What's with the NAACP defending bad schools? The victims of bad schools are chiefly black and Hispanic, as Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom of Harvard noted in their book "No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning." "By 12th grade, African-Americans are typically four years behind white and Asian students, while Hispanics are doing only a tad better than black students." The Thernstroms, national authorities in these matters, have singled out charter schools and the choice they afford as "essential ingredients in any serious effort to close the gap."

To which the NAACP says what when it boos the whole idea of charter schools -- the idea of giving them so much as a fair test? The NAACP says love that learning gap! Make it bigger, wider -- just so long as no Republican president (George W. Bush comes to mind) gets any credit for sincerity in trying to improve life for American blacks.

Off to the NAACP convention went Bush (the only president to appoint back-to-back African-American secretaries of state), hoping, however naively, that the delegates might actually be interested in ideas from a source other than Edward M. Kennedy's speech-writing shop.

Guess again. The NAACP, volubly committed to its identity as a subsidiary of the Democrats and the teachers' unions, cranked up the old boo machine whenever delegates weren't sitting on their hands.

"We recognize rhetoric when we see it," huffed an NAACP official from Mississippi -- proving that a few of the delegates recognize something. What more seem unable to recognize is the possibility that somebody other than themselves might know something worth knowing.