Friday’s anti-charter-school mini-rally by the NAACP’s New York chapter demonstrated dramatically how far the group has drifted from its historical mission.
Barely 50 “protesters” turned out — most from the usual rent-a-mob crew.
The rally was supposed to prove that the once-venerable civil-rights group was not “selling out” minority kids when it joined a United Federation of Teachers lawsuit to block charters and keep failing traditional schools open.
It showed just the opposite.
In truth, there’s scant support among blacks and Hispanics for blocking charters and keeping lousy schools open.
Indeed, a week earlier, several thou sand parents, teachers and others marched in protest of the NAACP position.
“Why is the NAACP trying to block access to a better education for my child?” asked one parent, Ny Whitaker, after meeting with the group’s president, Hazel Dukes. “Why does an organization that’s fought . . . for communities of color file a lawsuit to prevent access to public charter schools?” Why, indeed.
The suit aims to keep 22 truly awful schools open and 19 charters from sharing space in existing school buildings.
How awful are the 22 schools?
Consider the Academy for Collaborative Education in Harlem: Last year, just 3 percent of its students made the grade in English and 9 percent in math.
That’s close to criminal — and may explain why the city gave it an “F” grade.
As for the charters, consider Democracy Prep, which is slated to take space in the ACE building: It got an “A” from the city three years in a row; 34 percent of its students met the threshold in English and 76 percent did so in math.
Not great, maybe.
But worlds better than Collaborative.
So why would a rightly proud group like the NAACP side with the teachers union and block the schoolhouse door to minority kids? Try money.
It turns out that the UFT and its statewide counterpart, NYSUT, have “donated” more than $100,000 to the NAACP’s New York State Conference just since 2008. Not many poor black and Hispanic families can likely compete with that kind of payoff.
(Dukes, notably, was forced off the group’s national board after pleading guilty to stealing $13,000 from a cancer victim in the ’90s.)
The UFT, meanwhile, hates charters, because they outperform union-run schools. And, understandably, it wants to keep the 22 failing schools open to protect union jobs.
But who’d have expected a longtime-admirable group like the NAACP to sell its principles so cheaply — and help the union deny minority kids better schools?
Maybe it will learn from its embarrassing rally Friday that blacks and Hispanics don’t want charters blocked and bad schools saved, that the group is on the wrong side — and everyone knows it.
If it doesn’t, it’ll put much of the NAACP’s hard-earned respect at risk.
And all, it seems, for a few bucks.