The Cristo Rey Story - Book 3

Finally I've read a book for 52 Books in 52 Weeks that falls definitely in the suggested guidelines.  It is not a child's book, it is longer than 100 pages!  It is not a reread!  The book is The Cristo Rey Story, More Than a Dream; How One School's Vision Is Changing the World by G. R. Kearney.  That's quite a title!

I can't remember where I picked up this book, but it is sort of part of my continuing fascination with Jesuits.  My dad attended a Jesuit seminary and growing up we always thought of Jesuits as the pinnacle of everything that is good in Catholicism in my family.  After losing my religion for a long time in my teens and my twenties, I started back on my long reversion to the faith.  I was shocked to discover how many orthodox Catholics belittled or disdained the Jesuits.  It seems that the Jesuit order had fallen away from orthodoxy and seemingly had embraced modern culture, openly disregarding Church teachings on things like abortion, etc.  Wow, what a bummer, I thought.  But slowly I began to discover 'good' Jesuits, like Father Fessio of Ignatius Press, Father Mitch Pacwa of EWTN, Father Joseph Koterski of Fordham University, Father John McCloskey, who catechized and baptized Dr. Bernard Nathansen, the founder of NARAL, and finally Father James Martin, who is a prolific and bestselling author.

This book is about other Jesuits doing good things, in spite of the fact that at the same time, they were seemingly missing a lot in terms of being faithful Catholics in other aspects of their order.  They began and expanded a remarkably successful model for college prep high schools in impoverished areas of the United States.  When the Jesuits were first opening schools, way, way back when, these schools were aimed at the poor.  Jesuits are supposed to serve the poor, that's part of their charism.  If you think about it though, now we associate their schools with middle/upper class college prep schools.   I know in DC Gonzaga High School is a very popular high school and many people in Northern VA send their boys there.  You can see the tell-tale big G emblazoned on the back of many a Lexus and other high end cars around the area.  You have to have money to send your son there!  This change from serving the poor to serving the rich happened because of the shrinking of the order over the past decades coupled with the rising cost of education.  It took more and more money to run a private school with less and less Jesuits to run them.

So the beauty of Cristo Rey High Schools is that the Jesuit order came up with a plan to fund a great high school for very impoverished, endangered kids from the ghetto without having to charge high tuition.  They did it through a really visionary combination of things.  First they have something called CIP, or Corporate Internship Partnership.  Each student in the school spends one day each week working for a corporate sponsor. In essense, 5 kids job share at a particular site, each taking a day a week to work there.  The kids do things like work in mailrooms, copy centers, act as messengers, etc.  That sponsor 'pays' the student by contributing a contracted amount of money to the school.  This is a win-win situation.  It helps the student immensely.  Most of these students have grown up in violent, drug-infested, dysfunctional families and neighborhoods.  They have never really seen what life is like outside their own 'hoods.'  Putting them into the working world in a professional capacity, opens up their eyes to the possibilities out there.  It gives them responsibilities they wouldn't normally have and it hones their work ethic and social skills.

The school is also dedicated to treating Latinos with respect and they work carefully to balance the students needs between learning English and maintaining their Spanish.  The CIP also helps them become truly bilingual.  Most of these kids are Latinos who live in Spanish-speaking communities and have never made it out of their ESL programs in the public schools.  Learning to be fluent in English is a huge boost for a Latino teenager.

Another thing the school does is it focuses on what an impoverished Latino student needs to get into and stay in college.  The school developed something called an Active Learners class where the students were taught critical thinking skills, problem solving skills, and writing skills.  This class uses all sorts of topics as a jumping off point for developing projects that would teaching them valuable skills.  Sometimes the students rebelled and wanted more traditional classes.  At one point the students said they just wanted to learn history and not do all these fancy projects, so the teacher turned this request to learn history into a project!  The students had to research three topics in history they wanted to know more about (of course learning about the topics as they researched!).  They then had to present arguments for why the class should learn their particular projects.  Then the students had to vote on what projects they'd be able to focus on in class.  The teacher was really a genius at this sort of thing, though his highly unorthodox methods often got him into trouble.  However, the Active Learners class was always controversial and in the end it got axed to give time to more traditional subjects.  The students who had graduated from Cristo Rey and gone on to college came back to say that they did not feel prepared for college level history and literature classes.  They felt Cristo Rey needed to focus more on those subjects.  Another teacher, who in the beginning years of the school, was very traditionalist in his approach eventually was asked to not return one year.  So there was a constant tension between being innovative with the curriculum and providing traditional curriculum.

The book is largely about financing.  I don't know much at all about how to finance businesses and do fundraising for non-profits but it is extremely vital in order to begin a new private educational system.  This book gives the reader a little peek into that side of the business world, though I can't say I understood most of it, I came to appreciate how heroic it actually is to find, court and beg these big corporations and rich folks to fund a worthy cause.  Cristo Rey got its big break first from a man who'd made it rich in Silicon Valley and wanted to give back to the Jesuits who had educated him out of poverty.  Then, several years later, Bill and Melinda Gates got into the picture.  As the first Cristo Rey high school became financially solvent and proved to be fulfilling its goal of college prep for poor inner city Latinos, other educators around the country began to request help in setting up their own Cristo Rey high schools.  Another teaching religious order got involved as well; the De La Salle Christian Brothers got involved in setting up the high schools too.  Now something called the Cristo Rey Network exists, with many of the original entrepreneurs working for it, who help set up and run these high schools.

The most heartening thing about this book is the sheer number of priests (and some sisters), who so obviously devote their lives to helping the poor.  You definitely admire these selfless and hardworking people who live to serve the youths in need.

The author's writing style is a bit choppy, I found.  He writes very much like a reporter so I felt like I was reading one very long newspaper article.  But overall I enjoyed this book very much.  It taught me a lot about things I had never thought about before and it is a very optimistic book that makes one feel hopeful about mankind's future.