The NAACP’s Increasing Concerns with Publicly-funded Charter Schools
On July 29, 2016, Julian Heilig of the blog, Cloaking Inequity, published a postabout the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)2016 position on charter schools. Heilig serves as education chair of the California Hawaii NAACP.
In short, the NAACP has formally called for a moratorium on charter schools. But the resolution does more than just strongly advocate putting the brakes on charter school expansion; it also details the reason for the NAACP’s resistance against charter school proliferation, a resistance that the NAACP began formally voicing in 2010 and more strongly in 2014. (Archives of NAACP resolutions can be found here.)
NAACP concern over the ill effects of charter school expansion is increasing as years pass, as is evident in the language of its three resolutions on the issue. To begin with, here is the NAACP’s 2010 resolution:
CHARTER SCHOOLSWHEREAS, charter schools are public schools which were originally designed to explore new approaches to educate students; andWHEREAS, in some cases, charter schools have become a school model that is used to segregate students; andWHEREAS, charter schools have too seldom informed the education community regarding innovative instructional strategies that accelerate academic achievement in the general population of students; andWHEREAS, the Center for Research in Educational Outcomes (CREDO) which examined charter school data in fifteen (15) states and the District of Columbia confirmed that only 17% of the charter school students in the study outperformed their peers, while 46% performed no better and 37% performed worse; andWHEREAS, charter schools operate more autonomously than traditional public schools in the use of funds, adherence to state laws and school policies, selection and removal of students, and the selection and removal ofThe NAACP’s Increasing Concerns with Publicly-funded Charter Schools | deutsch29: