May 28, 2008

When School Works

By: Laura Vanderkam

Cynthia Muñoz has the kind of family story that inner-city Chicago educators grow weary of hearing. Her grandmother immigrated, illegally, from Mexico, and raised nine children in the city. Her mother dropped out of high school at age 16 to work in factories and other low-wage jobs to help support her eight brothers and sisters.

Muñoz, 17, is also working. Unlike her mother’s blue-collar jobs, though, Muñoz commutes 1-2 days a week from her home at 58th and Pulaski to Citadel Investment Group, a $12 billion hedge fund headquartered in downtown Chicago. She does records management, and is charged with getting the right names on letters to shareholders (which is “very confidential,” she says with pride).

It’s an impressive level of responsibility for a teenager, but it’s business as usual for Muñoz and her classmates at Cristo Rey Jesuit High School of Chicago, which is part of a national network of 19 urban Catholic schools that combine on-the-job work experience with rigorous academics. All of the school’s 525 students share approximately 130 jobs. In exchange, employers such as Citadel pay Cristo Rey $27,750 for each full-time equivalent position. These payments keep tuition at $2,700 a year. That’s important, because the majority of students at this school, and its sister schools with similar work-study programs in New York, Los Angeles, and elsewhere, come from economically disadvantaged backgrounds.

The concept of having students work to earn their tuition was borne of financial necessity. Children like Muñoz are desperate to escape the gangs and low expectations of big city public schools, but few can afford the full cost of a private education.

Over the past decade, though, members of the Cristo Rey network have discovered that requiring students to work does more than keep tuition low. It teaches children that there’s life beyond high school, with its teen-centered obsessions on things that don’t matter. It teaches them that working hard can help them get ahead—a lesson students from far nicer areas than the Pilsen/Little Village neighborhood could stand to learn, too. The model has helped revive Catholic inner-city education, and it offers some lessons for education more broadly. Anyone can create one school that works. The Cristo Rey Network has hit upon one of the few education models that can actually be replicated with reasonable success. It seems to be working everywhere it’s been tried.

The educators who run the Cristo Rey Network have not solved the problem of unspectacular academic achievement among the low-income Hispanic and African American students they serve. They have, however, graduated the majority of their students, and sent most of their graduates to college. That promise serves as a lifeline to motivated students in the poor, often dangerous neighborhoods where Cristo Rey schools are founded. These lifelines can’t save all students, but few would disagree that saving some is better than none.

***

The Cristo Rey (Spanish for “Christ the King”) concept began in 1995, when Jesuits in Chicago set about trying to open a high school for poor Hispanic children. Roughly one-third of Chicago’s Catholics are Hispanic. The Church was looking for a way to serve this community that has historically suffered from high drop-out rates. But the Jesuits struggled to fund the project.

Then, as now, a significant number of inner-city Catholic schools across the country were closing down. St. Stephen Elementary School of Pilsen—on whose site the Chicago Cristo Rey school would eventually be located—closed in 1996. Newark, New Jersey’s Our Lady of Good Counsel High School (which would later house Newark’s Cristo Rey school) closed in 2006. These traditional Catholic schools have faced rising costs as fewer people join the religious orders that used to teach in them. Lay teachers must be paid market rates. Add in multi-million dollar sexual abuse lawsuit settlements that have nearly bankrupted some archdioceses, and it’s no wonder that even the schools that stay open are tempted to move to wealthier areas or raise tuition to levels few poor families can afford. Tuition at Immaculate Conception High School in Montclair, New Jersey, for instance, is $7,200 a year.

The team of Jesuits cast around for ways to fund a school without relying on constant fundraising, archdiocesan support, or tuition. One of the Jesuits, Rev. John Foley, who’d just returned to work on the school after 34 years of service in Peru, suggested they meet with an innovative management consultant named Richard Murray. Murray had suggested fundraising tactics for the Jesuits in the past. They asked for ideas.

Murray gave the matter some serious thought. As a child, he had attended the Roeper School for gifted children outside Detroit, where he’d done multiple internships as part of the curriculum. He’d worked as a carpenter, a bus supervisor, and in a stockbroker’s office. Those jobs had taught him as much as he’d learned in the classroom. As G.R. Kearney describes in his new book on the Cristo Rey Network, More Than a Dream: How One School’s Vision Is Changing the World (Loyola Press, 2008), Murray was pretty sure that his work had had value for the organizations that sponsored the internships. That planted a question in his brain: What if Catholic businesspeople could be convinced to hire students at this new Chicago school and pay the school their wages? If students shared a job, they would still have time to take classes. And maybe they’d learn something in their office jobs as well.

There was much discussion with lawyers about whether this was legal. If it was, how could the school maximize revenue while minimizing the payroll taxes that would quickly eat up a big chunk of what corporations would pay for an entry level full-time equivalent position? Then there was the question of liability. If a student was injured on the job, could the school be sued? Eventually, Cristo Rey incorporated as two separate entities: a school, and something akin to a temp agency, albeit one with non-profit status. If a corporation paid $27,500 to Cristo Rey’s Corporate Internship Program, each student team would be “paid” minimum wage (approximately $9,000 for a 180-day school year). That way the temp agency would only be responsible for payroll taxes on that amount. All of the remainder could go toward school operating expenses. The students would also assign their wages back to the school.

Everyone liked the idea. As they recruited students, Foley—who by then had been named president of the new school—and his staff set to work drumming up jobs at any corporation that would take them. But then the doubts set in. The students who were willing to take a chance on a new school in a rough neighborhood were pretty rough themselves. Could such students work jobs at Aon Corporation, Loyola Press, law firm Katten Muchin Rosenman, and the other employers that had signed on?

School was starting, though, so they had to try. The staff trained the students to speak with adults in the workplace, look people in the eye, shake hands, and then sent them into the corporate jungle. “I had no idea if this was going to work,” Foley says. At times, he has said he wanted to “hide under the desk” the day the first students made their commutes.

But soon, employers were raving about the most eager temps they had ever seen. And the kids in general were wowed by their jobs. As Hector Hernandez, a current student at the Chicago school, tells me, “I was a little scared to go downtown.” Despite living a mere 20 minutes from Chicago’s business district, he hadn’t been there in 13 years. His first day at work, he got off the bus and walked “very slowly” into a lavishly decorated lobby with a gleaming chandelier. He craned his neck to look, awestruck, at this ceiling fixture, which was so different from anything he’d seen.

These days, the Cristo Rey Network schools send hundreds of kids every day into corporate America, with its glitzy appointments and mahogany furniture. Of course, sending hundreds of teenagers anywhere requires massive feats of organization. The Chicago school has a small fleet of busses. Cristo Rey New York High School (CRNYHS), located at 106th Street in East Harlem, sends crews of kids on the subway (with chaperones) to the city’s major employment centers at Wall Street, Grand Central, and Times Square.

On a morning in early October, I attended a pre-commute assembly at CRNYHS, and then rode the 6 train to Grand Central Terminal with a dozen students and James Wilson, the school’s corporate work-study director. Part motivational speaker and part logistics guru, Wilson is well-suited to introducing students to varied careers because he’s dabbled in every career imaginable. He’s played piano with bar bands, become a licensed acupuncturist, done freelance photography, served as Assistant Director for the AIDS Care Project in Boston, and practiced law at White & Case. While hustling me around to offices—he and his 5-person staff make more than 200 on-site visits in a 180-day school year—his cell phone rang numerous times as he tracked down a student who had potentially gone missing in the course of getting to an off-site event. This close monitoring pays off. Just over 95 percent of Wilson’s kids receive an “outstanding” or “good” rating from their work supervisors (though “the remaining 5 percent take a lot of time,” he acknowledges). Few human resources directors can give more than 95 percent of their workers such marks.

That statistic is even more impressive when you consider the contortions some Cristo Rey students go through to get to work. Genesis, a young woman from the Bronx, made a point of sitting in the back of the parish hall during the pre-commute assembly. When I asked her why, she told me she had to leave her house at 7:00 a.m. to get to school before 8:00. She had to leave school right at 8:30 to get to the Brooklyn offices of the major investment bank where she worked on time. She would check back in with her Wall Street chaperone around 5:30 p.m. It would be close to 7:00 p.m. before she got home.

Plenty of New York finance workers also have 12-hour days, but their home lives revolve around getting them to work on time and prepared. Students from economically disadvantaged homes seldom have the same support. As Wilson walked me into the parish hall that morning, he chastised one rumpled, sleepy-looking young man who had been locked out (since he didn’t arrive by 8:00 sharp). Two-thirds of the New York students come from single-parent homes, where the mother is often working nights, which means no one is there to put the kids to bed. Sometimes these kids’ apartments are too crowded—so no one gets a good night’s sleep—and sometimes people come in at all hours of the day and night, waking the children as they do. Chaos is the norm. One top student, Wilson told me, is living with his sister. His mother is not in the picture. His father is in prison. Another top student’s mom works nights, so Grandma cares for the family. Unfortunately, Grandma is also bed-ridden with diabetes. To do their homework and get to school—and work—on time, the men wearing ties and dress shirts, the ladies wearing collared shirts, Cristo Rey students must be incredibly organized and motivated. Supervisors appreciate such things.

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Wall Street and the Bronx are different worlds. So are Pilsen and downtown Chicago. Simply putting motivated if disadvantaged young people in such opulent settings can change their worldview about what is possible. Cristo Rey students who work at McKinsey & Company, in the Office of the Illinois Attorney General, and at JPMorgan Chase see the lives they could have if they went to college. This encourages them to do just that. According to More Than a Dream, of the first Chicago graduating class—who had started as juniors and graduated in 1998—13 of 19 seniors enrolled in college that fall. The next year, 31 of 44 graduates attended colleges, including Michigan State University, DePaul, and others. By 2002, 84 students had graduated, with 72 enrolling in four-year colleges (including Brown University, an Ivy League school), and nine in two-year colleges. Network-wide, 99 percent of the class of 2006 was accepted to a two- or four-year college, and 95 percent enrolled directly in post-secondary education. Not all will finish, but by contrast, only 12.1 percent of Hispanic adults in the U.S., and 17.6 percent of African Americans hold a bachelor’s degree.

Cristo Rey Jesuit High School in Chicago has always been good about getting press. Then-First Lady Hillary Clinton spoke at its dedication in 1996. Soon, other Catholic groups in Portland, Los Angeles, and elsewhere learned about Cristo Rey, and wanted to open similar schools. A $9 million gift from venture capitalist B.J. Cassin enabled the formation of the Cristo Rey Network. This network provides support to groups considering opening schools based on the Cristo Rey model.

The network established, eventually, ten points for what makes a school a “Cristo Rey” school. It must be explicitly Catholic. It must serve only economically disadvantaged students (who may be of any race or faith; network-wide, 64 percent of students are Hispanic, 25 percent are African American, and 72 percent are Catholic). It must play an active role in the community. It must be accredited, require students to work in something like the Corporate Internship Program, seek to integrate work learning into the classroom, have a specific administrative structure that includes a director of development and a separate work-study coordinator, be financially sound (that is, at full enrollment, collect 85 percent of its revenue from the corporate work-study program and tuition), seek “to understand, assure, and improve how and how well its students learn and grow,” and participate in the Cristo Rey Network.

Any group desiring to open a Cristo Rey school must conduct a feasibility study and show its commitment to these ten points. Groups have been rejected; a proposed New Bern, North Carolina school that would also have served middle-income students was nixed as being inconsistent with the Cristo Rey mission. But many others have opened, including schools in Portland, L.A., and Denver, as well as eight others that started up between 2004 and 2006. All have done a decent job replicating the first school’s results. Every single 2006 graduate of the L.A.-based Cristo Rey school, Verbum Dei, had plans to enroll in a two- or four-year college in the fall of that year, as did 47 of 48 graduates of Portland’s Cristo Rey school.

This is more than many replication efforts can say. The question of replication has bedeviled educators for years, and jaded more than a few. You see a great charter school lauded on TV. But then what? Neighborhoods like Harlem and Pilsen are riddled with empowerment zones and special school programs. Yet children there remain trapped in cycles of poverty. Schools spend great energy reinventing the wheel. As a recent Ernst & Young white paper on corporate education ventures points out, “if companies intend to more fully address some of the challenges facing our education system, they must focus less on developing new initiatives for which they can get credit and more on scaling the most effective programs that already exist.”

But what does work? It’s a question the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in particular has spent many years and over $1 billion trying to answer. At first, the Gates Foundation thought the answer might be “small schools.” In small high schools, teachers and principals would get to know students personally and hold them accountable. But massive investment in creating small schools, which are often carved out of larger ones, hasn’t entirely paid off; some Gates-funded small schools have closed due to low interest and lackluster results. That’s sent educators back to the drawing board. Maybe schools need not be small to be successful. Maybe they need great principals who are able to hire amazing teachers (and fire those who don’t work out). But teachers’ unions have blocked this avenue of reform in a number of failing urban districts.

It’s unlikely that the ten criteria for establishing a Cristo Rey school are an exhaustive list of what makes an effective school. It’s also unlikely that all are necessary to create an effective school for poor, minority students. The first requirement—to be explicitly Catholic—by its nature means the format can’t be universally replicated. But the Gates Foundation is always willing to put money into different experiments, so in 2003, it gave $9.9 million to the Cristo Rey Network. In 2006, it announced another $6 million gift. These grants have enabled the network to open schools in Newark, New Jersey and six other cities in Fall 2007, bringing the 2007-2008 school year’s total to 19.

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There is no question that Cristo Rey schools have transformed children’s lives. These schools do not suffer from what President George Bush calls “the soft bigotry of low expectations.”

“Our students come in with the idea that they’re going to college,” says Germán Indacochea, a math teacher who’s been at Cristo Rey Jesuit High School in Chicago ever since it opened. This year he is teaching calculus to 33 seniors. Rashad Mohammed, a junior at CRNYHS, confesses to me that “everybody is really worried about what college they’re going to.” In recent years it’s become fashionable for journalists to write investigative pieces about “hothouse kids” coached since birth to get into Harvard. Still, when a dark-skinned young man from the Bronx starts fretting about the pressure to get into a good school, it’s hard to do anything but smile. Indacochea is writing recommendation letters for Georgetown, the University of Chicago, and MIT, among other places.

 

Working in corporate jobs turns out to be a big part of this transformation. Abiezer Mendez, a senior at CRNYHS who works at JPMorgan Chase, says he used to be so shy that he’d hide during family gatherings. But during stints at brokerage firm Keefe, Bruyette & Woods, the Asia Society, and U.S. Trust, this son of a building superintendent “became better around people,” he says. “I’ve gained so much confidence. People treat me as an adult.” Mendez paid attention in English class so he could write better letters and memos. His financial institution employers pushed his math skills to the limit.

But Mendez and his fellow Cristo Rey students are outliers—few high school students see the connection between school and the adult world as clearly as they do. Indeed, few teens spend any time with adults at all.

Instead, even many well-to-do students live in a bizarre teen vortex that celebrates TV, clothes, and other trivialities. As psychologist Robert Epstein recently told Psychology Today, “Teens in America are in touch with their peers on average 65 hours a week, compared to about four hours a week in pre-industrial cultures. In this country, teens learn virtually everything they know from other teens. …This makes no sense. Teens should be learning from the people they are about to become.” When teens finally graduate to the real world—which is not the world of Britney Spears—they have no idea what’s going on.

Cristo Rey students, on the other hand, see the real world firsthand. Their long workdays help them appreciate how hard their parents have to work. Their forays into the adult world inculcate a sense of responsibility that helps keep order at the schools even apart from their Catholic nature. Says Chicago junior Isabel Gonzalez, on her first day, “I saw some seniors smiling. I expected them to be bullying, but they’re there to help you. There are no problems at all. There’s never been a fight. There are no metal detectors. Everyone trusts each other.” By contrast, an inner-city Newark parent once told me that getting into his sons’ public high school was tougher than getting into an airport.

All schools could stand to replicate this part of the Cristo Rey model: getting students invested in the adult world so they develop the discipline to plan for the future and see beyond their more childish present impulses. This—apart from the ten core components of a Cristo Rey school—is the true key to these schools’ success. America’s thousands of high schools can’t find jobs for all their students and follow up with over 200 on-site visits in 180 days. They can, however, match at-risk kids with mentors, and make sure the kids travel to the mentors’ workplaces for meetings. One Ernst & Young program has raised graduation rates to 90 percent among its Bronx student members by doing just that. They can have students participate in joint volunteer projects with adults. Some states require community service for graduation; it would be wise for them to require some form of work-study as well. Anything that can bring students into the adult world on a regular basis will help them feel like a part of it, with the privileges and responsibilities that entails. As Robert Epstein says, teens should be learning from those they are about to become. At Cristo Rey schools, they do.

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Of course, the Cristo Rey Network has not solved all the problems of inner-city education. For starters, it has not solved the particularly frustrating problem of sub-par test scores among poor minority youth.

When I toured the New York Cristo Rey school in August—my first in-person experience with Cristo Rey schools—I didn’t even ask about academic achievement. I assumed the kids did well, because they were so polished, ambitious, and well-spoken. Commuting with them to work in October, it occurred to me that in other circumstances, being surrounded by minority teenagers on a subway car in East Harlem might make me uneasy. But these children shook my hand. They looked me in the eye, addressed me as Ms. Vanderkam, and spoke in complete sentences. Perhaps it speaks to my own prejudices, but since the Cristo Rey students were better behaved than most other students I’ve met, I assumed they did better on tests too.

But while the three-week boot camp freshmen attend teaches them to act in ways that make office workers feel comfortable, academics are more of a mixed bag. The Corporate Internship Program boot camp “trains kids so well for work, but kids aren’t used to two-three hours of homework,” says Germán Indacochea, the Chicago math teacher. The ACT composite score at the Chicago school is 18.4—up from 16 in recent years, but still below the national average composite score of 21.1 in 2006.

This is a troubling statistic. Chicago’s Cristo Rey Jesuit High School boasts a gleaming new multi-million dollar building. The teachers are universally excellent. Whenever a new Cristo Rey school is announced, applications flood in, which enables the principals (who also tend to be veteran Catholic educators) to be selective. Discipline is good. And yet, the average ACT score of the Chicago school’s college-bound students is 2 points lower than the state average for Illinois (20.5 in 2006), which requires all its graduating seniors, not just the college-bound, to take the ACT.

Patricia Garrity, principal of the Chicago school, is aware of this issue. “ACT scores are not our kids’ strength,” she says. “Part of it is where you start out.” Most of the children at her school are first- or second-generation Mexican immigrants. The neighborhood is often dangerous. On March 23, 2003, according to More Than a Dream, the junior with the top PSAT score at the Chicago school was killed in what some suspect was a gang-related shooting. Approximately 70 percent of Cristo Rey students, network-wide, qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. Many are from single-parent families. In addition, the Cristo Rey mission has never been to take the top academic achievers, who have many options, even if they come from disadvantaged backgrounds. “We are about serving kids who would not otherwise be in a private school,” Garrity says.

Unfortunately, part of the problem, in the past, has also been the Cristo Rey curriculum. In the early years, the Chicago school employed some teachers who could best be called “true believers.” Their active social consciences drove them to work with the poor in inner-city Chicago. That same philosophy, however, also meant that some didn’t want to foist white America upon minority children. So the early curriculum emphasized celebrating Hispanic culture and Latin America, but not in the kind of rigorous way that involved intense study of actual historical events, government structures, and the like. Trying to avoid what was perceived as a “white” didactic way of teaching, teachers emphasized discussion and inquiry rather than content.

In theory, this can work. But when the staff asked graduates for feedback, they learned that “our kids were feeling out of the loop in college,” Garrity says. Kids from suburban public schools had read Beowulf and knew the names of major Civil War battles. Neither is critical for succeeding in college, but “part of the American college culture is that you know these references,” Garrity says. “If you’re already out of the mainstream culture, the onus is on us to make sure you have the curricular tools you need.” So the school beefed up its British literature offerings, and started teaching more U.S. history.

This tension between the true believers and the day-to-day operations of Cristo Rey has also come to a head over the Corporate Internship Program. The excellent teachers Cristo Rey schools hire generally have the option of working in corporate America, but have chosen not to do so. Early on, some teachers “felt that the work study program was pushing white corporate America on these kids,” Garrity says. Teachers who understood their job as developing children’s critical thinking skills pushed students to ask whether their corporate employers were being good citizens, whether capitalism was just, and so forth. This was not particularly appreciated by those running the internship program. “We’ve gotten better about hiring for our mission,” Garrity says. “We want staff members who are comfortable in their own life choices.” Just because a teacher elected not to work for a Fortune 500 company doesn’t mean a student will make that choice. Furthermore, the work-study programs are supposed to provide about 70 percent of each school’s operating income. Without them, Cristo Rey schools wouldn’t exist. And if Cristo Rey schools didn’t exist, many of these kids wouldn’t go to college and hence have the option of considering, and perhaps choosing against, corporate careers in the first place.

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That said, one can ask whether white corporate America does truly accept kids from poor, minority backgrounds. Diversity recruiting programs abound, but one of the reasons women and minorities are increasingly starting their own businesses is that they find the glass ceiling thicker than they thought.

Minority entrepreneurship is also taking off because many jobs just aren’t that exciting. Cristo Rey students tend to like even the mundane parts of their jobs at first; one supervisor giggled as she told me “how cute” her charge was when he figured out Microsoft Outlook. But the filing and faxing that are tolerable for one or two days a week may not be the best use of anyone’s talents, in the long term. Corporate America is full of people who are just putting in their eight-hour days. At first, Cristo Rey students are enamored with their gleaming workspaces. Then they notice that many of the workers aren’t nearly as motivated and ambitious as they are. Some pick up lessons that are less about the work ethic than office politics—like that it’s important to look busy when your supervisor walks by, whether you’re busy or not.

They can also be quite perceptive about the nature of corporate jobs. Juan Vargas, a junior at the Chicago school, works for a personal injury lawyer. He beamed as he recounted being taken to court for closing statements in a jury trial. But he has no illusions about the general glamour of law. There’s “a lot of paperwork,” he informed me, something many a young lawyer no doubt wishes he’d realized beforehand.

Working in boring jobs can build character, but it’s interesting to note that as Cristo Rey students learn about work, increasingly, children of America’s wealthiest citizens do not spend their teen years working in boring jobs. In 2007, only 35 percent of teenagers were employed during June and July, compared with 49 percent in 1978. In 2001, 31 percent of teens were enrolled in school in July, vs. 19.5 percent in 1994. Carlos De La Rosa, director of the Chicago Corporate Internship Program, smiles as he tells the story of a young lady who worked in human resources at a law firm, and then went to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to study HR. “How many kids at age 17 or 18 know what HR is?” he asks. But the most privileged children in society do not study HR. They study art or anthropology, spend their twenties traveling or experimenting with different careers, then go to business school, go into consulting, and rearrange corporations to eliminate the jobs of people who studied HR. Spend enough time covering careers and the workforce, and you start to wonder if the true believing teachers have a point.

***

Cristo Rey cannot erase all of America’s inequalities. Nor does it aim to. But its model has proved to be replicable, at least on a small scale. There are 19 Cristo Rey schools now. Three will open in fall of 2008 in Brooklyn, New York, the west side of Chicago, and, thanks in part to a $900,000 gift from the Skillman Foundation, Detroit, Michigan. Four more locations are undertaking feasibility studies. The network’s “12 by 12” campaign aims to enroll 12,000 students by 2012, which will require 32-33 schools. All in all, the U.S.’s large cities could probably support 100 Cristo Rey schools, and still maintain the rigorous hiring standards and Catholic character that the existing schools boast. If each Cristo Rey high school had 400 students, that would be 40,000 students—of America’s roughly 16 million high school students—who could benefit. The well-to-do and the brilliant don’t need such interventions. The lost causes won’t appreciate them. Cristo Rey schools can serve the good, motivated kids who don’t have other options. They can nurture these young people in caring environments, expose them to the adult world, and encourage them to go to college. It’s a small step, but it’s an important one.

It’s certainly been important to Michelle González, a student at CRNYHS. Thanks to her Cristo Rey experience, this daughter of a single mom who immigrated from Ecuador has consultancy Booz Allen Hamilton and architecture firm Arquitectonica on her resume at age 17. By contrast, she says, her neighborhood friends come home from school at 2 p.m. and spend hours watching TV. Between school and work, she has no time for that. “I see girls who have so much potential, and when I ask what they want to do, they say they want to marry a rich husband,” she says—a frequent theme of daytime television. “I say if you went to Cristo Rey you wouldn’t say that.”

When we talked in late summer 2007, González had just returned from an engineering camp at Cornell University. She wound up applying there, and as of press time was waiting to hear back. Not many children from the Bronx aspire to the Ivy League, but thanks to Cristo Rey, the distance between the two isn’t as far as it seems.

–Laura Vanderkam, a NewYork City-based writer, is a member of USA Today’s board of contributors and the author of Grindhopping: Build a Rewarding Career Without Paying Your Dues (McGraw-Hill, 2007)