During its century of existence, the National Association for
the Advancement of Colored People has rightfully and successfully
tangled with Jim Crow segregationists, school districts opposed to
racial integration, even famed (or notorious) Hollywood director
D.W. Griffith and his film, The Birth of a Nation. But
these days, the nation’s oldest civil rights group finds itself at
odds — and on the wrong side of history — with two groups with
whom it should be naturally allied: America’s school reform
movement — and a younger generation of African Americans.
The latest example came last
week when 2,500 parents of students attending New York City’s
public charter schools — most of whom are black and Latino — held
a
protest against the NAACP’s New York branch just a block away
from one of its local offices. Why? They were miffed about its
decision to join the American Federation of Teachers’ New York
City local in suing New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg to stop
the city’s longtime practice of allowing the publicly funded,
privately operated schools to share space with its traditional
counterparts in the city’s massive (and often half-empty)
buildings. The suit, which would essentially stop the opening of 17
new charters, could essentially stem the expansion of those
schools, which Bloomberg has championed as part of his decade-long
overhaul of the city’s public education system — and whose very
existence the AFT and the NAACP have long
vehemently opposed.
The protest — which included
the appearance of such big-name reformers and celebrities as Seth
Gilliam — who played the dedicated Baltimore cop Ellis Carter in
The Wire — and Geoffrey Canada (who’s successful Harlem
Children’s Zone collection of charters were profiled in the Davis
Guggenheim documentary, Waiting for ‘Superman’) — proved
to be embarrassing to the NAACP. It was even more embarrassing when
the president of the New York State branch found herself pleading
its case after 20 concerned parents showed up at its posh Avenue of
the Americas office.
This is just the latest example
of the NAACP being out of touch. Earlier this year, its branch in
Mississippi opposed a bill that would allow charter schools to open
in school districts throughout the state. Even amid evidence that
just 51 percent of traditional public schools in the Magnolia State
were fit for kids to attend — and in spite of the fact that just
six out of every ten black high school freshmen (and six in ten
freshmen of all races) graduate from high school four years later,
the chapter’s president, Derrick Johnson, declared that allowing
more charters would “create and maintain a
permanent situation of second-class citizens.”
The NAACP has been even more vocal in its opposition to
other reform measures — including vouchers, which allow poor
parents (especially those from black communities) to escape the
nation’s dropout factories and academic failure mills. In
Pennsylvania, the NAACP is opposing a
measure that would allow companies to collect a tax break in
exchange for financing private-school tuition for poor children,
declaring that the state should bolster school funding instead of
providing an “evacuation strategy” for students to flee abysmal
schools. By the way, those students would include the mostly black
kids in Philadelphia, whose school district has been under state
control for a decade; between 2001 and 2009, the percentage of
eighth-graders promoted to senior year of high school declined from
74 percent to 60 percent.
The NAACP has even found itself squaring off with President
Barack Obama, whose administration has aggressively (if not
always successfully) pushed for overhauling the nation’s woeful
traditional public schools. Last year, it teamed up with the
National Urban League and a smattering of other old-school civil
rights groups to issue a
manifesto decrying Obama’s efforts — including the Race to the
Top initiative, which, among things, successfully pushed states
such as California and New York to expand the number of charter
schools — demanding that the administration back their array of
warmed-over measures instead. Obama and U.S. Secretary of Education
Arne Duncan repaid them in kind by rhetorically smacking them
around for failing to realize the importance of their
efforts.
There are some dissident NAACP branches that have embraced
school reform. But for the most part, the civil rights group has
all but abandoned its mantle as a leading force in the debate over
how to reform the nation’s lackluster public school systems. In the
process, it is also losing relevance with a younger generation of
blacks — many of which are now bearing children and sending them
to school — who know all too well that just one out of every two
black men every graduate from high school and who understand the
consequences of academic failure. Over the past decade, they, along
with celebrities such as singers John Legend and Fantasia Barrino,
have backed efforts to expand charter schools and other reforms,
all but leaving the NAACP behind.
It hasn’t always been this way.
For most of the past century, the NAACP has been among the foremost
foes of those who defended some of the nation’s worst educational
practices. Led by future U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood
Marshall, the NAACP began its push to desegregate the nation’s
public schools and universities in 1935 when it successfully sued
Maryland’s state officials for barring black students from
attending its university law schools. It would then take on the
practice among traditional school districts, especially in the
southern states, of segregating black students from their white
peers and relegating them to rickety school buildings and other
abysmal conditions. These efforts would culminate in the landmark
Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education that
would begin the integration of elementary and secondary schools and
galvanize the nation’s civil rights movement.
Even today, the NAACP remains
dedicated to integration, this time in the form of so-called
socioeconomic integration under which districts bus poor students
to schools attended by middle-class peers, usually through
so-called magnet schools which theoretically also offer some form
of school choice. Its most recent push on this front is in Wake
County, N.C., where it is battling the school district over plans
to end its decades-long integration effort (which only covered a
fifth of all students) and go back to the practice of zoning
students to neighborhood schools.
The NAACP also remains dedicated
to its four-decade effort to improve the nation’s woeful urban
schools by filing lawsuits to force states to pour more money into
those schools, either by transferring property dollars from
wealthier suburban districts or increasing funding to those
districts from state dollars. The funding part has largely been
successful: NAACP-instigated lawsuits, along with moves by
statehouses to relieve homeowners of their property tax burdens,
have resulted in the average state funding 48 percent of school
expenditures — and as much as 83 percent of all funding for urban
districts such as Newark, N.J.
Driving both efforts are
outdated notions on how to improve the quality of education: That
moving poor black, white and Latino students into schools attended
by middle-class peers will result in improving their success in
school. And that spending more money on education will lead to
better schools in urban communities. But as seen in Wake
County, integration in itself does little to address the low
quality of teaching and
academic curricula that is at the heart of the nation’s
education crisis. Nor have funding equity reforms done the trick;
Jersey City, N.J, for example, remains one of the nation’s worst
school systems despite three decades of additional court-ordered
funding by Garden State taxpayers.
By continuing to hold on to
these notions, the NAACP has ignored solutions that could actually
improve education and lost opportunities to ally with reformers.
More importantly, it has alienated black families, particularly
those in urban communities often served by failure factories, who
have learned from experienced that integration
was a false promise and have become savvy about the role played by
teachers unions in contributing to the mediocre quality of urban
schools. Forty-nine percent of African Americans surveyed in 2009
by the school policy journal Education Next and Harvard
University supported charter schools, a seven-point increase over
the previous year. They, along with white families, have also
launched their own
organizations to work closely with school reform
activists.
The NAACP has done little to respond to this new
generation of black families, partly because of its aging
membership, which includes teachers of Baby Boomer age who, like
their white colleagues, zealously defend the array of
seniority-based privileges they have gained with the help of
teachers unions. The fact that the NAACP has longstanding ties to
the NEA (and has collected $260,000 from the union over the past
two years alone) also factors into the equation. Meanwhile it has done little to recapture its place
as a leading player in shaping education policy. Last November,
NAACP President Benjamin Todd Jealous proudly announced at a confab
held by the reform-minded American Enterprise Institute that it
would release its own school reform agenda this year. But the plan,
funded by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, has
yet to materialize.
Instead, the NAACP has launched
an effort
to increase school funding by diverting dollars from the nation’s
criminal justice system (including a report and an oh-so-snazzy
online petition for folks to sign). The fact that the nation
spends far less on prison construction alone (a mere $1.5 billion
in the 2006-2007 fiscal year) than on building schools ($63
billion, including lavish high school football stadiums) doesn’t
factor in its thinking; nor does it consider for a moment that the
reason American taxpayers spend $228 billion on courts and prisons
badly is because it spends $562 billion on schools
abysmally.
Thanks to its thoughtless
defense of traditional public education, the NAACP’s proud legacy
is collecting as much dust as old W.E.B. Du Bois-edited copies of
The Crisis.
