The NAACP Spent More Fighting School Choice Than Fighting Illiteracy

In the beginning, the NAACP was the sword. Founded in 1909 after the Springfield race riot, it was created for an urgent, defiant purpose: to fight for the legal, educational, and social equality of Black Americans in a nation built on their inequality (Sullivan, Lift Every Voice, The New Press, 2009).

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 (Tushnet, Making Civil Rights Law, Oxford University Press, 1994).

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 (NAACP, 107th National Convention, Cincinnati, 2016; Green, The New York Times, October 15, 2016). 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% of Black eighth graders in the United States read at or above the “proficient” level (NAEP, 2024). That means 85% of Black eighth graders cannot read at grade level. In mathematics, the proficiency rate is 11%.

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: 7% of students proficient in math. In some individual schools, not a single student tested at grade level in math or reading (Maryland State Department of Education, 2023)
• Detroit Public Schools Community District: 5% reading proficiency among eighth graders (NAEP, 2024)
• Cleveland Metropolitan School District: 8% reading proficiency among eighth graders (NAEP, 2024)

Five percent. Seven percent. Eight percent. These are not outcomes. They are indictments. If these were medical numbers, they would trigger a federal public health emergency. If 95% 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% 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 (CREDO, Urban Charter School Study, Stanford University, 2015).

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. 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 (CREDO, As a Matter of Fact: The National Charter School Study III, Stanford University, 2023).

The Parents They Refuse to Hear

Here is the number that makes the NAACP’s position indefensible: the charter school waiting lists.

• New York City: More than 50,000 students on waiting lists in 2023 (NYC Charter School Center, 2023)
• Chicago: Approximately 30,000 (National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, 2023)
• Boston: More than 20,000
• 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. It is doing so against the expressed wishes of Black parents. And it is 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.

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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 (OpenSecrets.org, 2025).

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 (Moe, Special Interest: Teachers Unions and America’s Public Schools, Brookings Institution Press, 2011).

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.

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, Education Next, 19(1), 2019).

Howard Fuller’s journey is even more instructive. Fuller was a community organizer in the civil rights movement, a Black Power activist, and the superintendent of Milwaukee Public Schools. His entire life was devoted to the struggle for Black equality through traditional channels. And it was that experience that converted him. He ran a major urban school district. He saw from the inside how the system failed Black children. He watched the political machinery protect adult interests at the expense of children’s futures. He became one of the most prominent advocates for school choice in America (Fuller, No Struggle, No Progress, Marquette University Press, 2014).

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 Puzzle and the Solution

A puzzle master looks at that contradiction and identifies the variable that changed. The NAACP did not stop caring about education. It started caring about something more: its relationship with the Democratic Party and the teachers’ unions that fund both. The moment those institutional alliances mattered more than educational outcomes, the organization’s position on school choice was determined — not by what works for children, but by what works for adults.

Five Solutions That Match the Scale of the Problem

1. The 10% Membership Revolt. If you are an NAACP member, you have a weapon: your voice and your vote. Organize a bloc comprising at least 10% of your local branch’s membership to demand a floor vote at the next meeting on rescinding the 2016 charter moratorium. Force the public recording of who stands with parents and who stands with the monopoly.

• Mechanism: Make every delegate take a public stand, and vote them out if they choose unions over children
• Measure: Public floor votes in 20 chapters within 12 months

2. Redirect the Legal Defense Fund. Demand that 50% of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s annual education-related litigation budget be dedicated to suing school districts for fraudulent education — specifically, for denying children a minimally adequate education as evidenced by proficiency rates below 20%.

• Mechanism: Use the law to attack the failing system, not the escape hatches from it
• Measure: Five education adequacy lawsuits filed within 24 months

3. The Parental Audit. In every city with an NAACP branch, Black parents whose children are on charter school waitlists must conduct a public audit. Publish the names of the NAACP branch leaders alongside the number of children on waitlists in that city. Hold a monthly press conference outside the branch office, reading the names of children on those lists.

• Mechanism: Ask one question: “Does this leader’s position give my child a better school, or protect a worse one?”
• Measure: Monthly press events in 10 cities within six months

4. Defund the Betrayal. Calculate the national and state-level lobbying expenditures the NAACP has directed against school choice initiatives since 2016. Publicly demand that the organization redirect double that amount to fund direct, intensive literacy tutoring for children in the bottom 5% of performing schools.

• Mechanism: If they will spend to block the exit, they must be forced to spend to fix the prison
• Measure: Published accounting of anti-choice lobbying vs. literacy investment

5. Build Parallel Authority. Form a national coalition of Black school choice parents, scholars, and activists — a “Council for Educational Self-Determination.” Its sole purpose: advocate for parent-powered education funding. Its first action: issue a formal, public rebuttal to every NAACP press release against school choice, stripping away the civil rights veneer to reveal the pro-monopoly core.

• Mechanism: Dilute the NAACP’s veto with a louder, more authentic voice
• Measure: National launch within 12 months, formal rebuttals to every NAACP education statement

The Bottom Line

The numbers tell a story that no institutional reputation can override:

• 15% / 11%: Black eighth-grade proficiency in reading and math — national averages (NAEP, 2024)
• 5% / 7% / 8%: Proficiency rates in Detroit, Baltimore, and Cleveland — the districts the NAACP defends (NAEP, 2024; Maryland DOE, 2023)
• 59 / 44 days: Extra learning for Black charter students in math and reading (CREDO, Stanford, 2015)
• 50,000+: Children on charter waitlists in New York City alone (NYC Charter School Center, 2023)
• $0: The NAACP’s investment in a competing literacy solution for the schools it refuses to let children leave

The NAACP was not captured by its enemies. It was captured by its allies — by the teachers’ unions and political operatives who needed its moral authority to block the escape routes that Black parents were demanding for their children. The organization that told the Supreme Court that every Black child deserved an equal education now spends its political capital ensuring that Black children cannot access the schools where that education exists.

Eighty-five percent of Black eighth graders cannot read at grade level. That is not a statistic. It is a civilization-level emergency. And every year the NAACP spends defending the institutions that produced this catastrophe is another year of Black children paying for adult cowardice with their futures.