Urban Prep and The Whole Story

Urban Prep Charter Academy is a charter school in Chicago that serves young black men and serves them very well. Their success with getting their first class into college is outstanding.

So let me be perfectly clear -- I applaud Urban Prep's work in getting all 107 of their seniors into college, but according to their Wikipedia page, they started with 150 freshmen.

So what happened to the other 43 students?

Now, I'm guessing there was some student mobility, but not 43 kids. That means that 30% of the kids that started there didn't graduate from there.

I say this for a few reasons...

1) I am skeptical of any education organization that says 100% of their students do anything.

(Full disclosure - SLA will graduate ~90% of the students who started with us and approximately 96% of the kids will go to college, and of those, between 90-95% of them will go to a four year college right away.)

2) I am doubly skeptical of that kind of publicity when it is made by a charter organization that is replicating the model with six new schools, because they - I believe - are under a moral obligation to be powerfully up front about their successes and failures.

3) This is a danger of the "market-driven" forces when applied to education, because a charter management organization like Urban Prep has a powerful incentive to frame the numbers in the best possible light so that they can continue to grow their brand.

4) That's a shame for a number of reasons, but here are two -- a) Urban Prep should be incredibly proud of a 70% graduation rate and a 100% college attendance rate of their graduates. It blows the city average away, and that's incredibly hard to do. but b) it would force all of us to admit that no one -- NO ONE -- has figured out how to serve every student. Not Urban Prep, not KIPP, not SLA. And as sooner as we admit that, the sooner we can start to have a real discussion about what needs to happen in our cities and our schools without thinking that the martyr myth (longer days, longer weeks, etc....) is all that is necessary.

What if the articles actually said, "For the kids who made it through Urban Prep's program, they are all going to a four-year college." What if KIPP said, "Yes, not every kid can handle our program, but the ones who do, do amazingly well after they leave us?" We can assume why some of these organizations don't frame their stories that way. It's a lot harder to get Oprah to give you millions with that statement, and it might be a lot harder to get the monies needed for replication. But that's the conversation we need in this country.

And I hold schools to a much higher standard of disclosure. When schools allow the impression to be that they have solved all the problems, they make it harder to have a real conversation about what we need to do. And again, no one has figured out how to help every kid. The Urban Prep articles makes it seem like if we just taught longer and harder, we'd help all the kids get to college.

5) Michael Klonsky makes a very good point, especially in light of the recent mass-firings in Central Falls. Urban Prep, despite all their work, has ACT scores below the average black male in Chicago and state test scores that are only a few points above the rest of the black male population in Chicago. Now, as someone who thinks that test scores tell an incomplete (at best) story and an inaccurate story at worst, I don't really care that much about their test scores if these kids can go to and thrive at college, but that too needs to be part of the story, because if Urban Prep is a success (and I'd argue that it very much is), then it is yet another data point that should force us to question the validity of the test.

Let me be clear -- I applaud Urban Prep -- they are doing amazing work for an under-served population. They should be celebrated, and we all should study at their successes for what we can learn from their story.

But let's make sure we tell the whole story.