Book Review: Urban preparation: Young Black men moving from Chicago’s South Side to success in higher education

UP’s Theoretical Framework

Warren (2017) draws on a wide, comprehensive body of scholarship to form his theoretical framework, utilizing historical and contemporary scholarship within critical race theory (CRT), from its beginning in legal studies championed by Derrick Bell and Kimberlé Crenshaw to Gloria Ladson-Billings and William Tate, the scholars who moved CRT to the educational discipline. Through this framework, Warren (2017) advances his commitment to “empirical research that opposes widespread deficit discourses and perspectives about Black people, Black communities, and Black men in particular” (p. 5). Warren is critical of his own experiences as a young Black teacher, admitting a meritorious agenda that highlighted the importance of tertiary education as a pathway to success. His is critical of this stance and thus showcases UP’s position in fostering a single-sex school that is culturally responsive in building its students’ resilience and school-related attributes, careful not to reproduce Woodson’s (1933) oft-relevant critique of urban education today, in that Black students continue to learn a White supremacist curriculum (Ladson-Billings, 1998). According to the author, UP was careful not to replicate internalization and reproduction of Anti-Blackness while critiquing White Supremacy through a traditional college preparatory curriculum. Based on what Warren presents, it seems as though this mission was relatively successful, as the theme of Black excellence thread through the monograph.

Through his “zoom in” and “zoom out” text structure, Warren (2017) develops five composite characters: Reggie, Antwan, Jeff, Winston, and Quentin, who attended the first cohort and are on track to graduating a 4-year university. While his composite characters fail to differentiate to the reader, edging more closely to the monolith he states he does not want to create, the composite characters humanize the young Black men from the “hood” many readers would not otherwise “meet.” As previous high school teachers in similar environments, we know how dynamically individual these young men could have been portrayed, but in Warren’s rendering of the information into themes and topics, the composite characters’ stories come across as generalized and underdeveloped.

Advancing the Narrative of Meritocracy?

Warren directs his readers through humanizing the macro-level ecological effects of urban education policy with the counter-narratives of the young men in his sample to highlight his participants’ trajectories from Chicago’s South Side to collegiate “success.” Warren (2017) deconstructs the epistemic notion of success, and challenges its discoursal power. He posits that “educators must commit to meaningful conversations and activities with individual young men around the meaning of success . . . and must co-construct a vision of success specific to teach young man” (p. 167). He argues that idealized, dominant notions of success, often disseminated through and by teachers and administrators, tend to essentialize Black male youth. “100% College Acceptance,” therefore, may place the young man on a trajectory for his perceived path to “success,” but the notion itself is nebulous unless attended to by educators. While the author “zooms out” to discuss how the participants’ notions of success rely on the meritocratic notions of tertiary education UP espoused, he does not offer critique of how this could further “policy, theory, practice, and action” (Milner, 2017, p. vii) in promoting education for students of color from underresourced areas in public schooling.

Charter Schools Within the Public Realm

Chicago Public Schools’ transitional shift to employing a more market-driven model was with the policy Renaissance 2010. The policy’s language situates it as an opportunity for new schools to be opened to take the place of those schools deemed struggling or failing by district officials. This opened the doors for the Urban Preparation Charter School Network, the now infamous all-male high school with the mission to provide a high-quality, comprehensive education that will afford students success in college. The first campus was opened in the Englewood Technical High School building in 2006, and 4 years later, UP was able to coin its “100% College Acceptance” trait. The hallmark of this charter school is the uniform: khaki pants, white shirts, UP emblazoned black blazers, and red ties, transitioning to a gold tie when the young man received his first college acceptance.

Warren attends to the limitations of a single-sex monoracial charter school in his distinction of marketing and recruitment. He applies CRT to illustrate UP’s reliance on the “normative social identity hierarchies which cause Black men to operate within the binary of good Black man or bad Black man” (p. 67). Through marketing techniques in branding the school as college preparatory and the media’s fetishization of the dress code, Warren aims to demystify the air of success around this particular school through the counterstory of his participants. In his discussion of the initial recruitment process of the school, he shows that often the students felt the expectations and the mission of the school. He quotes Antwan:

I made the right decision though [to attend UP]. But I feel like for everybody, just because of the situation in the neighborhoods we grew up in, I feel like definitely the way Urban Prep is structured, you know, people are there to support you, that believe in you, that you’re not doing it by yourself. I feel like that helps a lot of students out. I made that right decision. (p. 64)

Warren furthers that it was this type of support in high school that underscored the collegiate experiences of the young men. He posits that it is the makeup of the charter school that situates the school in a unique position to support the young men. However, despite the myriad research that makes empirical the disservice the United States’s social institutions are having on Black men and boys, Warren does not advance an agenda for teachers, administrators, or policy makers in the general education system.

Furthermore, the research site of Urban Preparation is a charter school, contentiously on the side of the “school choice” agenda. While Warren cites the statistics and arguments about the disservice public schools and educators given to Black males, he does gloss over some of the effects of a charter school as a research site, including “cream-skimming” student enrollment, severe discipline practices, outside funding for resources in recruitment and marketing, and nonunionized teachers (Lipman, 2013). However, there is space for a deeper examination of the disinvestment in CPS’ public schools nor UP’s position within these larger issues, often painting a nonpositive light on the possible good work being done within nearby South Side public schools. In a market-driven educational system like CPS, Warren only briefly analyzes the neoliberal agenda of which competition and the markets may have privileged the charter school network, which seems to be a macro-level aspect in the UP phenomenon. However, he does give the caveat that “charter schools should not and cannot be positioned as a panacea to problems that extend far outside of the school walls” (p. 58). In addition, he does situate his work in the future aspects of schooling—how the institution of public education can be restructured to better respond to Black males—and how the young men in his study are no different from the young men enrolled in nearby CPS-run schools—but not enough.

Discussion

In attempting to pinpoint how UP affected the trajectory of young Black males from Chicago’s South Side to and through college, Warren highlights the following findings from his participant data: struggle as both a positive and negative force which motivates educational trajectory, critical navigation skills, and creation of positive interpersonal relationships inside and outside of the local school context. Warren posits that the school’s focus on community and brotherhood “create a space for the explicit acknowledgement and affirmation of young Black men’s various cultural identities, which can promote greater school engagements” (p. 180). Warren concludes the book with recommendations for contemporary Urban Education Reform, yet is careful to point out that “it is misguided to think that a few generic recommendations can be the revolution that is needed, considering the failures of school reform in Black communities (and other communities of color)” (p. 174). He implores the educators and the academy to explicitly identify how “anti-Blackness permeates our thinking about Black youth and Black communities” (p. 175) through listening to and learning from Black youth. He does not argue that the only way to better educate Black men is through a single-sex charter school, but through a strong support network, dismantling anti-Blackness and White supremacist undertones within our schools, and an understanding that Black men and boys are capable of thriving and achieving in academic institutions. Urban Preparation can play an important role within teacher education, as it is couched within the time period of #BlackLivesMatter, and an increased application of CRT within and outside of education.