Urban League calls for coordinated plan to help city's blacks

Well if I were them I'd ditch public education. Perhaps not ditch it investment is necessary but there needs to be reforms. There has to be a guarantee that teachers will be held accountable and that parents won't be forced to send their kids to failing schools. And maybe the time will come where public schools will be forced to compete with each other and private schools for enrollment.

There are a lot of ways to attack this issue so let's just go to Crain's Chicago Business for this story...

Chicago’s black middle class could shrink dramatically if civic and corporate leaders fail to financially support public education and entrepreneurial development.

That’s the warning being sounded by the Chicago Urban League, which on Wednesday released a report to identify the key areas that can either make or break economic development for blacks in the Chicago area.

The report, done in conjunction with San Francisco-based consulting firm Global Business Network, was “intended to highlight the need for a unified, coordinated economic development plan for African American Chicago.”

It was funded from a $6.2 million grant that the BP Foundation is providing to the Chicago Urban League over a three-year-period to develop programs to help blacks, and the Chicago area, prosper.

The Chicago Urban League boasts that Cook County is the most densely black populated county in the nation with 1.4 million blacks. Of those, 1.1 million live in the city’s limits, representing 37% of Chicago’s residents.

Cheryle Jackson, president and chief executive officer of the Chicago Urban League, said the goal of the study was to identify areas of deficiency then use that information to help formulate possible solutions such as creating a business network to help African American-owned firms get advice from non-minority owned companies.

“It is always good to set a course,” she said.

In other news the Chicago Public Schools are seeking more money from Springfield. Yeah good luck, it was hard to get them to really move swiftly on the CTA issue late last year!