A reader asked for evidence that Urban Prep (the subject of Gary Rubinstein’s expose) actually boasted of a 100% high school graduation rate and a 100% college acceptance rate.
Thirty seconds of googling produced this press release.
Urban Prep Academy’s faculty and family were joined by Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel on Thursday afternoon to celebrate their 167 seniors who are all college-bound.
On Thursday, the last seven of the 167 young scholars underwent the rites of passage and were handed their new ties. This moment solidified Chicago Urban Academy’s fourth consecutive year in graduating 100 percent of their all African-American male student body and sending them to college.
The Chicago academy has a tradition of changing their students’ red ties to red and gold striped ties to symbolize that they have received college acceptance letters, according to the Chicago Sun Times:
“At Urban Prep, college is not a dream, it’s a reality,” co-founder and CEO Tim King said. “College acceptance is the new black.”
Indeed, the combined senior class of 167 racked up a total of $6 million in grants and scholarships to some 125 unique colleges. Two students were accepted to 20 schools each. Two others account for more than $600,000 each in scholarship offers from all of the schools they got into.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Juggling numbers while leaving out numbers that don’t make the charter look good. A documented common practice among charters built on greed for a few.
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Somebody seriously asked that? (I think I can guess who.) All that person needs to do is come to Chicago and ride the El – the ads are all over the place.
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My husband and I have been noticing that America has an INNUMERACY problem. We find numeracy errors in all kinds of printed materials.
When cashiers didn’t have to count change anymore, I knew we were in trouble.
Same with reading, Our kids are being phonics to death re: the Reading Wars … so STUPID.
And now our young can’t write in cursive? Sorry, but I like to sign my name on the dotted line, not a machine. Plus, kids NEED to manipulate print, not the screen. Does anyone remember Piaget’s research? What about Dewey?
This “ALTERNATIVE” reality is “Making America Dumb.”
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I just read how Trump could use his power as president to declare an emergency and shut down the internet or take the internet over with control over who is allowed to stay on the internet.
If the internet goes down, the country will collapse into chaos thanks to machines doing the thinking for most of the cashiers working in retail stores.
Imagine what life would be like if Trump shut the internet down and left it shut down so he could get away with more crimes.
For businesses to continue, the nation would have to learn real fast how to survive without the internet-nanny doing so much of the thinking humans once did for themselves.
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did you happen to see the big bruhaha about how millennials are said to be killing off the canned tuna industry because they don’t own can openers…. 🙂
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Ha,ha…perhaps that’s why, when people sign candidates’ petitions or vote, their signatures are questioned.
Yet another devious tactic in the war on public education & the 99%: refusing people their right to vote because they don’t know how to write in cursive, & may be inconsistent when signing their names.
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The schools website does not have any mention or any menu to search teacher staff. I was a bit curious as to the type of teachers and staff there but there in not one mention the staff there and who they are. I find that puzzling and Im wondering if they have huge teacher turn over rates.?
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Well, not exactly scientific or conclusive, but the reviews on Glassdoor are less than stellar, and they fired over a dozen teachers a few years back for trying to organize. Those are pretty good signs that turnover is probably a problem.
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The problem with Glassdoor is that corporations post good reviews to cancel bad ones.
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The press release was dated 2013.
I am really confused by that Gary Rubinstein’s analysis.
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I am really confused by that date and the more recent post with Gary’s analysis
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To confuse you even more, Laura, here is a separate webpage on the 100%
http://www.urbanprep.org/about/100-percent
From there, you can click on each year’s 100%, starting with the class of 2010. Here is last year’s
http://www.urbanprep.org/about/100-percent/class-2017
Here is a compelling video
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If you truly want to see a miracle of public education and services, last night’s 60 Minutes showed us one. The story of Ryan Speedo Green shows is an incredible story that shows how the compassion and outreach of a public school teacher and community health workers kept this young man from the dustbin of education. Green’s story also shows the value of a comprehensive education including the arts can help put students on the right path, and his journey has taken him all the way to the NY Metropolitan Opera. It was the humans in his life that made all the difference, not technology. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ryan-speedo-green-from-juvenile-delinquency-to-opera-stardom-60-minutes/
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That was an amazing story! Once again, teachers did it (right)!
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Here’s Duncan plugging the 100% rate in The 74.
In the same piece Duncan plugs a book by a charter cheerleader. It really is amazing how circular this whole thing is- Arne Duncan plugs Richard Whitmire’s book in the ed reform mouthpiece publication, The 74.
They never have to leave the echo chamber. One can conduct an entire career without any real questions of any kind:
“In 2010, four years after Urban Prep Charter Academy opened, it graduated its first class — with all 107 seniors headed off to four-year colleges and universities. Urban Prep Academies recently announced that 100 percent of the 252 seniors in the class of 2016 were admitted to a four-year university or college, too — the seventh year in a row in which 100 percent of Urban Prep seniors were admitted to a four-year college or university.”
No one in ed reform questions ANY of this.
https://www.the74million.org/article/arne-duncan-what-impresses-me-most-about-the-first-25-years-of-public-charter-schools/
Here’s another example- they promote the wait lists at charter schools. Did you know there are wait lists for certain Chicago public schools? There are, and more people are on the wait lists for Chicago public schools than charter schools.
If wait lists is the measure, Chicago should be opening more public schools.
You’d never hear that at an ed reform conference.
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I’ve recently retired as Chief Consultant to the California Assembly Committee on Education, and I’ve been doing my own research on charter high school graduation rates in my state. So far, I’ve reviewed 28 schools that promote themselves as being college prep “academies” or have been identified as among the best in the country by USNews & World Report. Only four have a graduation rate that is below the statewide average, but all of them have 9th grade to 12th grade attrition rates that are above–in some cases far above–the statewide average. Charter school admissions policies in California cannot take academic performance into account. However, there is nothing in the law to prohibit charter schools from expelling students for academic reasons once they have been admitted. The pairing of high graduation rates with high attrition rates is too consistent to be the result of pure chance. Something systematic is at work.
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“College acceptance is the new black,” says the CEO. When a school plays tricks to inflate numbers and forces college acceptance for high school graduation, the students go to college unprepared. No excuses charter students drop out of college by higher percentages than do public school students. College is not tuition free in this country, and dropouts as well as graduates today are saddled with twice as much debt as was generation X. They live in debt prison. So, in this charter’s case, college acceptance is not the new black; it’s the new orange.
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I make this video jump to an interesting segment https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkj32VrtqQw&t=6m50s
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I found this about Urban Prep from 2010.
http://charterschoolscandals.blogspot.com/2010/07/urban-prep-academy-charter-high-school.html
Today’s Sun-Times print edition reports on what must now be called the Miracle in Englewood. Urban Prep Charter School still has a 100% college-going rate with ALL 95 graduating seniors going to college!
Problem is, for the past few weeks, the orgy of happy-weepy media reports about the Urban Prep Miracle was that all 107 graduating seniors were going to college (see, for example, People Magazine, Good Morning America, “Urban Prep Named Person of the Week on ABC World News).
So, since their first self-promotional blitz, they’ve lost 12 students? And that’s on top of the other 50 or so members of the class of 2010 who had also gone missing from the rolls since the school first opened, as PURE reported a while ago:
According to the Illinois Interactive School Report Card, there were 166 freshmen enrolled in 2007, Urban Prep’s first year. Of these original freshmen, the Tribune reports that 107 are graduating seniors. This yields an overall school graduation rate of 64%, or nearly 6 points lower than the average district rate of 69.8%.
Just as they struggled as entering freshmen, as reported by the school’s founder, many of these graduates will likely struggle in college given the school’s composite state high school examination results of 15%, compared with the Chicago average of 28%.
With these new figures, the overall graduation rate at Urban Prep goes down to 57%. So, it begins to look more and more as though Urban Prep’s real “accomplishment” is refusing to graduate any senior who has not been accepted into college…
Comments are interesting read. For example
I pulled my son out of Urban Prep this year. On paper they look good. Their mission statement is encouraging, but sad to say they don’t stand behind it. The kids scores are below high school level. Freshmen and Sophomores reading and math scores are between 3rd and 7th grade, without any real plan for improvement. They absolutely did not have a lot of homework. And when you have teachers changing grades because they asked. Well, I am just saying my son doesn’t need that type of support to get ahead. He needs to be taught not passed!
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