“School Choice and the Civil Rights Establishment”

Shavar Jeffries:

According to the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, Black parents, especially Black parents of children in urban schools, strongly support school choice. This result should be unsurprising: The futures of their children are directly, if not irrevocably, compromised by the continuing failure of urban schools. At the same time, most longstanding civil-rights organizations — like the NAACP, the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR) — strongly oppose school choice. The following assertions of LCCR, contained in its platform statement on educational matters, is typical: