In addition, Cristo Rey schools have the advantages of being private and selective. Although they don’t select based primarily on academic ability—indeed, academic superstars are sometimes encouraged to go elsewhere—they will refuse to take children with discipline issues. Principals can hire staff members who are drawn to the entrepreneurial culture and hence are more proactive than the average public school teacher. As I was interviewing school administrators in Newark, Principal Cuddihy paused and noted, “A lot of our stories end with ‘and then I drove them home.’ ” Cochran, the social studies teacher, puts in 12-hour days, yet he gushes that “it’s like God created a job just for me.”
Even given the model’s limitations, though, the Cristo Rey schools present a challenge to the conventional educational wisdom. Not only do they show that it is possible to achieve good results with poor, minority young people; they show that it is possible to fund those results not with public money but by relying on businesses’ self-interest. They show that teenagers are capable of more than most people think. “When you let young people work side by side with adults, give them meaningful adult responsibilities, and separate them from their peers because if they’re trapped with their peers all the time, they’re not going to advance—any program that does this finds the same thing: These young people rise to the challenge,” says the psychologist Robert Epstein, author of The Case Against Adolescence.
The Cristo Rey schools also show that working to pay for education is good for kids. Students like Tiffany Adams, who wake before dawn to take two buses to get to school, clearly value their education already. Working too many hours can be problematic if it distracts from homework, but on the margin people value things more when they come with costs. One oft-cited 1981 study, conducted by researchers at Kansas State University, found that college students who worked one to 15 hours a week during school had slightly higher grade point averages than those who did not work. One possible reason binge drinking rates are lower at two-year colleges than at four-year colleges is that more junior college students are actually paying their own way. At Berea College in Kentucky, a school that caters to lower-income Appalachian students, everyone is required to work at least 10 hours a week in lieu of tuition. Internal studies found that this labor requirement actually boosts student engagement and retention.
Likewise, students at the Cristo Rey schools know they are working real jobs and earning real money that, rather than going to buy clothes or cell phones, is going to pay for their education. Hence education is a good that has value. That’s a lesson that’s lost in a system of free public high schools.
Laura Vanderkam is a freelance writer based in New York City.
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