With charter schools educating as many as half the students in some U.S. cities, they have been championed as a lifeline for poor black children stuck in failing traditional public schools.
But now the nation's oldest and newest black civil-rights organizations are calling for a moratorium on charter schools.
Their demands, and the outcry that has ensued, expose a divide among blacks that goes well beyond the complaints about charters diverting money and attention from traditional public schools.
In separate conventions over the past month, the NAACP and the Movement for Black Lives, a group of 50 organizations assembled by Black Lives Matter, passed resolutions declaring that charter schools have exacerbated segregation, especially in the way they select and discipline students.
They portray charters as the pet project of foundations financed by white billionaires, and argue that as students migrate to charters, the closing of traditional schools has disproportionately disrupted black communities.
Black leaders of groups that support charter schools have denounced the resolutions, saying they contradict both the NAACP's mission of expanding opportunity and polls showing support for charters among black parents. The desire for integration, the charter school proponents say, cannot outweigh the urgent need to give some of the country's poorest students a way out of underperforming schools.
"You've got thousands and thousands of poor black parents whose children are so much better off because these schools exist," said Howard Fuller, a longtime civil-rights activist and the founding president of the Black Alliance for Educational Options, which encourages support among blacks for charters.
Black residents of cities such as New Orleans, which has converted nearly all of its public schools to charters in the decade since Hurricane Katrina, have complained that the people who encourage charter schools tend to be white outsiders. Some charter school leaders themselves have acknowledged that they do not have enough blacks in their ranks or in front of their classrooms.
But to some black parents, those concerns seem academic.
Chris Stewart recalled feeling "like a complete loser" when his son was entering middle school in Minneapolis. A specialty public school had no room; other parents were warning him away from two nearby traditional public schools; and he could not afford a reduced tuition of $12,000 -- what he called "the poor people's discount" -- for a private school.
"It really challenged my sense of manhood because I felt like I was watching other people do for their kids what I wanted to do for mine, but I didn't have the resources," said Stewart, who became a school board member in Minneapolis and now writes a blog on education.
He found a charter school where black students were thriving and classrooms seemed orderly.
"It wasn't perfect, it wasn't horrible, it just was better," he said. "It set my mind at ease and let me go to work every day with a sense that I had done the best that I could."
Cornell William Brooks, president of the NAACP, noted that not all charter schools are high performers.
"This is very much a mixed bag," he said, noting that he had given a commencement address at North Star Academy, a well-regarded charter in Newark, N.J. "This whole notion that charter schools are uniformly excellent, and therefore that people don't even get to raise the question, is simply not the case."
Studies have shown that charters -- which are financed by taxpayers but privately run -- have improved on traditional public schools in cities such as Newark, Boston and Washington. But they have made little improvement in cities such as Detroit and Philadelphia, where a large proportion of students attend charters.
Although charters are supposed to admit students by lottery, some skim the best students from the pool, with enrollment procedures that discourage all but the most motivated parents to apply. Some charters have been accused of nudging out their most troubled students.
That, the groups supporting a moratorium say, concentrates the poorest students in public schools that are struggling for resources.
Charter schools "are allowed to get away with a lot more," said Hiram Rivera, an author of the Black Lives platform and the executive director of the Philadelphia Student Union.
Charters are slightly more likely to suspend students than traditional public schools, according to an analysis of federal data this year. And black students in charter schools are four times as likely to be suspended as their white peers, according to the data analysis, putting them in what Brooks calls the "preschool-to-prison pipeline."
Another platform author, Jonathan Stith, national coordinator for the Alliance for Educational Justice, chose a charter school in Washington for one of his children because it promised an Afrocentric curriculum. But he said he saw the school driving out students. It was difficult, he said, for parents to push back against the private boards that run the schools.
"Where you see the charters providing an avenue of escape for some, it hasn't been for the majority," he said.
A Section on 08/21/2016