The NAACP Spent More Fighting School Choice Than Fighting Illiteracy

After the Springfield race riot the NAACP was founded in 1909 and began as a sword. Its creation served an urgent, defiant purpose — to fight for the legal, educational, and social equality of Black Americans in a nation built on their inequality.

Among the founding members were W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, Mary White Ovington, and Oswald Garrison Villard. They built the most important civil rights group in American history. Under Thurgood Marshall's leadership, the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund won Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, the Supreme Court decision that ended legal school segregation.

The NAACP fought for voting rights and anti-lynching legislation. It also sought employment discrimination protections along with 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 free a living group from accountability. The NAACP's current actions on education — the very area of its greatest victory — are a betrayal.

The NAACP fought to give Black children access to good schools. For the last twenty years, it has fought to stop them from leaving bad ones.

The Resolution That Changed Everything

In October 2016 the NAACP passed a formal resolution calling for a moratorium on charter school expansion. The measure demanded that charter schools face the same oversight as public schools and added that no new charters should open until current ones met the stated conditions. That move positioned the NAACP as the leading national civil rights organization opposed to school choice.

The resolution passed even though Black parents make up the demographic most supportive of school choice. It overcame the reality of tens of thousands of children on charter waiting lists in majority-Black cities as well as research showing urban charter schools — the ones serving predominantly Black and Latino students — produce measurably better outcomes than the traditional public schools the NAACP defends.

The NAACP has never been forced to articulate honestly the reason it passed. Media that covers civil rights organizations treats them with a deference shielding those groups from the scrutiny routinely applied to every other institution in American public life.

The Literacy Catastrophe

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

The National Assessment of Educational Progress—known as the Nation’s Report Card—shows only 15% of Black eighth graders read at a proficient level. This leaves 85% unable to read at grade level. Math has an 11% proficiency rate.

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. 11% of students 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% reading proficiency among eighth graders.
• Cleveland Metropolitan School District. 8% reading proficiency among eighth graders.

5%. 7%. 8%. Far from ordinary outcomes, these figures read as indictments. Medical data at that level would trigger a federal public health emergency at once. A city confronting 95% contaminated water would never debate residents’ access to bottled water, entertain a moratorium on filtration, or counsel parents to wait for treatment-plant reforms.

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, the diversion of public funds, and the potential for charter schools to increase segregation. Those worries hold weight in theory. In practice — amid real data, actual children, and measurable outcomes — the strongest studies deliver a clear answer.

At Stanford University the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) has carried out the most comprehensive studies of charter school performance across the United States. Their 2015 Urban Charter School Study examined student performance data from 41 urban regions and 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 peers in traditional public schools.

In urban charter schools Black students recorded even larger gains, with 59 additional days in math and 44 in reading. Those increments are far from marginal; over a five-year elementary career they accumulate into nearly an extra year of academic growth.

Students in these charter schools come from the same neighborhoods and share the same demographics along with income levels as students in traditional public schools. The variable is the school, not the student.

CREDO’s 2015 study remains the most comprehensive analysis of urban charter school performance. The data show 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.

• New York City. More than 50,000 students on waiting lists in 2023.
• Chicago. Approximately 30,000.
• 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 reading policy papers from the Heritage Foundation or attending conferences hosted by the Walton Family Foundation. They are mothers and fathers who examined the school their child was assigned to, weighed the data and outcomes, and concluded that their child deserved better.

The same parental prerogative guides NAACP board members as they choose schools for their own children, yet those board members possess the means to pay private school tuition, a capacity the waiting-list parents do not share.

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

This is where the NAACP's position becomes unconscionable. The group defends more than a mere policy; it protects a system destroying Black children's futures against the clear wishes of Black parents, all without offering any alternative that achieves better results.

The NAACP always answers charter schools by insisting we must “fix the public schools.” Public schools in Baltimore, Detroit, and Cleveland have heard that promise for fifty years, yet proficiency rates have not moved. At some point the slogan stops functioning as policy and instead becomes a hostage negotiation. The children are the hostages.

Follow the Money

The question is straightforward enough. One has to wonder why the oldest civil rights group would oppose the school option Black parents want most, or resist the option research shows works best for Black students.

The answer is not complicated. It is in campaign finance records and political filings.

The National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, the two biggest teachers' unions, have about 4.7 million members combined. Their political spending puts them among the largest organizational political spenders in American politics.

For decades the NEA and AFT have ranked among the strongest opponents of charter schools. Because these schools operate outside union contracts, they reduce enrollment in unionized public schools.

Documentation exists of the financial link between the unions and the NAACP. The NEA and AFT have given significant money to the organization. They share political networks and support the same candidates while collaborating on education policy.

Not every NAACP leader opposes charters solely over union money. What matters instead is how the group's incentives align. Funding together with alliances and relationships works against school choice. Those incentives carry enough force to set aside Black parents' wishes and the research.

Rather than reflecting its members’ priorities, the NAACP’s education policy follows its donors. Institutional politics in America operates this way, and there is no conspiracy involved. It is naive to pretend civil rights groups are exempt, a luxury Black children cannot afford.

The Voices Within

Derrell Bradford has advocated for school choice from within the Black community for twenty years. As executive vice president of 50CAN, he calls school choice the civil rights issue of this generation, since trapping kids in failing schools by zip code amounts to a real form of segregation.

Howard Fuller's journey proves more instructive. A civil rights organizer and Black Power activist, he rose to superintendent of Milwaukee Public Schools while devoting his life to Black equality through traditional channels. Running a major city school district changed that outlook. From the inside he saw how the system failed Black children and how political machines protected adult interests over kids' futures, turning him into a leading advocate for school choice.

Fuller’s change had nothing to do with ideology and everything to do with evidence. Once he examined the data and saw the children, he concluded that the system he defended would never reform from within, since those with power had no reason to change it.

Fuller and Bradford are not conservatives. Black men who spent careers helping Black children, they concluded the NAACP's education position is indefensible. Their voices exist within the Black community, but an establishment that cannot answer their arguments pushes them aside again and again.

The Puzzle and the Solution

A puzzle master studies this contradiction to spot the changed variable. The NAACP had not ceased to care about education; instead, ties to the Democratic Party and the teachers’ unions funding them gained priority. When those connections counted more than results, the group’s position locked in—not by what works for children, but by what works for adults.

Top 5 Solutions That Are Already Working

1. Mississippi Literacy Reform (United States). Mississippi implemented science-of-reading instruction while adding both a third-grade reading gate and literacy coaches. By 2024 the state had climbed from 49th to 9th in national reading scores. Students gained one full year of progress, and the program costs about $32 per student per year.

2. Cuba National Literacy Campaign (Cuba). In 1961 Cuba sent over 250,000 volunteer teachers to teach illiterate children and adults to read, cutting illiteracy from 23.6% to 3.9% in one year and making about 707,212 people literate. Adult literacy in Cuba is now 99.8%.

3. Room to Read (28 Countries Across Asia and Africa). The organization supplies school libraries with local-language books, trains teachers in literacy methods, 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 participating. Its effect was 10 times greater than 70 other literacy programs studied.

4. Pratham Teaching at the Right Level (India). Children are grouped by actual learning level rather than age, and the program relies on 30-to-50-day camps to build basic reading and math skills. Among 346,000 participants, reading proficiency rose from 19% to 79%, and six trials produced consistent gains. The effort has reached 76 million students.

5. BRAC Education Programme (Bangladesh). Serving the poorest families—especially girls—this network comprises 23,000 low-cost primary schools. BRAC recorded a 99.93% pass rate against the national average of 97.35%, along with a dropout rate of only 6%. Over 14 million children have graduated at a yearly cost of $32 per child.

The Bottom Line

The numbers tell a story no reputation can override.

• 15% / 11% — Black eighth-grade proficiency in reading and math, national averages.
• 5% / 7% / 8% — proficiency rates in Detroit, Baltimore, and Cleveland.
• 59 / 44 days — extra learning for Black charter students in math and reading.
• 50,000+ — children on charter waitlists in New York City alone.
• $0 — the NAACP's investment in a competing literacy solution for the schools it will not let children leave.

Far from being captured by its enemies, the NAACP instead fell to its allies. Teachers’ unions and political operatives seized its moral authority, then used that standing to block the escape routes Black parents demanded for their kids. The organization that once persuaded the Supreme Court every Black child deserved an equal education now directs its influence to prevent exactly that outcome.

Eighty-five percent of Black eighth graders cannot read at grade level, a reality that goes well beyond any isolated statistic and instead marks a civilization-level emergency. Every year the NAACP spends defending the institutions that caused this is another year of Black children paying for adult cowardice with their futures.