Share: For Second Year in a Row, 100% of Urban Prep's Black Males Accepted in College... Chicago's Urban Prep Does it Again: Every Senior College Bound February 17, 2011 Tony Moseley, 18, a Posse Scholar, center, is congratulated by friends James Cole, 18, left and Cedric Hakeem, 17, as he steps to the front of the auditorium to be recognized for his accomplishments during an assembly at Urban Prep on Wednesday, Feb. 16, 2011. *For the second consecutive year, an all-male charter school located in one of Chicago's worst neighborhoods is sending its entire senior class to college, reports the Huffington Post. Urban Prep Charter Academy was founded in 2006, and its goal from the start was for every one of its graduates to be attending college when they left. It was an unlikely mission, given that only four percent of the school's first freshman class was reading at grade level when they entered. Last year, the school, founded by educator and nonprofit leader Tim King, did just that - all 107 graduating seniors were accepted at the end of the year. And this year, Urban Prep has repeated its success. "No other public [school] in the country has done this," King said, according to NBC. And some Chicago bigwigs were on hand to celebrate the result, including Alderman Willie Cochran, Treasurer Stephanie Neely and outgoing Mayor Richard M. Daley. "When you are accepted, there are no excuses," Mayor Daley said, said. "They said we believe in you. ... We are going to make you independent." Chicago's Urban Prep Academy class of 2010 also boasted a 100% college acceptance rate Students at the exceptional all-male school have a uniform of jacket and tie. It also has a school day two hours longer than usual, with two classes per day of English, and every student is assigned a mentor from the staff who has a school-assigned cell phone that students can call them on 24 hours a day. About 60 percent of teachers at Urban Prep are, like their students, black men. The students also have a creed, which they recite every morning. It finishes: "We believe in ourselves. We believe in each other. We believe in Urban Prep. WE BELIEVE." ...but the Picture for Black Males in College Looks Bleak Fewer young Black men enter college and fewer graduate than others Report: Number of Black Men in College Decreases Only 35% graduated within six years from college Picture Supplied by The Black Star Project Wednesday, April 07, 2010 The American Council on Education last week released its "Annual Status Report on Minorities in Higher Education," and it showed some disturbing trends when it comes to black males on the nation's college campuses: Their populations are not only declining, but they have the lowest graduation rate of any other group. According to the ACE report, 20 years ago, 30 percent of black male high school graduates were enrolled in college. It was a percentage roughly equal to the 28 percent for black females. But the latest data shows that while the percentage of black male high school graduates going to college has risen to 37 percent, the percentage for black female high school graduates has jumped to 42 percent. Perhaps more disturbing is that fact that only 35 percent of the black males who enter college graduate in six years. This compares to 59 percent for white males, 46 percent for Hispanic men and 45 percent for black females who entered college the same year. Similar studies released last year suggest that as black males drop out of college, some campuses are left with nearly twice as many black females as black males. Race to the Bottom "These corporate reformers are pursuing a strategy based on ideology, not on evidence. It is demoralizing teachers and setting up public schools to be de-legitimized, as they are called upon to meet impossible goals. This is not an improvement strategy, it is a privatization strategy." Diane Ravitch former assistant secretary of education U.S. Department of Education Race to the Bottom: Ravitch Says 'School Reformers' Scapecoat Teachers, Ignore Poverty Friday, February 11, 2011 By Roger Bybee Diane Ravitch, author of The Death and Life of the Great American School System. President Barack Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan have formed an alliance with billionaire "school reformers" whose agenda is to downgrade U.S. public education and blame its shortcomings on "bad teachers," warns educational historian Diane Ravitch. Ravitch spoke Thursday night before a crowd of more than 1,000 education professors, students, public school teachers, and community activists at the University of Wisconsin. "These corporate reformers are pursuing a strategy based on ideology, not on evidence," she charged. "It is demoralizing teachers and setting up public schools to be de-legitimized, as they are called upon to meet impossible goals. This is not an improvement strategy, it is a privatization strategy." Ravitch, once assistant secretary of education under George W. Bush, has undergone a remarkable transformation after observing how the education system became fixated on test results, the scapegoating of teachers and the promoting of a privatized approach to education. She has now emerged as one of the leading critics of the Obama-Duncan approach to public education, which has been driven by funding from several huge foundations--the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Eli and Edith Broad Foundation, and the Walton Family foundation. The essence of this corporatized approach to public education is "choice, competition, deregulation, accountability, and data-based decision-making," as Joanne Barkan summarizes it an important Dissent article. With progressive reforms for education generating little attention, the corporate model has managed to make surprising inroads among some liberals who have become persuaded that a market-driven education system is key to America's future. The corporate style of reform began with "No Child Left Behind" enacted under George W. Bush, which promoted a preoccupation with standardized testing and the conclusion that children's failure to measure up was a direct result of inferior teachers. This was followed by Duncan's "Race to the Top" program which embraced the same core beliefs, including the closing of "failed schools." Duncan and Obama, for example, applauded the decision of the Central Falls, Rhode Island School Board to close the high school and fire all 91 staff members, absurdly including the cafeteria and maintenance staff, based on the assumption that low test scores reflected the failures of the teachers. The poverty of the students and the fact that a high percentage were immigrants learning English were seen as irrelevant to the low test scores. Eventually, both Duncan and the local school system were forced to back off due to public outcry. But Duncan, along with the three huge foundations, is still pressing ahead with imposing what Ravitch calls their "punitive" and "market-based" assumptions on the nation's schools. However, as both Ravitch and Barkan have pointed out, all the major studies show that the key elements of corporate-style education reform are simply not working: No improvement in learning: The most comprehensive study of de-regulated "charter" schools, conducted by conservative economists at Stanford University, examined education results among students at 2,400 charter schools nationally. They found 83% of charter schools perform either worse or no better than public schools. Merit pay: The new wave of corporate reformers have argued that merit pay is vital to incentivize" and reward better-performing teachers. But a 2010 Vanderbilt University study clearly demonstrated that merit pay does not generate higher standardized testing. A National Research Council report, backing up numerous other studies, found that standardized test scores fail to effectively measure student learning The main result observed by Ravitch has been the tendency of school curriculums to get narrower and narrower, focusing almost exclusively on "teaching to the test" in reading and math. Supposed "success" stories of market-based, mayor-driven "reform" in Chicago and New York quickly unraveled once newspapers began independently evaluating the test scores of students. Nonetheless, the combined PR clout of the Gates, Broad, and Walton foundations has generated a massive wave of favorable publicity for their crusade against what Ravitch called "the Bad Teacher Syndrome. This included a cover story in Newsweek, a weeklong series on NBC that "celebrated privatization and scapegoating teachers," as Ravitch put it, and two segments of Oprah devoted to discussing Waiting for Superman, which Ravitch called a badly-biased documentary. All of these high-profile attacks on teachers, their unions, and union-won rights avoid the real causes of poor school performance. "Most of the nations that the US is comparing itself with have much lower rates of poverty among their children. It's 20% nationally here, and I know it's much higher in this community." (32 percent of children in Milwaukee are poor.) "Poor performance is mostly due to poverty and racial isolation," Raitch said. Barkan further illuminated this point in Dissent: The over-emphasis on testing, the targeting of teachers, the senseless closing of schools, and the substitution of a market model for the basic democratic right of public education are all generating an increasingly vocal backlash from both teachers and parents. "Teachers are going to be marching on Washington D.C. July 28 to 30 to protest the 'testing and punishment' regime in education," Ravitch announced. The top-down corporate-style reform championed by Obama and the billionaires threatens a further deterioration of education for poor kids, and is an imminent threat to America's democratic traditions, Ravitch concluded. Game On with OSI's Campaign for Black Male Achievement!!! Black Faces in White Places: Becoming a Game Changer in a Competitive World Location: OSI-New York Event Date: February 28, 2011 Event Time: 5:30 - 8:00 p.m. Click Here to RSVP Join Randal D. Pinkett, PhD, MBA, and leaders in philanthropy, education, community building, and social entrepreneurship as they discuss strategies for black men and boys to "redefine the game" at work, at home, and in their communities. The event is hosted by the Open Society Campaign for Black Male Achievement, in partnership with the Association of Black Foundation Executives, the 21st Century Foundation and the Schott Foundation for Public Education Black Male Donor Collaborative. In their book Black Faces in White Places, authors Randal D. Pinkett and Jeffrey Robinson seek to answer the question "What happens once you break past the glass ceiling?" Based on interviews with dozens of prominent African-Americans and the authors' considerable experiences in business, in the public eye, and in the minority, the book offers 10 "game-changing strategies" for learning, playing, mastering, and redefining the game for the current generation. Ultimately, it is about changing the very concept of success itself. Panelists · Nicole Sharpe, Director of the Schott Foundation for Public Education Black Male Donor Collaborative (moderator) · Susan Taylor Batten, President/CEO of the Association of Black Foundation Executives · Chandra Anderson, Interim President, 21st Century Foundation · Roger Blissett, Managing Director, US Strategy, RBC Capital Markets · Michael Lewis, Graduate of Hunter College and Member of Hunter's Black Male Initiative Program Can and Will Black School Operators Manage Turnaround Schools? Why aren't African-centered charters running turnarounds? Overhauls of poor inner city schools are now big business nationwide, but some successful school operators are still on the sidelines. by Benjamin Herold By many indicators, Imhotep Institute Charter High School is one of Philadelphia's most successful high schools. Imhotep sends more of its graduates - 66 percent - to college than any other charter school in the city. And last year, the school's 525 students, 99 percent of them African American and 87 percent low income, had proficiency rates above 70 percent in reading and math. Just as importantly, says 10th grader Khaliah Arrington, Imhotep's African-centered approach creates a nurturing atmosphere that more traditional schools can't match. "They teach you like your family teaches you," says Arrington. "At other schools, you might get good academics, but when you go to Imhotep, you learn about yourself." With the School District of Philadelphia actively shopping for successful charter operators to manage its lowest-performing schools - many of which are almost entirely African-American - Imhotep might seem a natural fit. But during the second year of Superintendent Arlene Ackerman's Renaissance Schools initiative, neither Imhotep nor any of Philadelphia's six other African-centered school operators will be in the mix to manage schools. Why? A national issue Student from Imhotep Institute Charter High School The dynamic is not unique to Philadelphia. There are no African-centered school operators in the country participating in the current wave of school turnarounds, says Taki Raton, an adjunct professor of education at Springfield College in Milwaukee and the founder and former principal of the African-centered Blyden Delaney Academy there. "Ironically, people do not turn to us to do this work," Raton says. That's partially because African-centered operators as a group lack the capacity to make sure they have a seat at the table when large reforms like school turnaround are rolled out, he says. Many are also reluctant to make the necessary compromises in order to participate in such mainstream reform efforts. Imhotep founder and CEO Christine Wiggins, for example, says she was approached by Philadelphia School District officials about applying to be a Renaissance provider, but decided against it. "I don't want to play the game," Wiggins says. Wiggins wants to grow Imhotep, but her preference would be to expand her existing school to accommodate a 500-family waiting list. That strategy is born in part from deep skepticism of the District's support for the African-centered approach. Wiggins, who worked for the District for over two decades before opening her school, says flatly that the District "was not going to approve any [Renaissance applicant] who was culturally relevant." A different approach It's true that the four Renaissance providers who took over Philadelphia schools last fall employ a set of common practices that align closely with the reforms currently favored by the Obama Administration. While distinct, each emphasizes creating an "achievement-focused" school culture and remediating basic skills, and each relies heavily on student performance data to guide instruction. Children's race and culture, to the extent that they are addressed at all, are primarily viewed as separate from the primary business of teaching reading and arithmetic. Imhotep, on the other hand, uses a student-centered approach to give students a "total immersion in their culture," says Wiggins. "We tell the whole story, which says that all humankind started on the continent of Africa, and we find out what's important to [students] and use that love to stimulate [their] want for learning." The school uniform at Imhotep is black pants and a dashiki, and the halls are lined with flags of African nations. Lessons in all subjects are infused with African history, and all students take part in a "rites of passage" process focused on formally preparing them for adulthood. "Last year, we were blindfolded [as part of an exercise], showing us how it was on the slave ships," said 10th grader Arrington of the rites of passage process. "Each year it gets more intense." Students are prepared not just for standardized tests or even college, say school leaders, but to become "intellectual warriors" working for the "redemption of African people." That kind of focus on creating a positive racial identity can make a big difference for Black children, says Howard Stevenson, an education professor at the University of Pennsylvania. "If you have a school that is teaching race consciousness, it can help [students] emotionally and academically," Stevenson says. "Kids develop coping strategies, and they don't feel like they have to overreact - or underreact - to stressful situations." Rallying the operators But while there are highly regarded African-centered schools in many cities across the country, including Philadelphia, Chicago, and Kansas City, there has not yet been any national research systematically assessing the model's effectiveness. In fact, there is no general agreement on the number of African-centered schools currently operating, in part because there are no broadly accepted criteria for what constitutes "true" African-centeredness. Those realities point to a deeper cause of African-centered schools' marginalization in wider school reform efforts, says Amefika Geuka, co-founder of the Joseph Littles-Nguzo Saba Charter School in West Palm Beach, Fla. "It's been extremely difficult to get [African-centered] charter operators to come together," Geuka says. "We are not taking care of the business of organizing ourselves." Last year, at age 69, Geuka walked 1,069 miles from West Palm Beach to Washington, D.C., to raise awareness about the need for African-centered education for Black children, but the impact of his effort was limited. "You have Black folks who say they want a better education for their children, but they can't define what they mean by that," says Geuka, explaining the paucity of Black parents demanding African-centered education. African-centered school operators have struggled to build collective capacity, he adds, partly because of old ideological debates and partly because of the demands of running their schools. The experience of Philadelphia's largest Black-run charter operator, Universal Companies, highlights this dynamic. Universal, which operates three charters, including two Renaissance turnarounds, would like to be more African-centered, said President and CEO Rahim Islam. But the organization's founders felt that adopting such an approach early on would have compromised their ability to grow. "We made a strategic organizational decision early on that we had to crawl before we could walk," said Islam. "The first thing we had to do was build the capacity to open a school. We couldn't do both." Regardless of the challenges, says Geuka, African-centered operators are "showing no vision whatsoever." "It's going to be as lucrative to have a charter to operate a public school as it is to have a franchise to operate a McDonald's. We need to have schools in order to make sure we are in a position to get our children's proportionate share of the resources." With the rapid growth of large charter management organizations capable of running numerous schools across multiple cities and states, he adds, that need is ever more urgent. The fast-growing network of so-called "No Excuses" charter schools, for example, includes several organizations - the majority of which are headed by Whites - that have positioned themselves to capitalize on the seismic shifts underway in American public education. KIPP, for example, is the best-established "No Excuses" provider, already operating 99 schools in 20 states serving 27,000 students - 95 percent of them African-American or Latino. Furthermore, major philanthropic groups like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation continue to support the expansion of many "No Excuses" operators, and independent capacity-building organizations like the New Schools Venture Fund support the replication and dissemination of their models. Mastery Charter Schools in Philadelphia is a local charter operator that has benefited from that support. "I have no competition with a KIPP or a Mastery, because I don't have the money to have a competition with them," says Wiggins. "We're all just trying to fight for our lives." Fathers and Sons and Daughters Chess Night The Chicago Million Fathers Club sponsors an event to help fathers and men teach youth focus, observation, concentration, planning, thinking and discipline. In America, Celebrate Black History Month by "Taking a Young Black Man to Worship" On Sunday, February 27, 2011, if your faith-based institution is not inviting, embracing and supporting young Black men, WHY NOT? You have plenty time to organize a successful "Take a Young Black Man to Worship Day." Call Bruce at 773.285.9600 to register. Take a young Black man to worship at your church, mosque, temple, synagogue or place of worship in your home town. The Black Star Project's Million Father Movement is partnering with the most dynamic force in the America--the faith community. Churches, mosques, temples and synagogues across the country are working together on "Take a Black Male to Worship Day," Sunday, February 27, 2011. Faith-based institutions throughout America are participating in this event. We are especially asking fathers, grandfathers, foster fathers, stepfathers, uncles, cousins, big brothers, mentors, deacons, trustees, male choir members, significant male caregivers and family friends to join The Black Star Project in this movement. Women and men of all ethnicities are also encouraged to "Take a Black Male to Worship Day." Please email blackstar1000@ameritech.netor call Bruce Walker at 773.285.9600 to bring this effort to your city, to receive a complete organizing kit or for guidance concerning this event. Participating faith-based institutions will be listed in our national directory. If your faith institution is not participating, why not? Please ask your faith leader to ensure that your faith-based institution participates in this event. If you wish to participate in or lead the effort in your city or in your congregation on Sunday, February 27, 2011, (or your day of worship near this date), please call Bruce Walker at 773.285.9600 for an organizing kit and to register or email blackstar1000@ameritech.net. Those who want to control the spirits and the minds of their children rather than wait for others to educate their children should join The Black Star Project in this effort at 773.285.9600 or visit our educational programs at www.blackstarproject.org. Support the Work of The Black Star Project For more information on our other programs and how you can get involved, click on these links below or please call 773.285.9600: Become a Member of The Black Star Project Get Information on The Black Star Project
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