The NAACP's Parent trap
GARNETT, NICOLE
The NAACP's Parent Trap by Nicole Garnett "T"t never ceases to amaze me," Justice Clarence Thomas has observed, "that the courts are so willing to assume that anything that is predominantly black...
...The NAACP seems to care more about maximizing both its own influence over the Milwaukee school board and the number of black teachers in public schools than it does about educating the children most in need...
...What these parents recognize is that many religious schools have long records of successfully educating minority students...
...The NAACP has a long and distinguished history of fighting for increased opportunity...
...In addition to insults aimed at black parents, at private schools, and at a program that it characterizes as the "tyranny of [the] majority," the NAACP relies on a highly developed entitlement mentality...
...The program gives up to 15,000 poor children educational vouchers to spend at a wide array of private schools...
...Observing that most religious schools in Milwaukee are Roman Catholic and Lutheran and that most black parents are not, it argues that permitting black parents to use vouchers in those schools is tantamount to forcing them to worship there...
...And no wonder...
...The NAACP's belittling of black parents is most glaring when it characterizes school choice as "compelled worship...
...It suggests that the choice program may violate the Voting Rights Act of 1965, reasoning that, because school-board districts are drawn so as to guarantee blacks seats on the board, any program that transfers students to private schools not supervised by the school board will "dilute" black votes...
...Ninety-six percent of the students participating in the program are minorities...
...Contrast this abysmal record with the record of two predominantly black private schools in Milwaukee: The high school graduation rate both for students at Messmer High School, an independent Catholic school, and for alumni of Urban Day, a K-8 independent school, is 98 percent...
...School vouchers, therefore, can actually advance the NAACP's goal of integrated education...
...Why would a policy designed to benefit poor, predominantly minority, children violate equal protection...
...Comparing the predominantly black private schools that upset the NAACP to the segregation academies in the South insults the intelligence of minority parents across the nation who are deciding in increasing numbers that inner-city private and religious schools provide an education far superior to the public alternatives...
...only this time, the all-black institutions at issue are the result not of intentional segregation, or even of housing patterns created by "vestiges" of discrimination, but of the free choices of black parents...
...According to the NAACP some of the parents using vouchers choose to send their children to "virtually one-race schools," and "racially separate schools are inherently unequal...
...Finally, it complains that when students leave for private schools, "teaching opportunities in Milwaukee Public Schools for African-Americans will contract...
...Her kids' religious upbringing, she notes, is her prerogative...
...Sadly, the Milwaukee National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is now asking yet another court to endorse just that insidious and patronizing assumption...
...Contrary to the NAACP's opinion, parents like Val Johnson (a Pentecostal Christian who has sacrificed to send all five of her children to Catholic school) have good reasons for wanting their children in religious schools: Johnson lists concerned teachers, discipline, and high academic standards...
...The Milwaukee Community Journal, the city's largest African-American newspaper, finds that 90 percent of the black community supports the program...
...Many of the private and religious schools in inner-city Milwaukee are more integrated than their public counterparts, some of which are virtually all black...
...Nevertheless, the NAACP argues that school choice violates the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment...
...These desperate arguments highlight the perversity of group-think taken to an extreme...
...It not only wants to prohibit black parents from choosing predominantly black private schools, but thinks that they must be stopped from selecting religious schools too...
...Only 35 percent of the freshmen who entered public high schools in Milwaukee in 1992 graduated in four years (in one school, only 13 percent did so...
...The NAACP compares the voucher program to the efforts of southern states to thumb their noses at desegregation during the period of massive resistance by sending white kids to private schools...
...In doing so, it abandons its heritage and the poor black children that it claims to represent...
...The NAACP recently interjected itself into litigation involving Wisconsin's groundbreaking schoolchoice program...
...If there are limits to the NAACP's audacity, they have not yet been reached in the Wisconsin litigation...
...While some black parents use their vouchers for schools that are mostly one race, many others choose an integrated environment...
...Vouchers will further integrate private schools by making them affordable for poor parents...
...It should wholeheartedly endorse a reform effort that empowers poor minority parents by opening the doors of good schools to their children...
...The success of predominantly black private schools is not the only irony of the NAACP's effort to thwart school choice...
...The NAACP's Parent Trap by Nicole Garnett "T"t never ceases to amaze me," Justice Clarence Thomas has observed, "that the courts are so willing to assume that anything that is predominantly black must be inferior...
...Instead, it clings to the status quo, claiming despite the abysmal failure of public schools that "African Americans and other racial minorities especially benefit from implementation of uniformity of educational opportunity by a government official...
...Nicole Garnett is a staff attorney for the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for Justice, which litigates nationwide for school choice...
...Apparently, however, the NAACP is more interested in curtailing poor parents' choices than in promoting integration...
...This suggestion—that black parents need the state to protect them by limiting their ability to expose their children to diverse religious traditions—is a slap in the face for the parents...
Vol. 2 • December 1996 • No. 16
