RAHM WATCH: Chicago has six of the top high schools in Illinois as part of our real public schools... So why did Rahm Emanuel go to a charter school to tout some questionable numbers claiming school success and ignore the state's best high schools?...
It's only been three days since U.S. News and World Report listed its top high schools in the USA, and once again several Chicago selective enrollment public high schools made the lists. Citizens are unlikely to see Chicago's mayor at any of the graduation ceremonies of the city's real public high schools, whether the selective enrollment high schools that are listed among the "best" in Illinois or the city's general high schools which continue to do their best despite massive attacks by Rahm Emanuel's favored charter schools and the mismanagement and corruption by the Board of Education and Rahm's appointed school system executives. Since his election campaign in 2010 and early 2011, Rahm Emanuel has staged media events where he is surrounded by what critics have dubbed "Rahm's Rainbow" -- the required background of smiling minority people praising the mayor. At Urban Prep, the Rainbow was there for the asking. Reporters who were informed of the event, however, were warned that there would be "no media availability".
Wearing an Urban Prep tie, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel staged a carefully controlled media event and repeated the dubious claims about Urban Prep's four-year-college acceptance rate and other stuff at a May 14, 2015 event. Photo supplied by the taxpayers of the City of Chicago.Why? Someone might have asked for verification of the claims by Urban Prep about their four-year graduation rates, especially in light of the decrease in the number of students who finish at the school by comparison with those who begin in ninth grade. Also of interest would be a check on how many of the graduates who supposedly go on to four year colleges survive there.
But the big story is at Northside College Prep, Whitney Young, Brooks, Payton, and Lane Tech. Chicago's Mayor Emanuel continues to snub the city's real public schools while touting the dubious claims by the city's charter schools. Nationally, Northside College Prep in Chicago was number 15. All of the "best" high schools in the USA are selective enrollment. Six Chicago high schools are among the 20 best in Illinois. All are selective enrollment. But Rahm shuns them all, not only because they are real public schools but because his handlers are afraid that students and faculty would challenge his Hollywood script versions of reality. No one in the city's real public schools expects to see Rahm Emanuel at a graduation this Spring, and his own children attend the expensive University of Chicago Lab School.
He's not alone among major Chicago personalities who steer media towards privatization and away from the real public schools. In one notorious example, Michelle Obama claimed that she was taking the NATO spouses to her former "school" -- and then did a media event for a nearby charter school instead. Michelle Obama graduates from Bryn Mawr Elementary School (now Bouchet) and Whitney Young High School, but steered the media event during NATO to the Gary Comer "campus" of the Noble Network of Charter Schools. None of the reporters present at the time asked her why she had not only been evading her public schools, but actually slandering some of their teachers (as she did when she claimed that Whitney Young counselors had tried to talk her out of applying to Ivy League schools, when actually the advice was just that she should spread her applications around... She continue to repeat that lie, just as the former White House Chief of Staff, Emanuel, continues to fear appearing at any of the city's real public schools.
So on May 14, 2015, Rahm went to Urban Prep, donned one of their ties, did some photo ops, and once again snubbed the city's real public schools. Mayor Privatization and charterization continues to spend public money to send out press releases from the "Mayor's Press Office" like the one below, which went out with a photograph just so reporters could do the whole story.
MAYOR EMANUEL CONGRATULATES URBAN PREP ACADEMY CLASS OF 2015
Urban Prep Seniors Admitted to 180 Colleges and Universities and Received More than $11 Million in Total Scholarship Value
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
May 14, 2015, CONTACT:
Mayor�s Press Office
312.744.3334
press@cityofchicago.org
Mayor Rahm Emanuel visited students at Chicago�s Urban Prep Academy in the Bronzeville neighborhood to celebrate the achievement of this year�s graduating seniors at all of the school�s campuses. Urban Prep Academy will graduate 260 seniors � all African-American young men � at three campuses, including Bronzeville, Englewood and West campuses. This is the sixth year in a row that 100 percent of the graduates were accepted at a 4-year institution.
The 2015 graduating class were admitted to more than 180 colleges and universities across the country, received more than $11 million in college grants and scholarship, and had six Gates Millennium Scholarship winners � more than any other school network in the state.
�Six straight years of 100 percent college acceptance is no exception � that is the expectation of every child in the City of Chicago,� said Mayor Emanuel. �The young men of Urban Prep are continually raising the standard of academic excellence, both here in Chicago and nationally. Congratulations to the students, parents and educators on this incredible achievement.�
The 260 seniors graduating from Urban Prep this year have been accepted into more than 180 colleges and universities across the nation, including Cornell University, Dartmouth College, DePaul University, Fisk University, Florida A&M University, Georgetown University, Howard University, Indiana State University, Marquette University, Morehouse College, Northern Illinois University and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This year, for the first time, Urban Prep seniors have also been admitted to Amherst College, Brown University and Princeton University. �It is not chance that for the sixth year in a row 100% of Urban Prep seniors have been admitted to college, but rather it�s because of the hard work of our students and staff and the culture we�ve built at Urban Prep. Our students are changing the narrative for young Black men from one of negative stereotypes to the real story of being college-bound young men,� said Tim King, Founder and CEO, Urban Prep Academies. �I�m always proud, but never surprised, by the achievements of our young men.� Urban Prep is the country�s first network of charter public high schools for boys. Since accepting its first class in the fall of 2006, Urban Prep has been recognized internationally for success in improving the academic, social, and emotional development of urban young men.
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Photo caption: Mayor Emanuel Celebrates with Urban Prep Academy Class of 2015
Photo credit: Brooke Collins, City of Chicago.
