Trump afraid to face NAACP. Sends underling. Group stands firm on charters.

NAACP 2017

The racist character of the current White House (aptly named for its lack of black faces) became even more apparent when Trump turned down the NAACP's invitation to address its 2017 convention. Instead DT sent his beleaguered underling, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, to represent the face of this administration. The results weren't pretty.

As you might expect, Rosenstein got a "chilly reception" when he repeated Trump's racist garbage about black crime and urban "carnage" and tried to downplay the current mayhem in the Justice Dept. with his boss, AG Jeff Sessions at the center of it.

POLITICO reports:

Rosenstein used his six-minute address to pay homage to Trump by citing one of his most polarizing speeches: the inaugural address where he railed against "carnage" in the streets of America.

"In President Trump’s inaugural address, he said that Americans want great schools for their children, safe neighborhoods for their families and good jobs for themselves. These are just and reasonable demands," Rosenstein said.

Rosenstein got a tepid reaction from the group, with organizers exhorting the crowd to give him more applause both as he took the stage and as he wrapped up.

 "Our goal is not to fill prisons. Our goal is to save lives," Rosenstein said, as his comments were interrupted by a smattering of applause.

Nothing of course, could be further from the truth. Trump's goal has been precisely to fill the prisons with black, Latino and immigrant bodies. Especially the now burgeoning industry of private prisons whose owners are among his biggest campaign contributors.

Responses...

   “Stop talking to us about the mythology of black crime," Rev. William Barber II said as many in the audience stood and cheered. "If you’re going to talk to us about black crime, talk to use about the Wall Street criminals that never get charged."

Many of those who addressed the convention Tuesday railed against the Trump administration and its efforts to repeal Obamacare.

"Stop texting lies. Stop telling lies. Stop turning people against each other with lies," said Barber, a leader of the Moral Monday movement in North Carolina. "Until you stop, we can’t move.”

"It gets dark sometime, but let nothing break our spirit," Rev. Jesse Jackson told the group. "Stand up. March up. We will outlast Trump and we will outlast this dark night."

Charter schools...

A NAACP task force that spent several months traveling the country learning about charter schools released a report Wednesday with the group’s conclusions. The report comes less than a year after the civil rights organization passed a resolution calling for a moratorium on the growth of charter schools last October. The new report calls on the NAACP to create a plan of action and a new coalition of groups to push back on charter schools’ lack of accountability and transparency.

The report notes that while charter schools were created to act as labs of innovation and share their best ideas with public schools, “this aspect of the promise never materialized.”

While making some concessions to some of its pro-charter affiliates, the organization, which has been under tremendous pressure from the administration and powerful corporate "reform" groups to retreat, appears to be standing firm on calling for more charter accountability and restraints on the expansion of privately-run charters.

According to the Baltimore Sun:

The NAACP is calling for tighter restrictions on charter schools and the elimination of for-profit charters as part of a broad array of actions leaders want to see taken on the local and national level to improve public education for children of color.

 In calling for more accountability, the NAACP wants local school districts to be the only body that can approve, or give a charter to, a new school. That restriction already exists in Maryland, which is one of the few states with charter laws that require all charter schools to be part of local school systems.Many states allow other entities, such as universities, to decide whether a school should be permitted to operate as a charter.

Huffington Post reports:

 During a time when the Trump administration is working to expand the number of charter schools in the name of civil rights, the symbolic importance of pushback from the nation’s oldest civil rights organization looms large. The report recommends the full elimination of for-profit charter schools. For-profit schools aren’t allowed in a number of states, but are prevalent in Michigan, the home state of U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. 

“The widespread findings of misconduct and poor student performance in for-profit charter schools, demands the elimination of these schools,” says the report.

More to come on this.