On February 16, the Union League Club gave out its Democracy in Action award to deserving local high school students, and Mayor Daley was on hand to give a rousing speech—calling on regular public schools to make like the charters and transform ordinary neighborhood students into high-scoring, high-achieving, college-bound stars.

What Mayor Daley didn’t say—what he probably didn’t even know—is that just days before his speech eight students from Pritzker College Prep, a school just down the street from Kelvyn Park, unceremoniously showed up at Kelvyn’s door, having flunked out, dropped out, or been kicked out.

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They’re the educational flavor of the day in the mainstream media, and they’ve got lots of friends in high places. It seems like just about every charter school success story is really an unveiled assault on teachers and their unions, as though every spike in charter test scores or every low-income charter student who goes to college is somehow proof that class, race, parental background, class size, and all the other usually cited impediments to academic success no longer matter. Because the real problem with education today—as the mayor was saying—is lazy teachers and their unions.

Pritzker is part of the growing Noble Street charter school empire. Created in 1991 by Michael and Tonya Milkie, the empire began with one school, at 1010 N. Noble (hence, the name) and has since expanded to nine other campuses. In September, U.S. Department of Education secretary Arne Duncan—an old Noble fan from his days as CEO of the Chicago Public Schools—awarded a $10.8 million grant to Noble, which the Milkies say they will use to expand five of their existing campuses and add six new ones by 2015. By then, Noble will enroll roughly 10,000 students—10 percent of the city’s high school population, according to a press release on its website.

Instead, like all charters, Pritzker’s budget largely comes from public money—state and local property tax dollars. For every child enrolled—about 700 this year, say Sierra—the school gets about $9,519, according to state educational officials. It works out to about $6.6 million a year.

The average ACT score at Pritzker is about 20. The average CPS score is 17.3, and the maximum is 36.

At Kelvyn Park, 13.4 percent of the students speak limited English, compared to about 5 percent at Pritzker.