Black History Month began Wednesday, and this year’s theme is “The Crisis in Black Education.” According to the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, the group that founded BHM—this crisis “has grown significantly in urban neighborhoods where public schools lack resources, endure overcrowding, exhibit a racial achievement gap, and confront policies that fail to deliver substantive opportunities.”
Delivering those opportunities is one of America’s unfinished civil rights imperatives. But it will require resolving new divisions within the racial justice movement over one of the great hopes for extending educational opportunity: Charter schools.