NAACP’s New Strategy to Shut Down Charter Schools

When an NAACP task force released a report Wednesday calling for new restrictions on charter schools, one of the panel’s members took up the mic to refute accusations that the process was biased.
“As we travel the country, people would say the NAACP is so against charter schools, you don’t know anything about charter schools,” said NAACP national board member Da’Quan Love. “And then faces would turn when our chair, Ms. [Alice] Huffman, would say, ‘Oh, Da’Quan, who is on our task force, is a charter school administrator.”

In concurring with the call for a moratorium on new charter schools and a number of other sweeping changes, Love struck perhaps the most conciliatory note of the task force members who spoke at the group’s 2017 convention.

“There are good charter schools that are doing phenomenal work in some communities where, quite frankly, some of our public schools are not,” he continued. “We have come to the conclusion that while there definitely are some good charter schools that are serving our scholars well … there are some problems with the operation of some charter schools that truly deserve our attention.”

They part ways, though, over many of the NAACP’s policy prescriptions, which charter school accountability proponents say aren’t good substitutes for the oversight mechanisms that are driving school quality in many places.

“I don’t think anyone would argue across our urban centers that we have enough high-quality options for kids,” said Karega Rausch, vice president of research and evaluation at the National Association of Charter School Authorizers. “Rather than a national moratorium, what you need is an understanding of where the charter model is working well and why.”

The policies the venerable civil rights organization called for won’t address the task force’s concerns, he and other education advocates say. Meanwhile, many of the proposed checks and balances are already in place in states with strong charter school laws.