NAACP, BAEO at odds of charter schools
3rd October 2016 · 0 Comments
By Kari Dequine Harden
Contributing Writer
This month, board members of the NAACP will vote on a resolution pledging support for a “moratorium of privately managed charter schools.”
It is a position also taken by the policy demands recently released by the Black Lives Matter movement, which advocates for “An end to the privatization of education and real community control by parents, students and community members of schools including democratic school boards and community control of curriculum, hiring, firing and discipline policies.”
In response, the Black Alliance for Educational Options (BAEO) launched a “ChartersWork” campaign, calling on the NAACP to reconsider their position, arguing that the “moratorium on new charter schools would ultimately reduce opportunities for Black students.”
Charter schools are very popular among Black parents, and have allowed families to “rescue their children from failing schools,” according to the BAEO letter signed by 160 Black education leaders, written on “behalf of the nearly 700,000 Black families choosing to send their children to charter public schools, and the tens of thousands more who are still on waiting lists.”
The NAACP and Black Lives Matter go into great detail over their concerns with charter schools: the targeting of low-income and communities of color, increased segregation, privately appointed boards that are neither accountable nor transparent, the overuse of punitive and exclusionary discipline practices, the school-to-prison pipeline, civil rights violations, fiscal mismanagement, and draining funds from traditional schools.
The NAACP cites “annual missing charter funds that have been estimated at nearly half a billion dollars nationally, and research showing “charter school expansions in low-income communities mirror predatory lending practices that led to the sub-prime mortgage disaster.”
The BAEO letter states the NAACP’s “proposed resolution cites a variety of cherry-picked and debunked claims about charter schools. The notion of dedicated charter school founders and educators acting like predatory subprime mortgage lenders — a comparison the resolution explicitly makes—is a far cry from the truth.”
There are many good charter schools, and many bad charter schools, just as there are good and bad traditional schools. But the problems the NAACP and Black Lives Matter movement are attempting to bring to light are a “mischaracterization,” and “misinformed,” as the BAEO suggests.
As charter schools rapidly expand, pausing to address the problems would be a positive undertaking for both supporters and skeptics.
One thing the charter school movement has performed terribly at is accepting criticism.
Serious inherent and systemic problems with charter schools have not been allowed to be brought to light, investigated, addressed, nor discussed in a meaningful way.
Charter school criticism is all but absent in the mainstream media.
The pro-charter movement is largely funded by billionaires, and has a formidable lobbying arm, while it is more unusual for large organizations to voice such staunch opposition to the financially and politically powerful privatization effort.
The NAACP and Black Lives Matter are confronting that money and power – and resistance is sorely needed to tell all sides of the charter story.
The words most often used to shame and criticize opposition to privatizing the public resources are “choice,” “options” and “opportunity.”
And in many communities, charter schools have presented another option for parents from their traditional neighborhood public school, and in many cases a better one.
But New Orleans is a unique case study with 11 years of experimentation on Black children in order to privatize an entire city’s public school system.
There have been both positive gains, and real reasons for concern.
The NAACP and BAEO could learn a lot from the New Orleans experiment, on both what works and doesn’t work.
Those lessons have been learned on the backs of the city’s children, some of whom have been lifted up, and some of who have been cast aside.
Neither painting all charter operators as evil nor ignoring serious abuses and inequities do anything to honor the children of the experiment.
The NAACP would do well to see some of the charter schools with which parents are thrilled, those using truly innovative teaching approaches, accept and retain all students, and who work to make sure both their teachers and communities are empowered.
The BAEO would benefit from seeing the overuse of the “zero-tolerance” discipline model, and children treated like prisoners instead of students.
The BAEO must also acknowledge the well-documented pushing out of the city’s most vulnerable students – those with special needs, behavior issues, or whose brains simply aren’t designed to be standardized test-taking automatons.
Not only are those students left behind because in a new market-driven era they are too expensive to educate, but getting rid of them artificially boosts the test scores and graduation rates.
The BAEO would do well to talk to community members who feel they have been completely shut out of the education of their children, left disenfranchised and voiceless.
There are serious questions about how many young people are not in school at all, and how graduates are actually doing once in college or the workforce.
While charters were originally designed to reach the hardest to reach kids, or to reach those who flourish in the arts, vocational technical programs, and other talents outside test-taking.
But New Orleans is only more recently starting to see more diversity within the charter schools.
The BAEO letter states: “A blanket moratorium on charter schools would limit Black students’ access to some of the best schools in America and deny Black parents the opportunity to make decisions about what’s best for their children.”
But there are close to 7,000 charter schools enrolling nearly three million students. The expansion has little regulation and transparency – and it is in essence handing over billions in taxpayer dollars to private operators and filling them with the nation’s children with little oversight. There are plenty of stories of gross misspending by the charter operators and corrupt practices.
There are also plenty of stories of children thriving and gaining access to better schools.
Stopping for a moment as a nation to “take stock,” making sure taxpayer dollars are being used responsibly and efficiently, and investigating schools violating civil rights and treating children as dollar signs, is a good idea both for the charter movement going forward, and the advocates of strengthening traditional school systems — thus leaving families with a choice.
After more than a decade of the charter takeover in New Orleans, many parents say their first choice would be a high-performing school in their own neighborhood. The majority do not have that choice.
And it is important to note that choice existed pre-privatization. If a parent wanted to put their kid into a school in another neighborhood, they simply made the request.
In New Orleans, in terms of governance there is no choice: it’s either a charter school or a private school. And there are not yet the great high schools that were promised: one with a culinary arts focus, another on music, another on health care, or mechanics, or engineering, or digital media. That would be choice. The current system is telling kids that test scores and entrance into a prestigious four-year university (and a lifetime of debt) is how their value is determined.
If the organizations on both sides of the debate truly want to act in the best interest of Black children, they only need to spend some time in New Orleans. Some children have been helped by charter schools. Some have been hurt.
The ways in which they have been hurt must be acknowledged and addressed before other cities adopt the New Orleans model.
This article originally published in the October 3, 2016 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
