Follow along with the video below to see how to install our site as a web app on your home screen.
Note: This feature currently requires accessing the site using the built-in Safari browser.
NAACP, parents and activists in Harlem at odds over charter schools
(CNN) -- For decades, Harlem has been a hub of African-American culture and the NAACP. But this month, the issue of charter schools has turned the New York City neighborhood into a battleground between activists and the 101-year-old civil rights organization.
The strain was as clear as the signs and chants during a rally Thursday in Harlem -- "NAACP, Don't Divide Us, Unite Us!"
About 4% of New York City's roughly 1 million students currently attend charter schools -- which are paid with public funds but typically have different mandates, approaches and staffing arrangements that traditional schools. Another 50,000 students are on waiting lists.
A proposal to expand access to charter schools and allow charters to co-locate -- or be based in the same building -- as regular schools has turned some traditional allies against each other.
The rift accelerated in May, when the NAACP and the United Federation of Teachers -- a union of 200,000 New York City teachers and school staff -- filed a lawsuit in New York State Supreme Court. Besides asking to stop 22 school closings, the lawsuit urged halting the plan to expand or co-locate 20 charter schools.
On its website, the teachers' union calls the initiative illegal and claims it would give "charter school students more access to school facilities, including libraries, auditoriums and lunchrooms, than students in the public schools that would share the buildings."
While a teachers union opposing charter schools is hardly unprecedented, leaders of the local NAACP said they decided to step in and support the lawsuit in order to best ensure a level playing field for all New York City students.
Hazel Dukes, president of the NAACP's New York chapter, said the group is fighting for equal education for all
I've always thought of NAACP leaders as modern-day African slave traders.
I do not care for NEA, unions or the NAACP in some cases but on the subject of charter schools they are dead right.
Here we are running deficits and they want to divert funds away from funding the public schools to charter schools.The problem with bad schools has been and always will be a lack of parental support, parents that do not work much and are on government tit and an absence of the father in the house.
Charter schools will not do a damn thing to solve that mess.
