Urban Preparation: Young Black Men Moving from Chicago's South Side to Success in Higher Education
About this ebook
2018 Outstanding Book Award, Society of Professors of Education
Chezare A. Warren chronicles the transition of a cohort of young Black males from Urban Prep Charter Academy for Young Men to their early experiences in higher education. A rich and closely observed account of a mission-driven school and its students, Urban Preparation makes a significant contribution to our understanding of how young males of color can best be served in schools throughout the United States today.
A founding teacher at Urban Prep, Warren offers a detailed exploration of what this single-sex public high school on the South Side of Chicago has managed to accomplish amid profoundly challenging circumstances. He provides a comprehensive portrait of the school—its leaders, teachers, and professional staff; its students; and the community that the school aims to serve—and highlights how preparation for higher education is central to its mission.
Warren focuses on three main goals: to describe Urban Prep’s plans and efforts to prepare young Black males for college; to understand how race, community, poverty, and the school contributed, in complex and interrelated ways, to the academic goals of these students; and to offer a wide-ranging set of conclusions about the school environments and conditions that might help young Black males throughout the country succeed in high school and college.
About the author
Chezare A. Warren is an assistant professor in the Department of Teacher Education at Michigan State University. He is the 2014 recipient of the Outstanding Dissertation Award from the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, and he completed a postdoctoral research fellowship in the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. A Chicago native, Warren has over a decade of professional experience as a public school educator. His research interests include urban teacher preparation, culturally responsive teaching, and critical race theory in education, and his scholarship has been published in several peer-reviewed journals, including Urban Education, Urban Review, Journal of Negro Education, Race, Ethnicity and Education, and Teachers College Record. Warren is past president of the Critical Race Studies in Education Association. He holds a BS in elementary education from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a MA in school leadership from Concordia University–Chicago, and a PhD from the Policy Studies in Urban Education program at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
