The school exists to nurture a culture of achievement for children with no other option for college preparation, including those who in public schools might be diverted onto a vocational track. It is not skimming off the cream of the crop of local students; it rejects any who can get accepted by, and afford, other Catholic schools. Some especially promising students are directed to Catholic schools that offer scholarships. Which makes CRJHS' college placement rate especially remarkable: In the last seven years, 99 percent of graduates have been accepted to at least one college, 75 percent of them four-year institutions.
CRJHS can have its work program, its entirely college preparatory courses ("the old, dead white man's curriculum," says an English teacher cheerfully), its zero tolerance of disorder (from gang symbols down to chewing gum), its enforcement of decorum (couples dancing suggestively are told to "leave some space there for the Holy Spirit") and its requirement that every family pay something, if only as little as $25 a month -- it can have all this because it is not shackled by bureaucracy or unions, as public schools are.
The "Cristo Rey model" is as American as another Chicago-area startup, McDonalds. And like McDonalds, the first of which was in suburban Des Plaines, the model is being replicated. The Cristo Rey Network now has 22 schools around the country, with four more coming by 2010.
People, communities and countries often make costly mistakes because they don't know what it is that they don't know. But regarding the education of inner city minorities, America's problem is that it doesn't know what a few Americans, such as those who have created the Cristo Rey model, do know. Three students who tied as CRJHS' valedictorians last June are now at Stanford, Brown and Georgetown.