The NAACP argues that the program violates the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Why would a program designed to benefit poor minority children represent "unequal protection?" The NAACP compares the voucher program to the earlier efforts of southern states to thumb their noses at desegregation by sending white kids to private schools. According to the NAACP, some of the parents participating in the voucher program choose to send their children to "virtually one-race schools," while "racially separate schools are inherently unequal."
Comparing today's predominantly black private schools to the segregation academies in the Jim Crow south insults the intelligence of minority parents across the nation. Inner-city private and religious schools provide a far superior education than their public alternatives. Only 35 percent of the freshmen who entered public high schools in Milwaukee in 1992, for example, graduated in four years. In one school, only 13 percent did so. Compare that abysmal record to that of two predominantly black private schools in Milwaukee: Messmer High School boasts a 98 percent graduation rate; the high school graduation rate for alumni of Urban Day, a K-8 independent school, is also 98 percent.
The success of predominantly black private schools is not the only irony of the NAACP's effort to thwart school choice. Many of the private and religious schools in inner-city Milwaukee are more integrated than their public counterparts, where less than 21 percent of the students are white. Vouchers will further integrate private schools by making them affordable for poor parents. While some black parents use their vouchers for schools that are mostly one race, many others will choose an integrated environment. School vouchers, therefore, would actually help advance the NAACP's goal of integrated education.
Apparently, however, the NAACP is more interested in curtailing poor parents' choices than in promoting integration. It not only wants to prohibit black parents from choosing predominantly black private schools for their kids, but it thinks that they cannot be trusted to select religious schools either
