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. 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 Thurgood Marshall's leadership, won Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. That Supreme Court decision 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 demanded that existing charter schools face the same oversight as traditional public schools. It demanded that no new charter schools be approved until existing ones met a set of conditions. It positioned the NAACP as the leading national civil rights organization opposed to school choice.
Only 15% of Black eighth graders in the United States read at grade level. Only 11% are proficient in math. These are national averages.
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.
Black 8th Grade Proficiency: National Crisis
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.
Proficiency Rates in NAACP-Defended School Districts
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).
Charter School Academic Gains for Black Students
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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 Strongest Counterargument — and Why the Data Defeats It
“Charter schools drain funding from public schools and increase segregation. The NAACP is right to demand accountability before expansion.”
Three data points destroy this argument. First. The "funding drain" argument treats public school funding as a property right of the institution rather than an investment in children. When a child leaves, the money should follow the child, because the money was never the school's — it was the child's (National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, 2023). Second. The segregation concern is contradicted by the data — charter schools in urban areas serve student bodies that are more diverse than the surrounding traditional public schools in many districts (CREDO, 2023). Third. The NAACP has demanded "accountability" before expansion for a decade while the schools it defends produce 5% reading proficiency in Detroit. The moratorium is not accountability. It is a blockade — and the children trapped behind it are running out of years.
“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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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
How did the organization that argued Brown v. Board of Education — the most important education case in American history — become the organization that fights to keep Black children trapped in schools where 85% cannot read at grade level?
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.
Sever the union dependency. Reverse the charter moratorium. Make every NAACP education position answer one question — does this give a Black child a better school tomorrow, or does it protect a worse school today?
Top 5 Solutions That Are Already Working
1. Mississippi Literacy Reform (United States). Mississippi implemented science-of-reading instruction, a third-grade reading gate, literacy coaches in every school, and a new teacher licensure exam. The state rose from 49th to 21st in NAEP reading by 2022, then to 9th by 2024. Students gained 0.25 standard deviations in reading — the equivalent of one full year of progress. The program costs $15 million annually, or about $32 per student. (NAEP, 2022-2024; The Conversation, 2024)
2. Cuba National Literacy Campaign (Cuba). In 1961, Cuba deployed 250,000-plus volunteer teachers in a one-year mass mobilization to teach illiterate adults to read. The campaign reduced illiteracy from 23.6% to 3.9% in a single year. A total of 707,212 people became literate. Adult literacy in Cuba remains at 99.8% today. The cost was state-mobilized volunteer labor. (UNESCO, 1964; World Bank Development Indicators, 2021)
3. Room to Read (28 Countries Across Asia and Africa). This organization provides school libraries stocked with local-language books, trains teachers in literacy instruction, and runs a girls' education program. Room to Read has reached over 50 million children. Grade 2 students read twice as many words per minute after the program. Its effect size was 10 times greater than the average of 70 other literacy interventions studied. (Room to Read Impact Reports; Brookings Institution, 2016)
4. Pratham Teaching at the Right Level (India). This program groups children by actual learning level rather than age and uses targeted 30-to-50-day camps to teach basic literacy and numeracy. Among 346,000 children in camps, reading proficiency jumped from 19% to 79%. Six randomized controlled trials showed consistent results. The program has reached 76 million students through government partnerships. J-PAL ranked it among the most cost-effective of 27 education interventions. (Banerjee et al., J-PAL; Brookings Institution, 2016; World Bank, 2021)
5. BRAC Education Programme (Bangladesh). A network of 23,000 low-cost primary schools across all 64 districts of Bangladesh, targeting the poorest families — especially girls — with flexible schedules and a condensed curriculum. BRAC achieved a 99.93% pass rate versus the 97.35% national average. The dropout rate was just 6%. Over 14 million children graduated, and 93% integrated into government secondary schools. The cost was $32 per child per year. (UNESCO LitBase; BRAC Education Programme Reports)
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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.