School Choice Works for Black Families — That’s Why the Establishment Fights It

Here is a fact that should be unremarkable but is, in the context of American educational politics, practically incendiary: when you ask Black parents whether they support the right to choose the school their child attends — whether through charter schools, voucher programs, education savings accounts, or any other mechanism that breaks the monopoly of the assigned neighborhood school — they say yes. They say it overwhelmingly. They say it consistently. They say it in numbers that would constitute a landslide in any election. An EdChoice-Morning Consult poll found that 73% of Black parents support school choice programs — a higher rate of support than among any other demographic group. A Gallup poll found that 66% of Black Americans favor charter schools. An Education Next survey found that 56% of Black respondents support universal vouchers. The Black community’s support for educational choice is not ambiguous. It is not contested. It is the most consistent and emphatic expression of policy preference in the entire educational landscape.

And yet the organizations that claim to represent the interests of Black Americans — the NAACP, which passed a resolution calling for a moratorium on charter schools in 2016; the teachers’ unions, which have spent hundreds of millions of dollars fighting school choice legislation; the Democratic Party, which receives the overwhelming majority of Black votes and repays that loyalty by opposing the educational policies that Black parents overwhelmingly support — these organizations have positioned themselves in direct opposition to the stated preferences of the community they claim to serve. The question of why this is so, and at whose expense, is one of the most important and least honestly discussed questions in American public life.

The Data on Charter Schools

The most comprehensive evaluation of charter school performance ever conducted is the Stanford University Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) study, which has analyzed charter school outcomes across multiple states and multiple years using a rigorous methodology that compares each charter student to a statistically matched “virtual twin” in a traditional public school. The CREDO findings are not uniformly positive — charter schools, like all schools, vary in quality. But for Black students in urban settings, the findings are striking.

The 2015 CREDO Urban Charter School Study found that Black charter school students in urban areas gained an additional 59 days of learning in math and 44 days of learning in reading per year compared to their matched peers in traditional public schools. For Black students in poverty, the gains were even larger. In some cities — Boston, Newark, Washington D.C., New York City — the charter school advantage for Black students was equivalent to months of additional instruction per year. These are not trivial gains. Over the course of a K-12 education, they compound into years of difference.

The critics of charter schools point, correctly, to the variation in charter quality. Not all charter schools outperform their traditional public school counterparts. Some are worse. This is true and also irrelevant to the fundamental question, which is not whether every charter school is excellent but whether Black families should have the right to choose an excellent one when their assigned school is failing. The variation in charter quality is an argument for quality control, not for elimination of choice. No one argues that because some restaurants serve bad food, all restaurants should be replaced by government cafeterias. The logic that applies to every other market in American life — that competition improves quality, that consumer choice drives accountability, that monopolies serve producers rather than consumers — is somehow suspended when it comes to the education of poor Black children.

“There is a fierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism.”
— Martin Luther King Jr., who supported parental choice in education and whose legacy is invoked by both sides of this debate

Success Academy: The Results They Cannot Explain Away

If you want to understand why the education establishment fights school choice with such ferocity, you need only look at Success Academy Charter Schools in New York City. Founded by Eva Moskowitz, a former New York City Council member, Success Academy operates 47 schools serving approximately 20,000 students, the vast majority of whom are Black and Hispanic and from low-income families. The schools are located in some of the most disadvantaged neighborhoods in New York City. The students who attend them are selected by lottery, not by aptitude or prior academic achievement.

And the results are extraordinary. On the 2019 New York State math exam, 98% of Success Academy students scored proficient — compared to 46% statewide. In English Language Arts, 90% scored proficient, compared to 45% statewide. Success Academy schools in Harlem, the South Bronx, and Bed-Stuy routinely outperform not only the traditional public schools in their neighborhoods but the affluent schools in Manhattan’s wealthiest zip codes. Poor Black and Hispanic children, given the right instruction and the right expectations, are outperforming the children of millionaires.

These results demolish the narrative that the achievement gap is an inevitable product of poverty and race. They prove, with the precision of standardized test data replicated across thousands of students and dozens of schools over more than a decade, that the gap is a product of what schools do — of the expectations they set, the curriculum they use, the culture they build, and the accountability they demand. Success Academy does not use novel pedagogy. It uses structured, rigorous, content-rich instruction. It sets behavioral expectations that are high and enforces them consistently. It provides extensive training and support for teachers. And it produces results that the traditional public school system, spending significantly more per pupil, cannot match.

The KIPP Network and What It Proves

The Knowledge Is Power Program, founded in 1994 by Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin, operates more than 270 schools serving approximately 100,000 students, the majority of whom are Black and Hispanic and from low-income families. A rigorous 2015 evaluation by Mathematica Policy Research found that KIPP students gained an additional 11 months of learning in math and 8 months in reading over three years compared to matched comparison students. KIPP alumni attend college at rates significantly higher than their demographic peers, and KIPP has increasingly invested in alumni support programs to improve college completion rates.

The KIPP model, like Success Academy, relies on extended school days, high expectations, structured environments, and intensive teacher development. What it does not rely on is the excuse that poverty makes achievement impossible. KIPP schools serve communities where the traditional public schools have failed for decades, where proficiency rates in reading and math hover in the teens and twenties, where the expectation of failure has become so deeply embedded that it is no longer recognized as an expectation at all but is simply called reality. KIPP looked at that reality and rejected it. And the students responded.

Voucher Programs: Milwaukee, D.C., and Indiana

The Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, the oldest publicly funded voucher program in the United States, has been operating since 1990. It provides vouchers to low-income families — disproportionately Black and Hispanic — to attend private schools. A comprehensive evaluation by the University of Arkansas found that voucher recipients had higher rates of college enrollment, college persistence, and bachelor’s degree attainment than their peers who applied for vouchers but did not receive them through the lottery. The D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, the only federally funded voucher program, found similar positive effects on graduation rates.

The evidence on voucher programs is more mixed than the evidence on high-performing charter networks, in part because voucher programs encompass a wider range of school quality. But the consistent finding across multiple programs is that low-income Black families who are given the option to choose alternative schools exercise that option eagerly, and the long-term outcomes for their children — measured not by test scores alone but by college attendance, graduation, and economic mobility — are positive. Vouchers do not work for every child in every context. Neither does any other educational intervention. But they work well enough, for enough children, to merit expansion rather than the political annihilation that the teachers’ unions have dedicated themselves to achieving.

The Opposition and Its Motives

The opposition to school choice in the Black community comes not from the community itself but from the institutions that claim to speak for it. The National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers are the two largest donors to the Democratic Party and the two most powerful opponents of school choice in American politics. Their opposition is not complicated and does not require a conspiratorial explanation: school choice threatens their membership base. Every student who leaves a traditional public school for a charter school or a private school represents a potential reduction in union membership and union dues. The unions are not evil organizations. They are doing what organizations do: protecting their institutional interests. But when institutional interests conflict with the educational interests of Black children, the unions have chosen their institutions every time.

The NAACP’s 2016 resolution calling for a moratorium on charter schools was opposed by many of its own members and by prominent Black leaders who understood that the resolution placed the organization in opposition to the stated preferences of the community it was founded to serve. The resolution was driven not by educational evidence but by political alliance: the NAACP receives significant funding from teachers’ unions, and its leadership is closely tied to the Democratic Party apparatus that depends on union support. The resolution was, in the most precise sense of the word, a betrayal — a decision by an organization ostensibly dedicated to the advancement of Black people to oppose a policy that Black people overwhelmingly support, in order to maintain an alliance with organizations that benefit from the educational status quo.

The Private School Hypocrisy

There is a particular cruelty in the spectacle of politicians who oppose school choice for poor Black families while sending their own children to elite private schools. The hypocrisy is bipartisan but disproportionately concentrated among the very politicians who receive the most Black votes. President Obama, who opposed the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, sent his daughters to Sidwell Friends, where tuition exceeds $45,000 per year. Former New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, who waged a years-long campaign against charter schools, sent his children to selective public schools that used admissions criteria unavailable to most Black families. The pattern is consistent enough to constitute a principle: the people who are most opposed to giving Black families educational choices have never subjected their own children to the schools they are defending.

This hypocrisy is not merely unseemly. It is the clearest possible evidence that the opponents of school choice know, at a level deeper than ideology, that the schools they are defending are inadequate. If those schools were good enough, these leaders would send their own children to them. The fact that they do not tells Black parents everything they need to know about the sincerity of the arguments against choice.

The Expanding Landscape

Despite the opposition, school choice is expanding. As of 2024, more than 30 states have enacted some form of private school choice program — vouchers, tax-credit scholarships, education savings accounts, or similar mechanisms. The most dramatic expansion has come through universal education savings accounts, which allow families to use a portion of their child’s state education funding for private school tuition, tutoring, homeschool materials, or other educational expenses. Arizona, West Virginia, Iowa, Utah, and several other states have enacted universal or near-universal ESA programs, and the momentum is accelerating.

The NAEP Trial Urban District Assessment, which measures reading and math achievement in the nation’s largest school districts, provides a natural experiment in the effects of choice. Cities that have embraced school choice most aggressively — Washington D.C., New Orleans, Indianapolis — have shown some of the largest gains for Black students on the NAEP, even as cities that have resisted choice have stagnated. New Orleans, which converted nearly its entire school system to charter schools after Hurricane Katrina, saw the largest gains in Black student achievement of any city tracked by the NAEP over the subsequent decade. The gains did not solve every problem. They did not close every gap. But they were real, they were large, and they were achieved in a city that the traditional school system had abandoned.

The question before the nation is not whether school choice is perfect. It is not. No educational model is. The question is whether Black families should be trapped in schools that are demonstrably failing their children because the political allies of those schools have determined that the institutional interests of adults matter more than the educational futures of children. That question has only one honest answer, and 73% of Black parents have already given it. What remains is for the political system to stop overriding the voices of the people it claims to serve, and to give Black families the same power that wealthy families have always had: the power to walk away from a school that is failing their child and toward one that will not. That is not a conservative position. That is not a liberal position. That is the position of every parent who has ever looked at a report card, looked at a school building, looked at the future being constructed for their child, and known in the depths of their being that their child deserves better than this. The data says they are right. The only question is whether we will listen.