Top NAACP official slams charter schools
WASHINGTON—The president of the California NAACP is slamming the nation’s burgeoning charter school movement as bad for teachers, bad for kids and bad for accountability to parents. And it especially hurts kids in inner-city schools, Alice Huffman says.
Huffman headed a special NAACP commission on the charters after her state chapter raised the issue at the last convention of the nation’s oldest civil rights group, she told a May 9 symposium on charters and their impact on public schools.
It found, in so many words, that charters were a mess: Most did not fulfill their promises, they keep their budgets and spending secret, they discriminate against the disabled, and they yank due process protections from disciplined kids and from their teachers, too.
The American Federation of Teachers, which has been skeptical of charters — and which is also trying to organize many of them – sponsored the symposium, along with the union’s Albert Shanker Institute.
“I don’t have the data” the other panelists presented, Huffman said. “I want to talk about the kids.”
“Believers in privatization” of schools, including for-profit charter school operators, “want to get the pot of dollars” states make available to public schools, she said. “And the one group they hated more than African-Americans was unions.”
She also set charters as one of several public school “remedies” that hurt minority-group kids. Charters, Huffman said, were preceded by vouchers and tuition tax credits funneling public dollars to parents of private school kids.
In the South, after the Supreme Court’s 1954 school desegregation ruling, the response was to close the public schools rather than integrate. But charters take advantage of parents’ desires for the best education for their children, Huffman noted – a desire mostly left unfulfilled, the NAACP report last year found.
Other panelists at the May 9 session also criticized charters, for different reasons. Most pointed was David Arsen, a Michigan State University education policy professor. He faulted the state’s politicians for bending to a strenuous lobbying campaign by GOP big giver Elizabeth “Betsy” DeVos against public schools in general and for charters.
Overcoming opposition from the state’s teachers’ unions and even the Chamber of Commerce, she won. Michigan’s charters, Arsen said, have virtually no accountability for their results, which have sunk the state to the bottom of national rankings in achievement, per-pupil spending and other measures.
DeVos, a vitriolic foe of public schools in general and unions in particular, is now carrying on the same crusade as GOP President Donald Trump’s Education Secretary – over opposition from the AFL-CIO, AFT, the National Education Association, the School Administrators (AFSA) and other unions.
Cities nationwide often use charters to evade union contracts, financial accountability to parents and, sometimes, teacher standards. The for-profit charter operators promise better student performance, but often – including in Detroit and Milwaukee – haven’t delivered.
That’s what prompted California’s complaint and the NAACP panel Huffman headed. It visited charter systems in New Orleans, New York, Detroit, Milwaukee, Cleveland and elsewhere.
Ironically, Huffman noted, Shanker, the union’s dominant president in the 1960s, first came up with the idea of charters. But he envisioned them as cooperating with public schools and demonstrating best practices Continue reading: Top NAACP official slams charter schools – People's World:
