The NAACP Spent More Fighting School Choice Than Fighting Illiteracy

The NAACP began as a 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.

Founding members included 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. The NAACP's Legal Defense Fund, under Thurgood Marshall's leadership, won Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. That Supreme Court decision ended legal school segregation.

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 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 resolution demanded that charter schools face the same oversight as public schools. It said no new charters should open until current ones met conditions. It positioned the NAACP as the leading national civil rights organization opposed to school choice.

The resolution passed despite Black parents being the demographic most supportive of school choice. It passed despite tens of thousands of children on charter waiting lists in majority-Black cities. It passed despite strong 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.

And it passed for a reason 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 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. That means 85% cannot read at grade level. In math, 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. 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.

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.

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 2015 study remains the most comprehensive analysis of urban charter school performance, 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.

• 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. 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

This is where the NAACP's position becomes unconscionable. The group is not just defending a policy. It is defending a system that destroys Black children's futures. It is doing this against the clear wishes of Black parents. It offers no alternative that gets better results.

The NAACP's answer to charter schools is always "fix the public schools." The public schools in Baltimore, Detroit, and Cleveland have heard that promise for fifty years. The proficiency rates have not moved. At some point, "fix the public schools" stops being a policy. It starts being a hostage negotiation. The children are the hostages.

Follow the Money

The question is simple. Why? Why would the oldest civil rights group oppose the school option Black parents want most? Why oppose 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 are the two biggest teachers' unions. They have about 4.7 million members combined. Their political spending puts them among the largest organizational political spenders in American politics.

The NEA and AFT have been the strongest opponents of charter schools for decades. Charter schools operate outside union contracts. They reduce enrollment in unionized public schools.

The financial link between the unions and the NAACP is documented. The NEA and AFT have given significant money to the NAACP. They share political networks. They support the same candidates. They work together on education policy.

This does not mean every NAACP leader opposes charters just for union money. It means the group's incentives all point the same way. The funding, alliances, and relationships are against school choice. These incentives are strong enough to ignore Black parents' wishes and the research.

The NAACP's education policy matches its donors, not its members. This is not a conspiracy. It is how institutional politics works in America. Pretending civil rights groups are exempt is naive. Black children cannot afford that naivety.

The Voices Within

Derrell Bradford has advocated for school choice from within the Black community for twenty years. He is executive vice president of 50CAN. He says school choice is the civil rights issue of this generation. Trapping kids in failing schools by zip code is a real form of segregation.

Howard Fuller's journey is more instructive. He was a civil rights organizer and a Black Power activist. He became superintendent of Milwaukee Public Schools. His life was devoted to Black equality through traditional channels. That experience changed him. He ran a major city school district. He saw from inside how the system failed Black children. He saw political machines protect adult interests over kids' futures. He became a leading advocate for school choice.

Fuller's change was not about ideology. It was about evidence. He saw the data. He saw the children. He decided the system he defended would not change from within. The people with power had no reason to change it.

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

The Puzzle and the Solution

A puzzle master looks at that contradiction. They find the variable that changed. The NAACP did not stop caring about education. It started caring more about its ties to the Democratic Party and the teachers' unions that fund both. When those alliances mattered more than results, the group's position was set. 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 used science-of-reading instruction. It added a third-grade reading gate and literacy coaches. The state rose from 49th to 9th in national reading scores by 2024. Students gained one full year of progress. 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. The campaign cut illiteracy from 23.6% to 3.9% in one year. About 707,212 people became literate. Adult literacy in Cuba is now 99.8%.

3. Room to Read (28 Countries Across Asia and Africa). This group provides school libraries with local-language books. It trains teachers in literacy. It 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 was 10 times greater than 70 other literacy programs studied.

4. Pratham Teaching at the Right Level (India). This program groups children by actual learning level, not age. It uses 30-to-50-day camps to teach basic reading and math. Among 346,000 children in camps, reading skill jumped from 19% to 79%. Six trials showed consistent results. The program has reached 76 million students.

5. BRAC Education Programme (Bangladesh). This is a network of 23,000 low-cost primary schools. It targets the poorest families, especially girls. BRAC got a 99.93% pass rate versus the 97.35% national average. The dropout rate was just 6%. Over 14 million children graduated. The cost was $32 per child per year.

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.

The NAACP was not captured by its enemies. It was captured by its allies. The teachers' unions and political operatives needed its moral authority. They used it to block the escape routes Black parents demanded for their kids. The group that told the Supreme Court every Black child deserved an equal education now spends its power to stop them from getting it.

Eighty-five percent of Black eighth graders cannot read at grade level. That is not a statistic. It is 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.