Urban Prep: A Different Kind of High School
Sharon Cohen reports for AP about Urban Prep, an all-boys charter school in Chicago. There are many things that make Urban Prep different, but perhaps the most important one is that 100% of its first graduation class is headed to college.
Along the way, boys’ lives have been changed — and very possibly saved.
Urban Prep would be a charter high school. It would bring together some 150 boys from some of the poorest, gang-ravaged neighborhoods and try to set them on a new track. They’d have strict rules: A longer school day — by two hours. Two classes of English daily. A uniform with jackets and ties.
And Urban Prep had a goal — one that seemed audacious, given that just 4 percent of the Class of 2010 was reading at or above grade level when they arrived at the school in 2006.
In four years, they were told, they’d be heading to college.
Chicago-born Tim King –one of Crain’s Chicago Business’s “Forty under Forty” in 2006, former president of an all-boy, predominantly all-black Catholic high school, and recognized education reformer– wanted a school that was different from other Chicago public schools.
“I wanted to create a school that was going to put black boys in a different place,” says the founder of Urban Prep, “and in my mind, that different place needed to be college.”
It’s easy to see why some might have doubted King’s vision for Urban Prep. As he told The Chicago Tribune‘s Tom McNamee in 2007:
“Consider this,” King says. “We have found that among Chicago Public School students, only 2.5 percent of black boys who start start out in high school
will get a college degree.”
King and the folks at Urban Prep don’t think their mission is complete once the boys are admitted to college. As the Chicago Tribune recently reported:
Students are assigned college counselors from day one.
Even the Urban Prep’s voice-mail system has a student declaring “I am college-bound” before asking callers to dial an extension.
“We don’t want to send them off and say, ‘Call us when you’re ready to make a donation to your alma mater,’ “ King said. “If we fulfill our mission, that means they not only are accepted to college, but graduate from it.”
Urban Prep is all-black as well as all-boy. What King and the faculty have done at Urban Prep could arguably benefit kids of any race and either gender. And I’m not as convinced as King is that the gender and race of a teacher are important. The story of Urban Prep is, though, a powerful illustration that good teachers who help kids meet high expectations in a school culture that values achievement make all the difference.
