Inner-city Chicago charter school has perfect college acceptance rate

Story here. How about that!? Geez, if you give a whit about them and teach them the way they need to be taught, boys CAN actually succeed and even EXCEL in school! Wow, what a novel concept! And it works for girls, too. It's just that that particular approach has been applied to all our public schools, and so, the results are well-known there: fast-diminishing graduation and college acceptance rates for boys while girls continue to increase their level of excellence -- at the boys' expense. Excerpt:

'Chicago – In Chicago, the graduation rate for African-American boys is about 40 percent, and only about half of all students are accepted to some form of college. The chances of young black men going to college – particularly young men from the poorest neighborhoods – are not good.

But the Urban Prep (link added) charter school, located in the city's tough Englewood neighborhood, has produced a very different statistic. In March, this school, which is made up of young African-American men, announced that all 107 boys in its first graduating class have been accepted to a four-year college. Just 4 percent of those seniors were reading at grade level as freshmen.

It's a remarkable achievement for any urban high school, but particularly one with a population that some people are inclined to write off. It has educators examining what aspects of the school are responsible – and how replicable they are.

Some elements are easy to quantify: an extended school day that means students have an additional 72,000 minutes in school each year, a double period of English, and required extracurriculars and public service.

But many more elements seem embedded into a culture that is based on four R's, as founder and CEO Tim King describes it: ritual, respect, responsibility, and relationships.
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Most important, King says: College graduation, not admission, is the goal. The school is doing what it can to prepare students for the leap they'll make when they move to a college campus. For one thing, most students participate in at least one summer college program. Also, counselors will be assigned to all graduates to help them over the next few years.

"It will be very hard for them, which is why we want to have this support piece in place so students don't give up," says King.

The 100 percent acceptance "is a big deal," he adds. "But we don't consider it a completion of our mission. We consider it a milestone.... We're supposed to make sure that they finish college."'