NAACP Calls For A Ban On Privately Managed Charter Schools

“You are taking these parents’ tax dollars and using it to hurt their children,” Dr. Joan Evelyn Duvall-Flynn, the president of the Pennsylvania Conference of NAACP said, describing racism in charter schools.

At the national convention in Cincinnati, a resolution was passed by the NAACP for the interdiction of privately owned charter schools. The nation’s oldest civil rights organization outlined some factors necessitating their demand for such schools to be ban.
The NAACP mentioned that the charter schools have rather increased segregation in our public schools. The civil rights organization disclosed that the public schools harbor mostly African-American students and people of low-income due to its relatively cheaper cost. On the other hand, the charter schools are usually the place for the Whites.

Dr. Joan Evelyn Duvall-Flynn describing the situation said, “We also noticed over the years that charter schools were leading to the re-segregation of the schools. In that re-segregation process, they were re-creating the white supremacy model.” Citing Chester Pennsylvania, as an example, she added; “The (Chester) school district is paying the charter school millions of dollars, and the public schools were going without physics, libraries. None of that is available because of the funding.”

Furthermore, the NAACP stated that there isn’t any checking mechanism in place to oversee the affairs of the charter schools. This situation they said, is leading to heavy mismanagement of public funds. Moreover, student’s safety isn’t assured since there isn’t any system in place to watch over their activities. According to the leader of the NAACP, billions of taxpayers’ monies are missing and going unaccounted due to the existence of charter schools.

Also, during the conference, it came to light the level of inequity and racism in Charter Schools. The Charter Schools are predominantly dominated by whites. DeJarnatt said, “There are a number of charter schools that are over 70 percent white,” and she cited this example of the Philadelphian state; a state that is occupied by 35% of white people. This clearly shows that the charter schools are unfriendly to people of color.” She also added that “In a lot of these schools the boards are almost all white. They tend to be very white-dominated institutions running pedagogies that are pretty restrictive of children of color.”

“You cannot maintain a system of racial superiority and claim racial intellectual superiority if all the kids get all the resources they need and access to learning. You are taking these parents’ tax dollars and using it to hurt their children,” Duvall-Flynn said. She explained that there are stricter rules that are purposefully designed to victimize people of color. And due to the non-existence of a supervisory mechanism, the Blacks are kicked out of school at the slightest offense.

It is obvious that these charter schools are purposefully created to further marginalize the Black people. It is a system which deserves to be properly scrutinized and managed or totally abolished. Black people also deserve access to quality education.

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