The NAACP Spent More Fighting School Choice Than Fighting Illiteracy

In the beginning, the NAACP was the sword. Founded in 1909, in the aftermath of the Springfield, Illinois race riot of 1908, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was created for a purpose so urgent and so necessary that its very existence was an act of defiance: the legal, educational, and social equality of Black Americans in a nation that had made their inequality a constitutional project. The founding members included W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, Mary White Ovington, and Oswald Garrison Villard, and they built an organization that would become the most consequential civil rights institution in American history. The NAACP’s Legal Defense and Educational Fund, under the leadership of Thurgood Marshall, won Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 — the Supreme Court decision that declared segregated public schools unconstitutional and broke the legal spine of Jim Crow education. The NAACP fought for voting rights, for anti-lynching legislation, for employment discrimination protections, for the right of Black Americans to exist as full citizens under law. That history is sacred, and I will not diminish it.

But sacred history does not exempt a living institution from accountability for its present actions. And the present actions of the NAACP on education — the very domain where its greatest victory was won — constitute one of the most consequential betrayals of Black children in the organization’s 117-year history. Because the NAACP, the organization that fought to give Black children access to quality education, has spent the last two decades fighting to ensure that Black children cannot escape the failing schools where quality education does not exist.

The Resolution That Changed Everything

In October 2016, at its annual convention, the NAACP passed a formal resolution calling for a moratorium on the expansion of charter schools. The resolution called for existing charter schools to be subject to the same oversight as traditional public schools, demanded that no new charter schools be approved until existing ones met a set of conditions, and positioned the NAACP as the leading national civil rights organization opposed to school choice.

The resolution was passed despite the fact that Black parents are the demographic most supportive of school choice in America. It was passed despite the fact that charter school waiting lists in majority-Black cities number in the tens of thousands. It was passed despite the fact that the most rigorous academic research available shows that urban charter schools — the ones serving predominantly Black and Latino students — produce measurably better outcomes than the traditional public schools the NAACP defends. And it was passed for a reason that the NAACP has never been forced to articulate honestly, because the media that covers civil rights organizations treats them with a deference that shields them from the kind of scrutiny routinely applied to every other institution in American public life.

The Literacy Catastrophe

While the NAACP was lobbying against charter schools, the following was true and documented in the school districts the NAACP was defending:

According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) — known as the Nation’s Report Card — only 15 percent of Black eighth graders in the United States read at or above the “proficient” level. That means 85 percent of Black eighth graders cannot read at grade level. In mathematics, the proficiency rate is 11 percent. These are not cherry-picked statistics from the worst districts. These are national averages.

In the specific districts where the NAACP has been most active in defending traditional public schools, the numbers are not merely bad. They are an emergency:

• Baltimore City Public Schools: In 2023, 7 percent of students were proficient in math. In some individual schools, not a single student tested at grade level in math or reading.
• Detroit Public Schools Community District: 5 percent reading proficiency among eighth graders on the most recent NAEP assessment.
• Cleveland Metropolitan School District: 8 percent reading proficiency among eighth graders.

Five percent. Seven percent. Eight percent. These are not outcomes. These are indictments. These are numbers that, if they appeared in a medical context, would constitute a public health emergency requiring immediate federal intervention. If 95 percent of the water in a city were contaminated, we would not debate whether residents had the right to buy bottled water. We would not pass resolutions calling for a moratorium on water filtration. We would not tell parents that the solution was to be patient while the water treatment plant was reformed. We would give them clean water immediately, by any means available, and we would hold the people who contaminated the supply accountable.

But when 95 percent of Black children in Detroit cannot read at grade level, the NAACP’s position is: stay in the school. Trust the system. Wait for reform. Do not leave.

What the Research Actually Shows

The NAACP’s moratorium resolution cites concerns about charter school accountability, about the diversion of public funds, about the potential for charter schools to increase segregation. These are legitimate concerns in the abstract. In the concrete — in the world of actual data, actual children, actual outcomes — the most rigorous research available provides a clear and documented answer.

The Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University has conducted the most comprehensive studies of charter school performance in the United States. Their 2015 Urban Charter School Study, which analyzed student performance data from forty-one urban regions, found that students in urban charter schools gained the equivalent of 40 additional days of learning in mathematics and 28 additional days of learning in reading compared to their peers in traditional public schools.

For Black students specifically, the gains were even larger. Black students in urban charter schools gained 59 additional days in math and 44 additional days in reading compared to Black students in traditional public schools. These are not marginal differences. Over a five-year elementary school career, those additional days compound into nearly an additional year of academic growth. The students in these charter schools are from the same neighborhoods, the same demographics, the same income levels as the students in the traditional public schools. The variable is the school, not the student.

CREDO’s updated 2023 study confirmed these findings with an even larger dataset, showing consistent academic advantages for charter school students in urban settings, with the largest gains among Black and Hispanic students in poverty.

The Parents They Refuse to Hear

Here is the number that makes the NAACP’s position indefensible: the charter school waiting lists. In New York City, more than 50,000 students were on waiting lists for charter schools in 2023. In Chicago, approximately 30,000. In Boston, more than 20,000. In Newark, Detroit, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C. — in every city where charter schools operate, the demand from parents — overwhelmingly Black and Latino parents — exceeds the supply by orders of magnitude.

These parents are not ideologues. They are not reading policy papers from the Heritage Foundation or attending conferences hosted by the Walton Family Foundation. They are mothers and fathers who looked at the school their child was assigned to, looked at the data, looked at the outcomes, and concluded that their child deserved better. They are exercising the same parental prerogative that every NAACP board member exercises when choosing schools for their own children. The difference is that NAACP board members can afford private school tuition. The parents on the waiting lists cannot.

“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.” — Alice Walker

And this is where the NAACP’s position crosses the line from misguided to unconscionable. The organization is not simply defending a policy position. It is defending a system that is functionally destroying Black children’s futures, against the expressed wishes of Black parents, while offering no alternative that produces measurably different results. The NAACP’s answer to charter schools is always “fix the public schools.” But the public schools in Baltimore, Detroit, and Cleveland have been receiving that promise for fifty years, and the proficiency rates have not moved. At some point, “fix the public schools” stops being a policy position and starts being a hostage negotiation, with Black children as the hostages.

Follow the Money

The question that the NAACP’s education position demands is a simple one: why? Why would the nation’s oldest civil rights organization oppose the educational option that Black parents most want and that the most rigorous research shows works best for Black students? The answer is not complicated, and it is documented in campaign finance records, organizational filings, and the political architecture of American education.

The National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) are the two largest teachers’ unions in the United States, with a combined membership of approximately 4.7 million and combined political spending that regularly places them among the top ten donors in American politics. The NEA and AFT have been the most powerful institutional opponents of charter schools and school vouchers for decades, because charter schools operate outside union contracts and reduce the enrollment — and therefore the funding — of unionized traditional public schools.

The financial relationship between the teachers’ unions and the NAACP is documented. The NEA and AFT have provided significant financial contributions to the NAACP, both directly and through affiliated organizations. They share political infrastructure, support the same candidates, and collaborate on education policy advocacy at the state and federal level. The unions’ political apparatus and the NAACP’s political apparatus are, in many jurisdictions, functionally intertwined.

This does not mean that every NAACP leader who opposes charter schools does so because of union money. It means that the organizational incentives — the funding streams, the political alliances, the institutional relationships — all point in the same direction: against school choice. And those incentives are powerful enough to override the preferences of Black parents and the evidence of educational research. The NAACP’s education policy is aligned with its donors, not its constituents. This is not a conspiracy theory. This is how institutional politics works in every sector of American life, and pretending that civil rights organizations are exempt from it is a naivety that Black children cannot afford.

The Voices Within

Derrell Bradford has been one of the most articulate advocates for school choice from within the Black community for two decades. As the executive vice president of 50CAN and the former executive director of Better Education for Kids in New Jersey, Bradford has made the case that school choice is the civil rights issue of this generation — that trapping children in failing schools based on their zip code is a form of segregation as real as the kind Thurgood Marshall fought, even if the mechanism is different. Bradford grew up in Baltimore, attended public schools, and speaks from direct experience about the gap between the education that poor Black children receive and the education they deserve.

Howard Fuller’s journey is even more instructive. Fuller was a community organizer in the civil rights movement, a Black Power activist, the superintendent of Milwaukee Public Schools, and a man whose entire life was devoted to the struggle for Black equality through traditional channels. And it was that experience — running a major urban school district, seeing from the inside how the system failed Black children, watching the political machinery protect adult interests at the expense of children’s futures — that converted him into one of the most prominent advocates for school choice in America. Fuller’s transformation was not ideological. It was empirical. He saw the data. He saw the children. And he concluded that the system he had spent his life defending was not going to change from within, because the people with the power to change it had no incentive to do so.

Fuller and Bradford are not conservatives. They are not Republican operatives. They are Black men who have devoted their careers to the advancement of Black children and who have concluded, based on evidence and experience, that the NAACP’s education position is indefensible. Their voices exist within the Black community, and they are systematically marginalized by an organizational establishment that cannot answer their arguments and so chooses to ignore them.

The Intervention

I want to be precise about what I am saying and what I am not saying. I am not saying the NAACP is a corrupt organization. I am not saying its leaders are venal. I am not saying its 117-year history of struggle and sacrifice is invalidated by its current education policy. I am saying that on this issue — on the specific question of whether Black parents should have the right to remove their children from schools where 93 percent of students cannot do math at grade level — the NAACP has chosen the wrong side. It has chosen the side of the institution over the side of the child. It has chosen the side of the donor over the side of the parent. And it has done so while wrapped in the moral authority of an organization that once stood for the exact opposite principle: that no child’s educational future should be determined by an institution’s convenience.

Brown v. Board of Education was not about school buildings. It was about the right of Black children to access the best education available, regardless of what arbitrary boundary — racial or geographic — stood in their way. The NAACP won that case. And now the NAACP defends a system that assigns Black children to failing schools based on their zip code and tells their parents they have no right to leave. The irony is so complete that it would be satirical if the consequences were not measured in the illiteracy rates of living children.

Fifteen percent of Black eighth graders can read at grade level. Fifteen percent. The other eighty-five percent will enter high school unable to comprehend a textbook, will enter the labor market unable to complete a job application without assistance, will enter adulthood carrying the compound weight of every year they spent in a school that did not teach them to read. And the NAACP’s documented, published, formally adopted position is that the schools that produced this catastrophe should face no competition, no alternatives, no consequences, and that the parents of these children should accept this arrangement because the organization knows better than they do what their children need.

This is not civil rights. This is institutional self-preservation dressed in the language of civil rights. And the children who pay the price for this performance — the 85 percent, the ones who cannot read, the ones who will never know that a different outcome was possible and that the organization bearing their ancestors’ trust fought to prevent it — those children deserve better than an organization’s loyalty to its donors. They deserve an organization’s loyalty to them.