Black to School: The Rising Struggle to Make Black Education Matter
Tonya Ray, center, a math teacher at the Academy of Public Leadership, talking with students in Detroit, May 11, 2016. (Joshua Lott / The New York Times)
The struggle for equitable education went to summer school, and the new school year is getting underway with leading Black organizations bolstering the movement against the central components of the corporate education reform agenda.
In an earthmoving decision for the education landscape, the NAACP -- the nation's oldest civil rights organization -- voted at its July national gathering to call for "a moratorium on privately managed charter schools," saying charter schools:
do not represent the public yet make decisions about how public funds are spent [and have] contributed to the increased segregation rather than diverse integration of our public school system.... Researchers have warned that charter school expansions in low-income communities mirror predatory lending practices that led to the sub-prime mortgage disaster, putting schools and communities impacted by these practices at great risk of loss and harm.
A moratorium would halt the granting of any more licenses to open new charter schools -- that is, schools funded by the public but privately run and not accountable to democratically elected school boards. The NAACP announcement has corporate education reformers reeling. Rick Hess, director of education policy at the right-wing American Enterprise Institute, said that if local governments adopt the NAACP's proposed moratorium, "It would give a permanent black eye to the sector."
If the NAACP's stance on charters would bruise the corporate agenda, then thedeclaration from the Movement for Black Lives -- the newest civil rights coalition, comprised of dozens of grassroots organizations around the country -- would flatline it altogether. The coalition released a policy platform at the beginning of August that called for, among other things, a moratorium on all out-of-school suspensions and the removal of police from schools, replacing them with positive alternatives to Black to School: The Rising Struggle to Make Black Education Matter:
