“Red Pedagogy” Sinks Indigenous Charter School Approval in NC Native Country

By a 4–3 vote that reversed its earlier decision, the North Carolina Charter Schools Advisory Board (CSAB) has rejected a proposal to create a charter school focused on growing “indigenous leader practitioners” in the state’s poorest and the nation’s most ethnically diverse rural county.

NPQ has covered Robeson County before, when it was selected to serve as the guinea pig for the state’s Innovative School District, a new district created by Republican state lawmakers to take low-performing elementary schools away from local control and cede them to a “qualified” for-profit or nonprofit operator. Most recently, we chronicled the 100-year-plus unsuccessful effort of the Lumbee Tribe (the nation’s largest east of the Mississippi) to secure federal recognition, and the continuing poverty, substance abuse and crises of identity that this purgatory produces.

Last year, NPQ reported on another aspiring Indigenous charter school’s struggle. It took three tries for the new Sovereign Community School in Oklahoma City to get approved. But unlike Sovereign, it wasn’t “technical issues” that stymied the North Carolina Indigenous effort to secure state approval, but concerns about “Red Pedagogy,” an educational philosophy cited in the charter’s application to the state.