by Kenya Woodard I made it a priority to join my college’s NAACP branch when I enrolled in the fall of 1997. But just a year later, I let my membership lapse. While I’m sure part of my disassociation was due to my participation in other activities, I do remember feeling[Read More…]
Parent Empowerment
Standing on the wrong side of empowerment
In a Wall Street Journal column today on the controversy surrounding the NAACP joining the New York City teachers union in an anti-charter school lawsuit, William McGurn writes: For those who understand that our big city public school systems have become jobs programs for teachers and administrators, the NAACP’s response[Read More…]
A misplaced faith in top-down decision-making
David Brooks focuses again on health care in today’s New York Times, and his observations have huge implications for public education. Here are his key points: Democrats tend to be skeptical that dispersed consumers can get enough information to make smart decisions … Democrats generally seek to concentrate decision-making and cost-control power[Read More…]
No matter who is standing in the way
Kevin P. Chavous, a former Washington, D.C., councilman and board chairman of the Black Alliance for Educational Options, reflects on the NAACP’s fight against school closures and charter school expansions in New York City, in light of a Harlem rally of parents urging the civil rights group to drop its[Read More…]
As owners become workers, alliances shift
A Monday New York Times story headlined, “As Physicians’ Jobs Change, So Do Their Politics,” suggested that as doctors increasingly abandon their private practices and become employees of large health care institutions, they are no longer thinking like Republican-learning owners and instead thinking like Democratic-leaning workers. “Doctors were once overwhelmingly[Read More…]
A lost opportunity, and friendship, at FEA
For the second time in three years, the top African-American official in the Florida Education Association has been pushed out of the organization. FEA Chief of Staff Alfreda Davis, the former Chief of Staff for Washington, D.C. mayor Anthony Williams and a gifted leader, has been given a severance check[Read More…]