Dive Brief:

• The NAACP is doubling down on its rejection of a broad investment in charters as school choice movements gain in popularity, renewing its call for a moratorium on for-profit charter schools.
• In a report released Wednesday, the organization's education task force wrote charter schools were intended to help infuse innovation into the traditional public school system, which they say has not happened. Instead, the report says, traditional public schools have been left with depleted resources as funds and attention are diverted away.
• The report's authors recommended school finance reform to promote more equitable funding at all schools serving students of color and an additional investment in low-performing schools, and while they conceded the positive impacts of some charter schools, they also called for tighter regulation around the authorization process and a ban on for-profit providers.

Dive Insight:

A lack of consistent standards about who is authorized to run charter schools, requirements for teacher and administrator training and credentialing requirements and curriculum standards has led many to argue that the quality of education is being compromised for children who most needed a jolt to their educational experiences. And instead of serving as a rising tide to lift all ships, dissenters argue that charter schools did not force district schools to elevate the quality of the product they were offering. Instead, they say, these already-struggling schools were left to fail, taking along the students enrolled.

In DC, however, which has the highest concentration of charter school students enrolled in the country, officials did find a huge influx of charters actually raised the academic performance of all schools in the district. But despite consistent gains, students are still not where they need to be, suggesting more must happen than simply introducing more schools into an area. 

The NAACP's main premise — that the education system can't be an either-or proposition, but must include a more equitable investment of time and resources into both traditional district schools and alternative models, including charter schools — gets lost often in scare tactics that pit the schools against one another. In reality, the foundation of any good school choice program should underscore the notion that all schools should be worth choosing, with competitive programs and equitable resources and emphasis on innovation at each individual school. It is in this vein that education reformers from No Child Left Behind to the Every Student Succeeds Act perhaps began. ESSA, with its emphasis on innovation and allowing individual states the space to reimagine systems to benefit students therein, is a good start.

However, history has shown states can't always be trusted to do the right thing for all of their students. This is why, despite protests by former U.S. Secretary of Education and current chair of the Senate education committee Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN), current U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos' pushback on initial state plans over lack of clarity on how they will target individual populations is an encouraging sign.