a press release announcing the protest, that co-locating charter schools and traditional schools would be tantamount to “setting up separate and unequal education.”

The NAACP had every reason to be anxious of private school voucher plans and other choice schemes that grew out of the War on Poverty in the 1960s, as some southern school districts made it clear they would take advantage of those policies to resegregate public education in their states. But choice as its proposed in New York City today, as it is in several other states considering or implementing voucher or charter school options, provides options disproportionately to low-income black and Hispanic children that often come from impoverished single-parent households. Hazel Dukes can stand before Eva Moskowitz and appropriately challenge the Success Charter Network’s efforts without summoning the ugliest racial injustice in our nation’s history. Dukes has used her influential position to tarnish an important policy debate and, more disturbingly, has abandoned a large part of her constituency that is looking to the NAACP for support in this new age of public education.

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Fighting the NAACP’s opposition to school reform

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On May 27, 2011 in Charter Schools, Education and Public Policy, General, Parental Choice, School Choice

When 2,500 Harlem protesters yesterday challenged the NAACP’s involvement in a lawsuit against school closures and charter school expansions in New York City, they joined a growing chorus of confusion that fails to grasp why the nation’s oldest and largest civil rights group continues to fight school reforms that disproportionately benefit minorities.

Chiefly, one of the school leaders most confused by the NAACP’s opposition to education alternatives is New York City’s new chancellor, Dennis M. Walcott. Last year, in a column published in the New York Post, Walcott wrote:

More than 50 years ago, another education lawsuit asserted the rights of children of color. Brown v. Board of Education affirmed the right of citizens to an equal education when the Supreme Court found that school segregation is a violation of the right to equal protection under the law. That was the civil-rights issue of that day.

And yet, more than half a century later, we are still failing to protect the interests of our African-American and Latino children. Here in New York City, the graduation rate for African-American and Latino students is rising, but it remains just over 50 percent. These outcomes reflect a crisis that is devastating our communities. It is the civil-rights issue of our time …

… Continuing to send students to failing schools, especially when we know how poor the odds are that they will succeed in those schools, and when we have evidence that we can do better, represents a fundamental violation of the civil rights of our children of color and their families.

For decades, the civil-rights movement fought in the courts on behalf of African-American and Latino children. This time, the battlefield in the fight for social justice should be the classroom, not the courtroom.

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One legend’s call to today’s civil rights leaders: Erase the lines we have drawn in the past

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On December 15, 2010 in Achievement Gap, Charter Schools, General, School Choice

After listening recently to RiShawn Biddle’s podcast calling on civil rights leaders to change their approach to education reform, I was reminded of an unpublished column written by one Florida legend in the civil rights movement, the Rev. H.K. Matthews. Matthews shared the commentary with me and others after several civil rights groups last summer demanded that President Obama reconsider the core elements of his education agenda, which included the expansion of charter schools and the closure of consistently low-performing schools. These iconic groups, which included the NAACP and the National Urban League, had good intentions in presenting their education policy framework, but Matthews found their arguments irrelevant today. Their call for equal opportunity, he wrote, was “limited by some familiar boundaries of generations past – those of neighborhood and family income.”

Matthews, whose story is chronicled in the biography Victory After the Fall,  marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, Ala., and was jailed 35 times for his many protests of segregated lunch counters in northwest Florida. In recent years, he has joined the call for more educational options for poor families, an effort he called “a natural extension of the civil rights movement.”  In this column, which has never seen publication until now, he asks his brethren to erase the lines we have drawn in the past:

The African-American leaders who convened in Washington last week [July] to call educational quality the “civil rights battle of this generation” have it at least half right. Unfortunately, their call for equal opportunity seems limited by some familiar boundaries of generations past– those of neighborhood and family income.

As President Obama put it: “What’s not working for black kids and Hispanic kids and Native American kids across this country is the status quo … What’s not working is what we’ve been doing for decades now.” Continue Reading →

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