The School That Works

Each weekday morning, about 100 students at Cristo Rey, a Jesuit high school in Chicago, troop onto buses wearing shirts and ties and looking like slightly younger versions of all the adults going to work. After getting dropped off downtown, they walk to their jobs at law firms, insurance companies and banks.

Started six years ago in Pilsen, an extremely poor Mexican community on Chicago's Near West Side, Cristo Rey combines some of the typical features of a parochial education--rigorous classes and an emphasis on discipline and college attendance--with an unusual work-study requirement called the "corporate internship program."

But these are no ordinary internships. Instead of the loose hours and nonexistent pay that characterize traditional efforts to link work and school, students hold down real full-time jobs, with the hours split between four students. Cristo Rey kids fax, file, deliver, copy and answer phones just like any other entry-level worker for five full days a month, while at the same time completing a demanding academic program--and paying their own tuition through their jobs.

For decades, parochial schools have provided an escape hatch for ambitious low-income students who might otherwise have to attend struggling neighborhood schools. But the average parochial high school tuition--$4,000-plus in New York--remains insurmountable for many families. At Cristo Rey, students' wages cover about 75 percent of the cost of running the school, as opposed to the typical parochial school, where tuition covers about two-thirds of the costs. Thanks to the internships, students get valuable work experience, employers get able young workers, and families get a drastically reduced tuition of $2,200--roughly half the cost of most other Catholic high schools in the area.

To its proponents, the Cristo Rey model is a sustainable way of expanding access to quality education, with much larger numbers of poor students gaining access to parochial education than would be available through scholarships at existing schools. "Even with all the scholarship money in the world, you couldn't give access to all these kids," says Jeff Thielman of the Cassin Foundation, a Cristo Rey funder.

Among skeptics, reservations are not so much ideological as practical. "It is sort of sad that children have to do this to get a good education," says Noreen Connell, executive director of New York's Educational Priorities Panel, a budget watchdog group. "It sounds really onerous," echoes Brad Hoylman, communications director of the New York City Partnership, a municipal business group that has sponsored public-private education collaborations. "How do they find time to work?"

At first, Cristo Rey was a Chicago-only phenomenon. But then San Francisco venture capitalist B.J. Cassin started a foundation to help find additional locations and start-up funds for new Cristo Rey schools. Since then, three more Cristo Rey schools have been started--one in Portland, Oregon, one in Los Angeles, and one in Austin, Texas--with another opening up next fall in Denver. Officials in Boston, New Brunswick, and Tucson are all either considering or planning on opening a Cristo Rey school in the near future. The idea has been profiled in BusinessWeek and the Los Angeles Times as well as on public television. Visitors have flocked to the Chicago school to see how it works.

Now, if all goes as planned, the Cristo Rey model is coming to the Bronx. After conducting a nine-month feasibility study, chief proponent and founding president William Ford has secured a three-year lease for the top floor of the Immaculate Conception Parish Elementary School on East 151st Street in Mott Haven. Ford already has over $1 million in funding and says he's on track to admit the first class of 100 freshmen to Cristo Rey High School New York in August.