Birdsell, Robert J.

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Conversations on Jesuit Higher EducationVolume 40 Re-creating Jesuit Higher Education: TheGeneral's Challenge Article 249-1-2011The Cristo Rey Story: Serving the Marginalizedthrough Learned MinistryRobert J. BirdsellFollow this and additional works at: http://epublications.marquette.edu/conversationsRecommended CitationBirdsell, Robert J. (2011) "The Cristo Rey Story: Serving the Marginalized through Learned Ministry," Conversations on Jesuit HigherEducation: Vol. 40, Article 24.Available at: http://epublications.marquette.edu/conversations/vol40/iss1/24Conversations 45The Cristo Rey StoryServing the Marginalized through Learned MinistryBy Robert J. BirdsellLast April, Fr. Adolfo Nicolás, S.J., SuperiorGeneral of the Society of Jesus, called onJesuit universities to think with him aboutre-creating the Society of Jesus, to re-createthe journey, to re-create the institutions ofthe Society. It was this spirit of “re-creation”that in 1994 led Fr. Bradley Schaeffer, S.J.,the provincial of the Chicago Province ofthe Society of Jesus, to imagine a new Jesuit institution thatwould help break the paralysis of poverty on Chicago’s nearsouth side. Fr. Schaeffer prayed about the ministries of theSociety and the impact they were having. Through thisprayer, he began to see the need to serve the Mexican immi-grant population in Chicago with a college preparatory highschool. Fr. Schaeffer passionately pursued this desire of pro-viding a Jesuit secondary education to low income students.In 1995, he called Fr. John Foley, S.J., to return from 34 yearsin Peru to open and lead Cristo Rey Jesuit High School. In1996, the school opened its doors to 74 students.Today, there are 24 schools in the Cristo Rey Network,with ten additional communities in some stage of opening aCristo Rey school. Consequently, over 6,500 students are earn-ing a Catholic, college preparatory education, who otherwisewould not have had such an opportunity, had Fr. Schaeffer notlistened to the call to re-create the Society’s institutions to serveone of Chicago’s most marginalized communities. However, the story does not end here. The mission of theCristo Rey Network is not to simply provide thousands of stu-dents a quality high school education; rather, it is to break thecycle of poverty. In the 21st century this means educatingyoung men and women to succeed in college and beyond. The ingenious part of the Cristo Rey story is the much-touted business model – the way the Jesuits re-created themodel of the traditional, private high school. In 1995, when Fr.Schaeffer asked how the school would be funded, Fr. Foleyand his Jesuit brothers turned to a consultant for assistance.How could we fund a private, Catholic high school for eco-nomically disadvantaged youth? We certainly could not chargethe tuition typical of traditional Jesuit high schools. As a result,the idea for the Corporate Work Study Program was born.Today, we have partnerships with over 1,500 corpora-tions, law firms, hospitals and universities that provide entrylevel, professional jobs to every student in the Cristo ReyNetwork. Cristo Rey students, in this year alone, will earnover $30 million to support their education. And many Jesuituniversities are a cornerstone of this partnership by employ-ing students from Cristo Rey schools.Initially, the Corporate Work Study Program was envi-sioned as purely a revenue model to support the schools.Today, we know that the four-year work study experience isa critical component of our students’ educational experience.In fact, we are designing an empirical study to quantify theskills gained on the job that prepare them for success in high-er education – skills like persistence, teamwork and collabo-ration, precision and reasoning strategies. In addition to engaging in a rigorous college academicprogram. Cristo Rey students are taught how to thrive in acivil society. All Cristo Rey freshmen spend three weeks in aRobert J. Birdsell is president and CEO of the Cristo ReyNetwork.1Birdsell: The Cristo Rey Story: Serving the Marginalized through Learned MiPublished by e-Publications@Marquette, 201146 Conversationswork training program that teaches them how to greetcolleagues, shake hands, look people in the eye, dressprofessionally, communicate clearly, and succeed in thework place. This experience is transformative for youngpeople who have never worn a tie, worked in a profes-sional setting, or been expected to look adults in theireyes when they speak to them, and it sets them up forsuccess in work and life.In addition to the 34 communities and 1,500 corpo-rate partners that are part of the Cristo Rey Network, 24universities join with us to ensure the success of our mis-sion. These universities are working deliberately and dili-gently, “networking” as Fr. General suggested, with ourteam and our schools to ensure that every Cristo Rey stu-dent will graduate from college and thus be positionedto “help shape a more humane, just, faith-filled, sustain-able world.”The Cristo Rey Network is a young organization –just ten years old. At the beginning, our work focused onreplicating the success of the Cristo Rey Jesuit HighSchool in Chicago. Two years ago, we too stepped backand began to think about “re-creating” the Cristo ReyNetwork. We asked if all we were being called to do wasreplicate and grow. Was our success simply measured bythe number of schools and number of students beingserved by Cristo Rey schools? After much discernmentand discussion, we felt that we needed to re-create theCristo Rey Network to focus not only on growth, but alsoon enriching the quality of the academic programs in ourschools and ensuring the long term postsecondary suc-cess of Cristo Rey students. What do we need to bedoing to prepare students, who are often coming to ourschools two grade levels behind, to complete college?This year alone we will invest over $1,000,000 enrichingthe academic programs in Cristo Rey schools and scalingbest practices that are working in these schools acrossthe Network and with our university partners.Today 80 percent of the graduatesare enrolled in collegeThrough a partnership with the National StudentClearinghouse, we also began to systematically anddeliberately track the alumni from Cristo Rey schools. Forthe class of 2008, over 85 percent of the graduates fromCristo Rey Network schools have enrolled in college. Over200 alumni have enrolled at one of our university partnerssince 2008 and this year 97 percent of those students wereretained into their sophomore year. This success metric isno accident, but the result of our uni-versity partners’ deliberately employ-ing strategies to ensure that these stu-dents succeed. For example, sincethe beginning of Cristo Rey JesuitHigh School, Loyola University ofChicago has been a resource andpartner to the school and to theCristo Rey Network. This summerhundreds of teachers and schoolleaders from virtually every CristoRey Network school will convene atLoyola Chicago’s Water Tower cam-pus to work collaboratively on col-lege-ready curriculum and assess-ments and to incorporate evidence-based teaching practices. Similarly,the Center for Catholic SchoolEffectiveness at Loyola has hostedsummits to teach Cristo Rey facultyabout the culture of poverty and tobuild communities of learners. In addition to this support ofthe work at the Cristo Rey Network,Loyola has a strong and deep com-Loyola University Chicago President Michael J. Garanzini, S.J., with Cristo ReyNetwork alumni.2Conversations on Jesuit Higher Education, Vol. 40, Iss. 1 [2011], Art. 24http://epublications.marquette.edu/conversations/vol40/iss1/24mitment to the dozens of Cristo Rey alumnistudying on its campus. Fr. Justin Daffron,S.J., has built a cohort of students succeeding atthe institution and rallied support from Loyola’salumni to build the Cristo Rey Scholars pro-gram (http://www6.luc.edu/undergrad/acade-mics/factsheets/cristo_rey_scholars.pdf).Over the past two years since the Scholarsprogram was launched, every student in theprogram has been retained. As WendyGomez, first year chemistry scholar, statedrecently, “I am lucky to be at a university thattruly cares about its students.” These sup-ports and partnerships allow Cristo Rey andLoyola to fulfill our common mission.Since 2007, Fairfield University has host-ed students from across Cristo Rey Networkon its campus for a week long collegeimmersion experience. Following this lead,Georgetown hosted students from 18 CristoRey Network schools for a three-week sum-mer program. Students learned about collegelife, visited Capitol Hill, and took collegecourses next to some of the most gifted stu-dents in the country. (you can see a videoabout this program at: http://www.cri-storeynetwork.org/college/university_partners.shtml) What these students felt on Fairfieldand Georgetown’s campuses was an extensionof their own school – faculty and staff commit-ted to their success. And they felt a commonshared identity with each other as theybecame part of these institutions’ “knowledgesocieties.”I was fortunate enough to have dinnerwith the students studying at Georgetown atthe end of their first week. The enthusiasm andhope in their eyes impressed me, but even more than thiswas their connectivity to one another. They were network-ing amongst themselves – they had found a family of stu-dents like themselves from all across this country. There are many more examples of Jesuit universitiesforming partnerships with the Cristo Rey Network; oneof the most exciting examples is the growth in Cristo Reystudent enrollment. Over 280 Cristo Rey Network alum-ni have enrolled at a Jesuit college over the last eightyears. Over 80 percent of these students have enrolledsince 2008. Fifteen years after Fr. Schaeffer envisioned “re-creat-ing” a Jesuit high school to serve the most vulnerableand marginalized in Chicago, we imagine what a Jesuituniversity could do if it re-created itself in the spirit of a“learned ministry,” as Fr. General described last year inMexico. He stated that “an important challenge to thelearned ministry of our universities today comes from thefact that globalization has created ‘knowledge societies,’in which development of persons, cultures and societiesis tremendously dependent on access to knowledge inorder to grow. Globalization has created new inequalitiesbetween those who enjoy the power given to them byknowledge, and those who are excluded from its bene-fits because they have no access to that knowledge.Thus, we need to ask: who benefits from the knowledgedeveloped in our institutions, and who does not? WhoConversations 47Cristo Rey Network rising seniors at Georgetown University’s Pre-CollegeProgram in summer 2010.3Birdsell: The Cristo Rey Story: Serving the Marginalized through Learned MiPublished by e-Publications@Marquette, 201148 Conversationsneeds the knowledge we can share, and how can weshare it more effectively with those for whom thatknowledge can truly make a difference, especially thepoor and excluded?” Time to re-createIn its first decade, Cristo Rey grew from an idea to a sin-gle school to a national network with alumni in hun-dreds of universities, including many of the finest in thenation. The growth strategy of this decade has been suc-cessful by virtually any measure — pace, professional-ism, scale, quality, results, cost. However, there are many more young people toserve, and one of the impediments to the growth of theCristo Rey Network in the next decade will be identify-ing religious sponsors for our schools. The Jesuits arealready involved in 11 of our 24 schools, the ChristianBrothers three, and 30 other orders either sponsor orendorse a school. As we look to communities likeMilwaukee, Seattle, Dayton and Philadelphia, a majorhurdle we face is identifying a religious sponsor for eachnew community.As we have focused on “re-creating” a Cristo Reyschool from a governance perspective, two differentCatholic universities have surfaced the idea of sponsor-ing a Cristo Rey Network school. The excitement andpossibilities around this concept are palpable. We envi-sion the value a business school might bring to a highschool work-study program, the engagement of a schoolof communication with a high school’s marketing plan,and a school of education establishing a Cristo Reyschool as a model quality program, offering access tocollege readiness to those with limited options. (Thisconcept has been incorporated at Stanford Universityand the University of Chicago, both sponsoring high per-forming charter schools, and at the College of the HolyCross, co-sponsor of a Nativity Miguel middle school.)This suggestion responds to Fr. General’s asking ofsome “specific questions of faculty and students: Howhave they become voices for the voiceless, sources ofhuman rights for those denied such rights, resources forprotection of the environment, persons of solidarity forthe poor?” What better response than to extend the CristoRey movement to a Catholic university campus?As America and the world struggle to counter the“inequality of knowledge distribution,” we must re-createour institutions of knowledge. For too long, the discon-nect between secondary and tertiary education has led toover 40 percent of college freshmen needing remedialcourses. For too long, our doors have been closed tothose with limited financial means. What remarkableimpact would result if Jesuit universities were to reinsti-tute the high school, sharing the abundance of researchand learning with the excluded – offering hope andopportunity to the marginalized by incorporating CristoRey high schools on their campuses? ■Cristo Rey Network rising seniors at Georgetown University’s Pre-College Program in summer 2010.4Conversations on Jesuit Higher Education, Vol. 40, Iss. 1 [2011], Art. 24http://epublications.marquette.edu/conversations/vol40/iss1/24

The Cristo Rey Story: Serving the Marginalized through Learned Ministry

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The Cristo Rey Story: Serving the Marginalized through Learned Ministry

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