Quick: Who are the nation’s most relevant civil rights leaders?
Neither Jesse Jackson nor Al Sharpton fit the bill. And it isn’t
Benjamin Todd Jealous, the far lesser known president of the
increasingly irrelevant National Association for the Advancement of
Black People.
These days, civil rights leadership can be claimed by
folks such as Geoffrey Canada, CNN commentator Dr. Steve Perry, and
Gwen Samuel. Each one is taking on the biggest concern among black
families — and families throughout the nation overall — in this
century: the reform of America’s lackluster traditional public
schools.
As head of the Harlem Children’s Zone, Canada has garnered
acclaim over the past decade for his launch of three charter
schools that have challenged the longstanding view that poverty is
somehow a barrier to students succeeding academically. One of the
heroes featured in Al Gore friend Davis Guggenheim’s documentary,
Waiting for “Superman”, Canada has also emerged as one of
the leading spokesmen for combating the decades of mediocrity that
has marked education. This summer, for example, Canada, along with
other charter school operators and the families whose kids attend
them, led protests against the American Federation of Teachers and
the NAACP after the two filed an
unsuccessful lawsuit aimed at stopping the expansion of those
schools. The protests proved to be particularly embarrassing to the
NAACP, which found itself in the awkward position of opposing
Canada and the very black families it proclaims to
support.
Then there’s Perry, the blunt-speaking social worker who
has garnered national acclaim for his work as founder of Capital Prep Magnet School in
Hartford, Conn., rated by U.S. News & World Report
among the best-performing schools serving black and Latino
students. Besides hosting his “Perry’s Principles” segment on CNN
and writing a new book on how parents can navigate an often hostile
education system, Perry has emerged as one of the leading critics
of status-quo defenders like the AFT, the much larger National
Education Association, and Diane Ravitch, the once respectable
former George Bush appointee who has become the darling of
teachers’ union bosses.
Declared Perry in an interview this week: “These are people who
don’t see your children as being as capable as theirs.”
Meanwhile Samuel, a mother from the tiny Connecticut city
of Meriden, has become one of the foremost leaders of the Parent
Power movement, an emerging collection of urban and suburban
families pushing for reform. In the past year alone, the two
organizations she leads, the State of Black CT Alliance and the
Connecticut Parents Union, helped pass the nation’s second Parent
Trigger law — which allows a majority of parents to petition for
the overhaul of a school — and filed a series of lawsuits aimed at
forcing the Nutmeg State to allow parents to exercise school choice
so their kids can flee failure mills.
The level of fear among teachers’ union leaders over
Samuel’s efforts — and that of fellow Parent Power groups such as
Parent Revolution (which passed the nation’s first Parent Trigger
law) became clear last month when education magazine Dropout
Nation revealed a presentation given by the AFT at one of its
conferences that showed how its Connecticut affiliate worked
unsuccessfully to kibosh the law (it did manage to water it down).
The
widespread
outcry forced AFT President Randi Weingarten to issue two
apologies for the language contained in the presentation — and
a meeting with Samuel in order to save face.
Canada, Perry and Samuel aren’t the only ones emerging as
the leading voices for black families. A new generation of
activists such as Derrell
Bradford, who has championed New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s
efforts to expand school choice and subject teachers to private
sector-style performance management, and music stars like John
Legend (who has helped make school reform a mainstream issue) are
also advancing the cause. Another group consists of big-city
politicians such as Newark mayor Cory Booker, who has gained
acclaim for reducing a 23 percent decline in homicides between 2007
and 2009 (the latest data available) and for leading a school
reform effort funded in part by a controversial $100 million
donation from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. There’s also Kevin
Chavous, the former D.C. city councilman who helped push for the
expansion of charter schools, as well as the launch (and revival)
of D.C.’s current voucher program; he has also founded such groups
as Democrats for Education Reform, which has helped shape President
Barack Obama’s education reform agenda.
The leading light of this group is the fiery Howard
Fuller, who, as superintendent of the Milwaukee school district in
1991, helped successfully push for the nation’s first school
voucher program. Within the past two decades, Fuller has become one
of the foremost school reformers and civil rights activists,
cofounding such groups as Black Alliance for Educational Options,
which has been one of the leading forces for expanding school
choice. (Chavous, who helped cofound BAEO, is Fuller’s successor as
its chairman.) Declared Andy Rotherham (who writes the
Eduwonk blog) in his Time column: “[Fuller’s]
tireless quest to empower low-income parents led him far from
traditional political allegiances.”
Certainly old-school civil rights groups such as the
NAACP, the National Urban League, and Jackson’s Rainbow PUSH
Coalition remain influential forces in African-American politics
and key activists within Democratic Party politics. For good
reason. During the last century, they have earned the esteem of
generations of blacks with their protest marches, lawsuits and
legislative battles to rightfully end legal and de facto Jim Crow
segregation.
On education, in particular, old-school civil rights
groups successfully pushed for the integration of public schools.
They also used the courts to force states to pour more money into
the urban schools, either by transferring property dollars from
wealthier suburban districts or increasing funding to those
districts from state dollars. Driving those efforts are two
outdated notions: 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. Both
notions tend to favor Baby Boomer teachers, who tend to be their
most influential members.
But a younger generation of blacks, who realize that
economic freedom is critical to social equality, understands that
neither integration nor increased funding have done much to address
the low
quality of teaching and academic curricula — the issues at the
heart of the nation’s education crisis. The fact that one out of
every two young black ninth-grade men drop out of high school
before senior year — and the consequences in the form of long-term
unemployment
and low income — has also made blacks more concerned about
education, especially in an age in which what you know is more
important than what you can do with your hands. Young black
families, particularly those in urban communities often served by
failure factories, have learned from experience 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.
From the perspective of young blacks and even some of
their Baby Boomer counterparts, education is the civil rights issue
of this generation. So they have joined common cause with big-city
mayors, reform-minded politicians from both sides of the political
aisle, and young centrist Democrats. 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.
Old-school civil rights activists haven’t taken too kindly
to their loss of influence. Nor are they happy with President
Obama’s embrace of the school reform movement (even though many of
the groups were not supportive of his successful presidential
campaign three years ago). Last year, a group led by the NAACP and
the National Urban League issued a manifesto decrying Obama’s
efforts — including the Race to the Top initiative, which, among
other 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 — backed
wholeheartedly by black school reformers — repaid them in kind by
rhetorically smacking them around for failing to realize the
importance of their efforts.
The battle in New York City over the expansion of charters
placed the conflict between old-school civil rights groups and
black school reformers into full view. Chavous
chastised the NAACP for having “become the protector of the
status quo it once fought”, while Perry
accused it of being “a jobs program” for teachers’ unions. The
head of the NAACP’s New York affiliate, Hazel Dukes, told a charter
school parent that she and her fellow supporters were doing the
bidding of
“slave masters.” The national office went further by issuing a
press release accusing Chavous and Perry (along with other
school reformers) of being funded by “right wing opponents of
traditional public schools.”
The results didn’t turn out well for the NAACP. Nor can it
even count on all old-school civil rights activists to be on its
side. One of the foremost school reformers out there is the
National Urban League, whose president, Michael Lomax, serves on
the boards of the National Alliance of Public Charter Schools and
the KIPP chain of charter schools. And Sharpton has even teamed up
with former New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein and former
House speaker Newt Gingrich to champion charters. The NAACP and
other old-school civil rights groups will either have to change —
or disappear into the history books.
