Education Week posted an article, like many others, on the growing African American opposition to the expansion of charter schools.
This was in response to resolutions passed by the NAACP annual convention (not yet ratified by the national board, which must be subject to heavy lobbying by Gates and other funders) and by the Movement for Black Lives (a consortium of 50 black organizations including Black Lives Matter).
The resolutions acknowledged that schooling in black communities is being taken over by outside entrepreneurs, and black parents have no voice when this happens. It is a bit like Walmart moving into your town and killing off all the mom-and-pop stores, then hiring mom and pop as greeters in a massive chain operation, which might abandon the community if sales are not sufficiently brisk.
All such stories about this development have two go-to sources to contradict the NAACP and the Movement for Black Lives: Howard Fuller of Black Alliance for Educational Options and Shaver Jeffries of Democrats for Education Reform.
Neither is a grassroots black organization.
Howard Fuller is black, but his organization has been bankrolled by white rightwing philanthropies since its inception in 2000. Its biggest funders are the Walton Foundation, the Bradley Foundation of Milwaukee (huge supporters of vouchers), the John M. Olin Foundation (now defunct), and the Gates Foundation.
Shavar Jeffries is black, but DFER is an organization that represents white hedge fund managers, including billionaires, who are contemptuous of public schools and eager to privatize them.
Nonetheless, it is heartening to see that truly grassroots groups like the NAACP and many of its chapters (including the New England chapter, which opposes Question 2 to expand charters in Massachusetts) are speaking up and opposing privatization of public schools.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
With so much money at play, it is easy to hire people and organizations to stump for bad ideas. Those that can look at the impact of charters with unbiased eyes will see the truth. Charters are getting meager results with African Americans unless they stack the deck by cherry picking, suspending and counseling out students or whitewashing results. African Americans are losing more than they gain. Communities are being destroyed; black teachers have been fired in disproportionate numbers, and thousands of mostly educated black women have lost a middle class life in our country. Peter Greene has stated that this link is a very important one, and I agree. http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/09/black-teachers-public-schools-education-system-philadelphia
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I am posting that article at the beginning of next week. Great piece.
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The so-called “education reform” movement, of which charter schools are the biggest profit-making part, has always had resegregation of America’s schools as a key agenda item. The fact that billionaires and hedge funds could pocket tens of millions of public tax dollars from this new kind of segregation was just a bonus. The first calls for “reform” in the form of vouchers arose immediately after the 1954 Supreme Court ruling on Brown v. Board of Education in which the Court declared that separate but equal was inherently unequal and ordered racial integration of the public schools. That ruling triggered “white flight” from public schools to private schools — but parents quickly realized that the tuition cost of private schools was more than they wanted to pay out-of-pocket. That realization led political and private resegregationists to the concoct the “reform” of vouchers, and to sell it to eager parents by deceptively marketing it then (and now) as merely giving parents free “choice.”
But the 1950’s voucher reform faded away when it became clear that because of school attendance boundaries no more than a few token blacks would be attending formerly all-white public schools. In 1972 when the Supreme Court finally ordered busing to end the ongoing de facto segregation, the reform movement rose from its grave and has been alive ever since then trying new tactics to restore racial segregation because it’s unlikely that the Court’s racial integration order can ever be reversed. When it became clear in the 1980’s that vouchers would never become widespread, the segregationists tried many other routes to restore racial segregation, and the most successful has been charter schools because charter schools can be sold to blithely unaware do-gooder billionaires as well as to unscrupulous profiteers who recognized charter schools as a way to divert vast amounts of tax money into their own pockets and into the pockets of supportive politicians at every level of government.
An essential part of the strategy to mask their underlying motives has been for segregationists to sell the public on the necessity for charter schools because public schools are allegedly “failing.” With all manner of “research” that essentially compares apples to oranges against foreign nations’ students, and with the self-fulfilling prophecy of dismal public school performance generated by drastic underfunding of public schools, and with condemnation of public school teachers based on statistically invalid student test scores, the segregationists are succeeding in resegregating education in America via what are basically private charter schools that are funded with public money.
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Jesse Hagopium references the NAACP position in his article posted today at Truthout, “Black to School: The Rising Struggle to Make Black Education Matter”.
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I agree with this outside business should not come into small towns like this and take over just to make a quick buck. They don’t care about the kids and there education as much as the parents do. The funding for the schools should come from the tax payers in the town not from outside company’s.
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We can unite to fight the oligarchs or, we can allow our taxes to be used to enslave our own children, in “human capital pipelines” (the descriptor used by a Gates-funded organization).
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