There will be a vote this weekend by the Board of the NAACP on whether it will sustain the general assembly vote for the Moratorium on Charters. The charter lobby is on fire contacting them. I am seeing calls to action on their Association sites. Please post everywhere.
Call these two numbers and express your support for a moratorium on charter schools
Hollywood Bureau
Los Angeles, CA
Phone: (323) 938-5268
Fax: (323) 938-8153
Washington Bureau
1156 15th Street, NW Suite 915
Washington, DC 20005
Phone: (202) 463-2940
Fax: (202) 463-2953
washingtonbureau@naacpnet.org
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I just called the Hollywood Bureau number, and the woman who answered told me to call this number instead: 410-580-5777 (Maryland).
I spoke with a kind woman (an actual person, not a recording!) and told her briefly my concerns with charters and that I hoped that the board would support the general assembly vote on the moratorium on charters.
Diane, I was told that the number I called in LA was not the correct division of NAACP. The woman there gave me this number and division to call instead, if this helps:
(410) 580-5777
Speak to the Communications Department.
Thank you.
I called several weeks ago and when I was talking to the person that answered I got so national, it was obvious I was upset and her voice changed to help clam me down.
Coupling, the historical, proposed privatization of public schools, by Georgia’s Gov./Sen. Talmadge, in his effort to avoid court-ordered racial integration with, the current evidence that, indeed, charter schools result in segregation, the NAACP’s position taken, in Cincinnati, is the right one. Red flags are everywhere, when reviewing the people associated with the charter school agenda, the deep-pocketed supporters, and the unethical lengths to which they will go. Additionally, Dr. Ravitch made the point that cessation of democracy and turning schools over to corporations, offers no reason to expect anything positive.
In a second, separate point, David Koch was in the photo array of Aspen board members until this summer. The Gates Foundation funds Aspen’s education programs. The state of Washington, home to Gates, has been cited as having the most harmful state tax system in the nation, for the middle class and poor. It’s estimated that they pay up to 7 times higher the tax rate, than the rich pay. For the NAACP to side with people who work to defund the common good or who support tax unfairness, would be a mistake of great proportion.
I will add further that the gentleman working at NAACP in Washington was VERY supportive of advocates calling for a moratorium or ELIMINATION of all charters on behalf of the NAACP.
Charter schools hurt children of color and low income children; they polarize, and segregate. They misuse funds rampantly and don’t offer any transparency to find out how that fraud should be addressed. They cherry pick students.
They are NOT the answer to addressing poverty. Children must be prevented from falling into poverty well before they enter school, and that is a task that public schools and government should work on together, rather than have the government attack public school as through they are the sole cause of America’s ills. How disgusting is that?
Andit is YOUR president who is among the biggest fans of charters and privatization. They should take back his Nobel prize and call him out for who he really is. This brings out the Viking in me.
I sent this email:
To the Esteemed Members of NAACP National;
As a career public school teacher in NY, I have seen first hand the damage done to our neediest, most vulnerable students of color by the proliferation of largely unregulated, undemocratically run charters. They cherry pick and filter out the most challenging children, they demand harsh and inappropriate disciplinary methods from teachers ill-trained and unqualified to understand how young children learn and develop. Charters have increased segregation, drained essential funding from already under-resourced public schools, suspend children as young as 4 and 5 years old for behaving as most young children would in a rigid and untenable environment. Their over-emphasis on test prep and scripted teaching discourages the very creativity and interactive skills that are valued and nurtured in schools that serve high income, predominantly white children. Sadly, charters rarely close achievement gaps with similar populations served by neighborhood schools- and often do worse despite serving kids with fewer learning challenges. I urge the NAACP to join educators and parents fighting for equitably funded, staffed, and resourced community schools, and call for a halt to charters. Let’s focus on leveling the playing field with proven methods- small class sizes, well-rounded curricula that is culturally competent and responsive to the needs of diverse learners. Let us recognize that outcome-based test and punish approaches are abusive. They reinforce and replicate existing income and racial inequities. Charters siphon public dollars into private profits, without empowering children or their communities.
PLEASE support the national call for a moratorium on charters in the name of education justice for children of color.
Thank-you,
Terry Kalb
Mother Jones published a scathing indictment of the testing that Harvard’s Prof. Roland Fryer advocates in his “two tier” system. The Deutch 29 blog quotes Fryer and puts on display his c.v. filled with “philanthropic” grants like a huge one from Gates.
Correct number to call is410/580-5777.
I can’t wait to read your response to today’s NYTimes editorial about the NAACP’s Misguided stance on charter schools…. ay yi yi…
The NY Times education editorials have been consistently wrong for many years (probably because the same person has been writing them for decades). The Times thought NCLB was wonderful; it thinks charters are wonderful. Fortunately the reporters do not answer to the clueless editorial board.
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.