What This Black School-Choice Advocate Has to Say to the NAACP

The NAACP, whose purported concern is the advancement of “colored” people, advocates abortion and opposes measures that would bar race-based abortions.

The NAACP also opposes vouchers that give low-income parents the option to remove their children from failing government schools and use the money for private schools.

Liberals typically oppose such choice for parents, because they believe the money should be spent on government schools — even if the schools are bad.

One voucher program, the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship Program, allows businesses to donate money for vouchers and receive a tax credit. This program helps black families. Groups that don’t want these children to leave failing government schools contend the program is unconstitutional.

Because taxpayers don’t fund the program directly, they don’t have standing to file a lawsuit. Last year, a judge dismissed a lawsuit filed by a teachers union and other opponents because they lacked standing. An appeals court panel heard arguments Tuesday on whether the lawsuit should be reinstated.

Howard Fuller of the Black Alliance for Educational Options (BAEO) held a press conference to ask the NAACP to stop supporting the lawsuit against the program.

“So many children are simply not being educated in the traditional system,” he said. “It doesn’t mean that you don’t have great people in that system. It doesn’t mean that people don’t mean well. What it means is that there is no one, best, system.”

From BAEO:

“If this lawsuit succeeds, the results will be devastating, not just for the nearly 80,000 low-income, mostly Black and Hispanic students who will be kicked out of their schools, but a teachers’ union lawsuit win will mark a significant loss for equal rights in education,” said [BAEO president Jacqueline] Cooper. “Wealthy families have always had choices in education; low-income and working-class families deserve the same.”
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The NAACP has joined the union as a plaintiff in the lawsuit, even though roughly 30% of scholarship recipients are Black. “We at BAEO are very disappointed that the NAACP would sue to disempower low-income and working class Black families,” said Cooper.

Photo credit: Alan Alfaro (Creative Commons) – Some rights reserved