Urban Prep West Campus closing, another dent in Chicago education

Wikipedia Photo

Continuing the further erosion of education on Chicago’s South and West sides, and what many observers are seeing as a concerted effort to reduce Chicago’s black population, the Chicago Public School announcement, this week, that Urban Prep Charter will close, brought both shock, and concern, to local educators and community leaders.

Coming closely on the heels of the end of the victory of a new contract that ended, the nation’s first charter school teacher strike, at Acero, another charter, serving mostly Latinx students, has now shown, to many education advocates, without a doubt that the effort to preserve schools for mostly black students is tenuous, at best.

The Chicago Teachers Union,  in their statement, noted that they were “disappointed to learn of Chicago Public Schools’ plans to close Urban Prep Academy’s West Campus. The Union’s position on school closings has long been clear: We oppose the closure of any school for the same reasons we oppose charter expansion. Both have destabilizing effects on communities and lead to privatization of public education at the expense of those our schools should serve.”

While the value of charter schools, versus neighborhood schools has been part of a long simmering debate, across the nation’s urban cores, they are also acknowledged to have become a part of  America’s educational landscape, it has also resisted unionized teachers, offering both educators, and staff, lowered salaries, and benefits, which was the dominant issue with Acero.

The end result, as we have seen, has been frequent teacher departures, less academic cohesiveness, and a decline in test results; which have consistently been higher, (especially in Chicago), in traditional neighborhood schools.

When Mayor Rahm Emanuel closed 50 schools, during 2013, in predominantly black neighborhoods under the guise of improving them, only to have some turned into North Side luxury condos, (as was done with Uptown’s Graeme Stewart), or had money earmarked for other schools siphoned off to real estate developers, the effect has devastated these areas, not only for the students, but also as an anchor for their communities.

Added to the economic disinvestment, and high crime, and decreased housing value, that these neighborhoods, and their students face, the situation is dire: another nail in the coffin for community disenfranchisement, and one that reached its peak in the administration of the incumbent, and now departing, Emanuel.

An earlier report, this year, from the Washington  Post noted. “Schools officials and Mayor Rahm Emanuel made this promise to nearly 12,000 mostly African American students from families living in poverty: When you are sent to a new school, there will be better opportunities for academic success. But a new report says that isn’t exactly what happened.”

“Closing schools has been a favored tool among school reformers who have tried to operate public schools as if they were businesses rather than civic institutions. Though research has shown that promised academic gains don’t materialize, reformers have closed schools anyway, sometimes because they were underused or persistently low performers, or to address financial woes,” The Post added..

Citing a University of Chicago report, “researchers looked at the short-term and multi-year effects of the closures on students’ academic, behavioral and other outcomes. They sought to answer two questions about the school closings, which were strongly opposed by the affected communities.”

They discovered, in part, the following:

●     School staff said that the planning process for merging closed schools into welcoming schools was not sufficient, resulting in staff feeling unprepared.

●     When schools closed, it severed the longstanding social connections that families and staff had with their schools and with one another, resulting in a period of mourning.

●     A lack of proactive efforts to support welcoming school communities in integrating the populations created challenging “us” vs. “them” dynamics.

●     Students affected by school closures did experience negative learning effects, especially students from closed schools.

●     The largest negative impact of school closures was on the test scores of students from closed schools; their scores were lower than expected the year of the announcement.

“But the closure of Urban Prep West, a school serving a student population made up entirely of African-American males, goes one step further in its negative impact as it represents another chapter in the wholesale removal of Black and Brown people from our city,” CTU said.

Looking back at the recent gubernatorial campaign, then candidate Chris Kennedy “opined that the mayor’s planning policies were intended to drive black people out of town,” reported the Chicago Reader, recently, and CTU concurs when they emphasize that they “are steadfastly opposed to the school’s closure, which would only exacerbate the Negro Removal Act that Mayor Rahm Emanuel has put in place since taking office in 2010.”

Bloated executive salaries seem to be part and parcel of many charter school criticisms, as they operate, for profit with tax payer money, and, as we saw with Acero, we now see with Urban Prep; only in this case they planned a Westward expansion.

“Urban Prep last year chose to expand its organization rather than invest in the classrooms, staff and students they currently serve. Urban Prep applied for, and was granted, a contract to run a charter school in Las Vegas under Nevada's Achievement School District. The Achievement School District operates much like other state takeovers of urban school districts, where privatized charter operators are hired to take over struggling, under-resourced public schools.

According to documents submitted to the Nevada Department of Education, Urban Prep management created a full-time, six-figure position specifically for its expansion effort, and top officials took numerous trips to Las Vegas over the past year to secure its expansion. Meanwhile, Urban Prep has one of the most bloated central office operations of any charter school in CPS, serving fewer than 800, yet spending $1.3 million on executive and central office administration (or $1,700 per student).”

The loss of funds to traditional neighborhood schools, by charters, has peeled away, both at the lives and fabric of American cities, plus its black and brown children, but also the social capital of cities, that are often economically marginalized; and the loss of Chicago’s Urban Prep, is another step in misalignment.