When I was a kid, my parents bought a house in a middle class neighborhood of an economically diverse city. My brother, who is a year older than me, embarked upon his schooling in our local public elementary school – an adventure that lasted one year.

His teacher struggled to control the class, fights broke out, students stole other students’ lunches, and, because of the constant disruptions, he lost precious time for in-class learning.

My parents swiftly made plans to move my brother—and consequently me—to a private school. After elementary school, my brother and I continued to attend the small student-centered private school, skipping over, as did many of our affluent, white peers, the notoriously bad neighborhood middle school.

We returned to our neighborhood public high school, where we received, overall, a good education.

But I am not naïve. I know that part of my academic success in the AP and honors courses at this huge, socioeconomically diverse public high school came from my K-8 education, which included individual attention, undisrupted classes, creative projects, and teachers who not only taught the subject matter but also how to study, meet deadlines, and take control of our own learning.

I wonder how different things would have been if I had been told I had to wait. If instead of my parents having the choice to remove my brother from his disruptive elementary school, they were forced to watch as he fell behind because of factors beyond their control. If they were told that the school district was attempting to fix the school’s problems, and in the meantime, my brother and I would have to make the best of it.

No one ever told me that I had to wait for access to a good education. My parents’ socio-economic status gave them an option, a way around the traditional system when it failed.

Unfortunately, many parents don’t have that option.

Now it’s the NAACP telling parents to wait while school districts fix traditional public schools. Telling them that abandoning their neighborhood public school for a public charter school is a civil rights crime, because saving traditional public schools will somehow save poor and minority kids… someday. Propping up failing schools is so important, in the NAACP’s view, that parents should forgo their right to a choice, just so the traditional system can have all the resources—regardless of whether its students are succeeding.

Last week the NAACP upheld its 2016 call for a moratorium on the expansion of public charter schools. Its edict, much like a recent one from the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union, demands that the moratorium remain until charter schools implement a series of changes that would essentially make them function like traditional public schools.

The main difference is that this time the betrayal of impoverished and minority families comes from an organization that is historically committed to advancing opportunity for those groups.

Charter schools are about opportunity. They provide choices for those families who lack the economic means usually required to “have a say.” They provide opportunity for millions of low-income kids to graduate from high school and attend college.

Studies have repeatedly shown that public charter schools produce dramatic academic gains for minority students in high poverty areas, compared to traditional public schools. Thousands of black families choose charter schools, and they are happy with that choice.

Former NAACP president (ousted in May 2017) Cornell Brooks previously explained that NAACP’s actions are not inspired by an ideological opposition to charter schools but by the organization’s historical support of public schools. Yet, Brooks embraced school choice for his own family. Both of his sons attend/attended The Potomac School, a private school in Fairfax County, Virginia, where tuition ranges from $33,000 a year for kindergarten to $38,500 for high school.

Why does the NAACP want to deny avenues of choice to parents who can’t afford private schools?

Could it be that the NAACP has been influenced by the hundreds of thousands of dollars it has received from teachers unions? And could it be that its leaders care more about their adult constituents, many of whom teach in public schools, than about the needs of minority children?

Charters offer students over the age of 18 an alternative path to graduating high school

The U.S. Senate will soon vote on the nomination of Betsy DeVos, and it appears the vote may be a 50-50 tie, in which case Vice President Pence will break the tie. We believe DeVos’s confirmation would be a mistake, and we urge senators to vote against it. She supports the idea that every student should be able to use publicly funded vouchers to attend private schools, and we believe such broad voucher programs would be a huge mistake.

States have already begun to pass voucher programs available to almost every student. Louisiana’s program allows almost half of public school students to apply for vouchers. Nevada passed a bill allowing virtually every family access, but fortunately, the courts ruled it unconstitutional. The Arizona House passed a similar bill. With DeVos as Secretary of Education, there will be high-level national support for such legislation.

We understand that vouchers for poor, inner-city children expand the opportunities available to them. But when vouchers are available to all or almost all, they will undermine what little equal opportunity still exists in our public schools. Wealthy parents will add money to the voucher—because they love their children—and buy $30,000-per-year educations. Upper middle class parents will buy $20,000-a-year educations; middle class parents will buy $15,000-a-year educations; and poor and working class parents will be stuck in schools that accept the voucher as full payment.

What little mixing of income levels we have today will vanish, and with it any hope of equal opportunity. Children will also lose the chance to rub elbows with those from different social classes, races, and ethnic groups. That experience creates a more tolerant society, willing to embrace diversity—a huge asset in a racially and culturally diverse nation such as ours. Its absence creates the opposite.

We also believe that all schools receiving public funds should be held accountable for their performance. Louisiana and Indiana do this with vouchers, but most voucher programs include no accountability to the public. If students don’t learn to read and do math, nothing happens—the schools continue to collect the vouchers. Some parents might pull their children out of school, but if students don’t take standardized tests, how will their parents know? Experience with charter schools teaches that some parents will stick with a school if it is safe and nurturing even if reading and math scores are abysmal, so we cannot rely on parents to abandon all failing schools even if we do require testing.

Should more states enact broad voucher programs accessible to most students, we doubt there will be political support for accountability. Once every private school and almost every family is eligible for voucher money, the lobbying pressure against public accountability will be too strong.

Eli Broad, founder of the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation (a PPI funder), wrote a letter to all senators last week to “urge them to vote against Mrs. DeVos confirmation.” No one has been a fiercer advocate for education reform, including public charter schools, than Mr. Broad. We agree with him when he writes, “We must have a Secretary of Education who will vigorously defend the rights of all students to have safe, fair and equitable learning opportunities.”

Kudos to Governor Andrew Cuomo for proposing that the New York State legislature abolish the charter schools cap that limits the sector’s expansion in New York City. As a group, the city’s charters have long been high performers. Despite opposition from adults in the system – particularly the teachers’ union – we must never lose sight of what is most important: the students. Lifting the cap will help poor and minority students who need help the most.

Cuomo’s proposal is in direct contrast to the unwise decision made by Massachusetts voters to keep their charter school cap. Massachusetts has some of the highest-performing charters in the country. Why would people want to deny them to poor, minority kids in Boston, Springfield, Worcester, Lawrence, and other urban centers? Could it be because the Massachusetts Teachers Association spent millions of dollars misleading people, warning that charters would drain money from their school districts?

This is not the first time Governor Cuomo has stood up for public school choice and innovation. During his campaign, Mayor Bill de Blasio said he wanted to stop co-locating charters with traditional schools and start charging charters rent if they were in district buildings. He then withdrew permission for three charter schools to share space with traditional schools. In response, Governor Cuomo pushed through a budget agreement that required New York City to find space for charter schools inside public school buildings or pay much of the cost to house them in private space. The legislation also prohibited the city from charging rent to charter schools, something de Blasio had suggested. Governor Cuomo vowed to make sure the city’s charters had “the financial capacity and physical space and government support to thrive and grow.

Progressives have long supported charter schools. While Republicans were focused on vouchers, Democrats led the charge in early charter states: Minnesota, California, Massachusetts, and Colorado among them. President Bill Clinton proposed the first national charter school program in the 1990s, which has since provided $3 billion to start charter schools. President Barack Obama continued to support charters with his Race to the Top grants.

So Governor Cuomo stands in a long line of progressive, reform-minded Democrats who have had the courage to stand up to the teachers unions. For that, we applaud him.

WASHINGTON—The Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) today led a panel discussion at the 2016 NewDEAL Leaders Conference on strategies to ensure that all Americans have the education and skills to succeed in the rapidly changing 21st Century global economy. The panel was moderated by PPI President Will Marshall and featured panelists Harry Holzer, Professor of Public Policy at the McCourt School at Georgetown University, and Bridget Gainer, NewDEAL Leader Cook County Commissioner (Ill.).

Marshall discussed PPI’s Reinventing America’s Schools Project headed by Senior Fellow David Osborne—focusing on how policymakers can innovate and reinvest in education and the importance of reimagining public schools for the knowledge economy, with an emphasis on why reimagined charter schools can and must lead the way.

“The longer students stay at charters, the larger the benefit. By the time a student spends four or more years enrolled in an urban charter school, we can expect their annual academic growth to be 108 days greater in math and 72 days greater in reading per year than their peers in traditional public schools,” said Will Marshall, highlighting the work of David Osborne at PPI. “Since traditional school years last about 180 days, this is equivalent of an extra half-year of learning, every year.”

As Osborne has noted, rising inequality was a major underlying issue in the 2016 Presidential Campaign, yet the candidates avoided the subject of K-12 education and its impact on closing the inequality gap. The gap in standardized test scores between affluent students and the poor has grown at least 49% since the 1960s. The gap in college competition between those whose families make $109K a year or more and those making $34K a year or less has grown to 77%. As education levels largely dictate income levels, the education gap widening and education levels mattering more in the job market have created a vicious cycle. Stanford Professor Sean Reardon says, “As the children of the rich do better in school, and those who do better in school are more likely to become rich. We risk producing an even more unequal and economically polarized society.” Charter schools have started to close these gaps, according to Osborne’s research.

Holzer spoke on the need for new and meaningful postsecondary education or training for working class Americans to find jobs that pay enough to sustain a middle-class life and stressed the role of community colleges—expanding on ideas proposed in his report for PPI, Creating New Pathways into Middle Class Jobs. Gainer spoke about the promising new approaches to apprenticeships that she has been working on in Chicago.

To learn more about PPI’s Reinventing America’s Schools Project visit www.progressivepolicy.org or email Taylor Miller-Freutel at tmillerfreutel@ppionline.org.

Betsy DeVos, Donald Trump’s pick to be his Secretary of Education, is often described as a champion of school choice. Progressives should know that she defines “school choice” in ways that undermine public accountability and blur the crucial distinction between public and private education.

“We think of the educational choice movement as involving many parts: vouchers and tax credits, certainly, but also virtual schools, magnet schools, homeschooling, and charter schools,” DeVos said in 2013 interview.

DeVos grew up in Michigan, where she met her husband Dick DeVos, an heir to the Amway direct-sales fortune. Together they helped pass Michigan’s charter school law in 1993, which has failed to hold charter authorizers accountable for the quality of their schools. Michigan’s charters are some of the least regulated in the country, and about 80 percent are run by for-profit companies. If one authorizer denies a charter or tries to close a failing charter, the school often simply shops for a more laissez-faire authorizer. Hence failing charters are often allowed to stay open, which has helped create an estimated 30,000 empty seats in Detroit.

The DeVos’s own children attend private Christian schools. Betsy DeVos founded and serves as chairwoman of the American Federation of Children and its associated political arm. She has used this political platform to vigorously support candidates who endorse vouchers. The DeVos family has also made political donations to discourage lawmakers from increasing oversight on charter schools.

The Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) helped to pioneer the charter school concept in the early 1990s. But it has always drawn a sharp distinction between charter schools, which are public, and vouchers, which allow students to attend private schools at public expense. The problem is, those private schools are not accountable to the taxpayers in any way. All too often, they aren’t very good schools. Even in states that do hold them accountable, like Louisiana, research has shown that students who participated in the voucher program experienced declines in achievement test scores of eight to 16 percentile points.

Another big problem with vouchers is that if we give them to poor children, eventually the middle class will want them, too. Already, several states have passed laws allowing the majority of families to access vouchers. (Fortunately, Nevada’s was found unconstitutional.) When this happens, any semblance of equal opportunity will fly out the window.

Let’s say the voucher is worth $10,000 per child. Poor and working class parents will send their kids to $10,000 schools. Middle class parents may send their kids to $15,000 schools, adding some of their own money to the voucher. More affluent parents will send their kids to $20,000 schools, $25,000 schools, and beyond. I’m not blaming them: We all love our children, and we want what’s best for them. But public policy should protect the common good as well as private goods. And public education, despite all its inequality, is perhaps the only place left in American society where we even make an effort to create equal opportunity. If we lose that, we lose something precious–and we kick the growing inequality undermining our society into high gear.

We should push for more integration of public schools by race and class, because research shows that it helps low-income students without harming higher-income students. Beyond that, in a multi-racial, multi-cultural nation, we need to promote experiences that help people rub elbows with those from different races and classes. That experience teaches people that underneath our skins we are all alike. It builds tolerance into our society. After the elections we’ve just experienced, it should be abundantly clear that we need more tolerance in America, not less.

Betsy DeVos’s goal is different — to radically diminish public oversight of public schools, and to steer more dollars into unaccountable private schools.

That’s not the kind of “school choice” progressives should support.