Swords, Shields, and the Fight for Our Children: Lessons from Urban Prep.

The grim statistics are well known, but bear repeating: here in Chicago, close to 60% of Black boys do not graduate from high school, and only one in forty receive a bachelor's degree by age 25. In the fall of 2006, we opened Urban Prep Charter Academy for Young Men-Englewood Campus, the nation's first all-male charter public high school, knowing that we had to do something differently to succeed. In 2010 and 201 1, 100% of the members of each of our first two graduating classes were admitted to attend four-year colleges or universities. The key to our success has been an ability to build a community that values college education and believes in the ability of its students to achieve. In some places, those values and beliefs are taken for granted; but in Englewood - a neighborhood long-plagued by drugs, gang violence, and some of the nation's worst-performing public schools - building that community took careful focus and clear doing. As a public charter school, there are some big limitations on what our community can look like. Admission is by city-wide lottery, so we do not get to decide which students enroll. Like all public schools, we have minimal control over our funding. And perhaps most importantly, we have very little power to confront the negative influences in the surrounding neighborhood once students have left our building. In light of these limitations, we knew that we had to have the right school culture and to do that, we needed the right faculty and staff. Om- school community is shaped by a culture that makes Urban Prep vastly different from typical public high schools. All students wear a uniform shirt, tie, and blazer; our school day is about two hours longer than other public schools, everyone is referred to by their surnames (so a student is, for example, Mr. Jones not Brandon), and each day begins with a ritual recitation of our school Creed. When we designed our school and selected our founding staff, we knew it would be important to find individuals who could be effective mentors, advocates, and sometimes friends, in addition to being great teachers. We hire teachers based not only on their ability to drive learning in the classroom, but their ability to establish mutual respect and forge productive relationships with their students in the hallways, through activities, and after school. Students almost intrinsically respect that which they are familiar with, so we searched carefully to build a faculty whose background resembles the students'. The majority of our administrators, senior leadership, and teachers are African American men. Many of these members of Team UP (our name for an Urban Prep employee) know first-hand about the struggles our students face; and we make it clear to staff members who do come from different backgrounds that their success will hinge upon an ability and willingness to establish respect through other means, often by immersing themselves in the culture of the urban community. Urban students often lack positive male role models that are active in their own communities. Placing Black men at the top of our school community enables our students to encounter positive men who resemble themselves on a daily basis. In a population where the majority of families are led by a single, female parent, the daily presence of these positive Black male role models often provides students with their first personal encounter of the possibility that their own futures hold. In practice, building these relationships requires a tremendous amount of listening. In the past decade since No Child Left Behind became law (NCLB, 2002), teachers have been increasingly trained to 'listen' to what test score data says about what students know and what they have learned. …