The Homecoming pep rally is a time-honored tradition in American high schools. Bands, cheerleaders, dance teams, and athletes perform for cheering crowds of students sporting colorful t-shirts and waving banners and signs. Pep rallies are loud, boistrous, and, above all, joyous occasions for students and staff alike to demonstrate their school spirit, filling the school gym with color, sound, and enthusiasm.
Getting to the pep rally is usually easy; everyone walks down the hall to the gym, the center of many school events. No big deal, right? But what if your school gym is more than five miles away on the other side of town? And what if you need to move almost a thousand students and staff to the gym for this terrific event? It would take a fleet of 20 or more busses to accomplish the move. Or, you can take the "Spirit Express."
Jones College Prep is on State Street in downtown Chicago, and just outside our gate is the CTA "Red Line" subway station. Each year Jones charters a CTA subway train, christened the "Spirit Express" for the occasion, to take us all to our gym facility at the former Near North high school campus on the other side of downtown. Taking the train is not a novelty for our students, as most of them take public transportation to school. Taking the train with 800 of your closest friends is something else entirely.
An old travel slogan once proclaimed, "Getting there is half the fun!" While the "Spirit Express" is no cruise line, the fun of our Homecoming pep rally begins on the subway platform.
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Saturday, January 16, 2010
Jones College Prep: An Urban Education Success Story
The national media are saturated with stories of the crisis of American public education. The failures of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), dismal test scores, abysmal dropout rates, violence-plagued schools dominate the headlines. At the epicenter of these reports are major urban public school systems, such as Chicago. Not discounting the many challenges, the media continue to follow the time-honored credo of news reporting: "If it bleeds, it leads." While the bleeding is sometimes literal, the impact of this coverage contributes to a broad, national image of failure.
If one looks beyond the headlines, the picture is not by any means universally bad. Ask parents, teachers, and students in many school districts around the country and you will find genuine satisfaction with their local schools, satisfaction that is backed up by hard data of real student achievement. Even in the most struggling school systems, there are individual schools and programs that demonstrate public schools are not in their death throws. One such urban success story is the Chicago Public Schools' selective enrollment high school program. Initiated in 1998 to provide greater academic rigor, nine selective enrollment high schools serve approximately 12,000 students from all over the city of Chicago.
Jones College Prep opened in 1998 in a building that had previously housed a business education school. Located on State Street in the South Loop area, Jones is Chicago's only downtown high school and the premier selective enrollment school in the city's educational and cultural corridor. Just steps from Lake Michigan, Jones is surrounded by the downtown locations of DePaul, Roosevelt, and Robert Morris universities and Columbia College. The Field Museum, Shedd Aquarium, Adler Planetarium, Grant and Millennium parks, and Chicago's many professional theaters are within easy walking distance. The school has developed partnerships with many of these institutions and takes full advantage of its location.
Jones students come from all over Chicago and represent the full spectrum of the city's population, racially, ethnically, and socio-economically. More than 72% of its students are minority, and 56% qualify for the free/reduced lunch program. Jones is not a gifted program; what the students have in common is the desire to learn and the willingness to work hard to achieve their educational goals. They are served by a talented and dedicated faculty devoted to student success.
The results are gratifying. Graduation rates are near 100%. Student performance on the ACT and the Illinois PSAE assessment place Jones in the "Top 10" in Illinois, ranking alongside affluent suburban powerhouse New Trier. The 150 students in the Class of 2009 were offered more that $20 million in college scholarships. In recognition of this success, Jones was named a "Blue Ribbon School" by the US Department of Education, the first Chicago public school so honored. US News and World Report recently rated Jones a "Gold Medal" school (in the top 100 schools nationally) in their annual "America's Best High Schools."
The next time you hear or read about the latest crisis in American public education, remember there are many success stories that do not make the headlines.
If one looks beyond the headlines, the picture is not by any means universally bad. Ask parents, teachers, and students in many school districts around the country and you will find genuine satisfaction with their local schools, satisfaction that is backed up by hard data of real student achievement. Even in the most struggling school systems, there are individual schools and programs that demonstrate public schools are not in their death throws. One such urban success story is the Chicago Public Schools' selective enrollment high school program. Initiated in 1998 to provide greater academic rigor, nine selective enrollment high schools serve approximately 12,000 students from all over the city of Chicago.
Jones College Prep opened in 1998 in a building that had previously housed a business education school. Located on State Street in the South Loop area, Jones is Chicago's only downtown high school and the premier selective enrollment school in the city's educational and cultural corridor. Just steps from Lake Michigan, Jones is surrounded by the downtown locations of DePaul, Roosevelt, and Robert Morris universities and Columbia College. The Field Museum, Shedd Aquarium, Adler Planetarium, Grant and Millennium parks, and Chicago's many professional theaters are within easy walking distance. The school has developed partnerships with many of these institutions and takes full advantage of its location.
Jones students come from all over Chicago and represent the full spectrum of the city's population, racially, ethnically, and socio-economically. More than 72% of its students are minority, and 56% qualify for the free/reduced lunch program. Jones is not a gifted program; what the students have in common is the desire to learn and the willingness to work hard to achieve their educational goals. They are served by a talented and dedicated faculty devoted to student success.
The results are gratifying. Graduation rates are near 100%. Student performance on the ACT and the Illinois PSAE assessment place Jones in the "Top 10" in Illinois, ranking alongside affluent suburban powerhouse New Trier. The 150 students in the Class of 2009 were offered more that $20 million in college scholarships. In recognition of this success, Jones was named a "Blue Ribbon School" by the US Department of Education, the first Chicago public school so honored. US News and World Report recently rated Jones a "Gold Medal" school (in the top 100 schools nationally) in their annual "America's Best High Schools."
The next time you hear or read about the latest crisis in American public education, remember there are many success stories that do not make the headlines.
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