N.A.A.C.P. on Defensive as Suit on Charter Schools Splits Group’s Supporters

[alp227]

In some ways, it seems like a natural cause for the N.A.A.C.P.: students — many of them poor, most of them black — treated as second-class citizens when the public schools they attended had to share buildings with charter schools. A lawsuit filed last month by the N.A.A.C.P. and the United Federation of Teachers described children having to eat lunch so early it might as well be breakfast, and getting less exercise because gym hours were evenly divided between the schools despite big differences in their enrollment sizes.

But black children have been major constituents of charter schools since their creation two decades ago. So when thousands of charter-school parents, students and advocates staged a rally on May 26 in Harlem, it was not so much to denounce the litigation as it was to criticize the involvement of the N.A.A.C.P.

Since then, a war has broken out within the civil rights community in New York and across the country over the lawsuit against the city and the larger questions of how school choice helps or hurts minority students.

A Facebook page titled N.A.A.C.P.: Don’t Divide Us, Unite Us has logged hundreds of followers and dozens of comments, and the two sides have traded barbs in the opinion pages of local newspapers, including a commentary by the schools chancellor, Dennis M. Walcott, in The Daily News on Thursday in which he wrote, “Let’s stop pretending this is about process technicalities or paint on the school walls or what time students eat lunch in the cafeteria.”

What is it about, then?

Both sides say it is, fundamentally, about improving the quality of the education that black and Latino children receive in public schools, but they differ profoundly on how to do so.

Full: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/11/nyregion/naacp-on-defensive-for-suit-against-charter-schools.html

[LiberalFighter]

1. My feeling on why (not all) black religious leaders and politicians support charter schools

Because the churches are the creators of the schools. So the question is who benefits graft wise?

The question to ask about why the schools that are closing for poor performance have that issue is whether the schools have the same resources the students come from the same economic background as others.

[kwassa]

2. The churches are not the creators of the charter schools.

Why do you think that?