{UAH} NAACP Might Fail Test

The national board of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People will vote this week on a resolution calling for a moratorium on charter schools. If they vote yes, they should also change their storied name because they will be voting to leave black children behind.

Delegates to the NAACP national convention this summer passed a resolution to halt charter-school expansion. Most of the resolution's complaints against charters, such as that they perpetuate segregation, are spurious. The NAACP's main gripe seems to be that charters are threatening the union-run public-school monopoly.

The resolution claims that privately operated charters are "targeting low-income areas and communities of color," thereby putting traditional public schools "at great risk of loss and harm." Further, the NAACP complains that public funding of charters is creating "shortages of resources and space" at traditional schools.

It's true that charters are attracting students from traditional schools, especially in big cities. Nearly one in four public school students in Los Angeles now attends a charter, up from about 9% in 2008. In the last seven years New York's charter-school population has quintupled to more than 100,000 students.

Charters are proliferating because minority parents are voting with their feet. About two-thirds of black voters in Louisiana, New Jersey and Tennessee support charters and vouchers, according to a 2015 survey by the Black Alliance for Educational Options. An Education Next poll last month found that blacks backed charters by nearly two-to-one. Two thirds of blacks also favored tax-credit scholarship programs such as Florida's, which the NAACP has sued to block. Meantime, only 8% of blacks gave their local schools an A grade. Twice as many Republicans did.

These views aren't surprising since student learning at charters far exceeds that at traditional public schools. Black and Hispanic students who attend charters in New York City scored nearly three quarters higher than their counterparts at district-run schools, according to a recent analysis by Families for Excellent Schools.

A study last year by Stanford University's Center for Research on Education Outcomes found that low-income black students attending urban charters gained 59 days in math and 44 days in reading over counterparts in traditional school. Advancement among black students at charters in Boston was off the charts: 200 days in math and 100 days in reading.

So what explains the NAACP's hostility to charters? Money and ideology. The nation's two largest teachers unions contributed nearly $400,000 to the outfit between 2011 and 2015, and other labor unions are also financiers. But don't underestimate the degree to which the venerable outfit is now dominated by gentry progressives who are well-to-do themselves and are more attached to the Democratic Party than they are to poor black families.

The tragedy is that this is a sellout of the NAACP's founding principles to provide opportunity for nonwhite Americans. The single biggest obstacle to an equal chance in America is the terrible quality of too many public schools. Charters are a proven path out of this dead end. If its board abandons charter schools, the NAACP might as well close up shop.

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