“We are shaping kids’ values. That’s what we blatantly get to do here,” says religion teacher Mike Sinkus. “We are not proselytizing and baptizing people in the back rooms. We really avoid the ‘these are the rules of the church’ sort of instruction.
“It’s more of a thing where we get kids to explore questions like ‘What is a moral decision and what is the process of coming to a moral decision? What is a moral life, and how do we come to live it?’ “
But most teachers at the school, no matter what their subject area, one way or another try to weave religious and ethical values into their lessons and activities.
“I’m training up ‘changers.’ I go beyond the academic to do what I can to give my students instruments to change the world for the better,” says Rev. Bob Thul, a mathematics teacher.
“I give them the instrument of math power, which isn’t an insignificant instrument. It puts them in a position of leadership these days because the world is so quantified.”
Thul is co-author of a supplemental textbook for high school math teachers that is designed to explore the world’s moral and ethical ailments. He assigns students once a month or so to use newly learned mathematical principles to examine and quantify some “social justice” issue in the world outlined in his book. It might ask them to use recent data to project the rate of unmarried teenager pregnancies 25 years from now, or to calculate the per capita foreign debt ratio of seven Central American countries.
Mary Pat Haley–a St. Ignatius speech teacher and drama coach whose daughter is a student there–says the religious component of the school’s education plays a unifying role. It gives the school a communal sensibility, she says, that breaks down barriers often found in other schools between students and teachers and between students of different races and social standing.
“Religion, ethics and morality are never far from the surface here,” she says. “Even when we choose to do a play, we look for faith-filled shows and try to derive meaning from the script. We work very hard and pray together after every rehearsal.”
It’s more like a collaborative effort for me, rather than me being the authority figure; we all feel closer and come to trust each other. This sort of thing happens in all sorts of activities, whether it’s sports, arts, student government or whatever. We’re a community that works at breaking down barriers between people.”
In fact, in the last several decades, when racial and ethnic relations have been increasingly volatile in America, St. Ignatius has never experienced any serious problems.
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Art Reliford, an African-American science teacher at the school, attended St. Ignatius in the late 1960s. Now his children go there. During the tumult of black rioting and social unrest in the late 1960s, St. Ignatius teachers saw to it that its black and white students talked to each other about what was going on. It’s a role he now plays at the school, he says.
“I liked the way St. Ignatius dealt with that ferment when I was a student,” says Reliford. “They encouraged discussion of controversial things. When Fred Hampton (a Black Panther leader) was killed in a police raid in 1969, the school let us have a memorial service for him.
“Instead of backing away to avoid trouble, teachers looked at those events as opportunities to learn. Now, as a teacher, I’m emphatic that kids from different ethnic groups get involved with each other and learn from each other.”
Corey Lewis, 18, a senior who grew up across the street in the ABLA Homes, talks about his experience at St. Ignatius being much the same as it was for Reliford 25 years ago.
“I’m Baptist. I didn’t know what a mass was until I got here,” says Lewis, “and I still don’t know what the traditional ways of the Catholic Church are, but I don’t mind. We’re all praying to the same God. The school’s motto is ‘the person for others,’ and it really works out that way. There’s a sense of family here.”
That “family” and “communal” sense at St. Ignatius is a phenomenon common to Catholic schools, says researcher Anthony Bryk, and one that troubled urban public schools might do well to emulate.
Bryk, a professor of education at the University of Chicago and a consultant to the Chicago Board of Education, headed a 10-year study of Catholic schools around the country. Focusing on seven of them in seven cities (none in Chicago and none as richly supported as St. Ignatius), it was published last year as a book, “Catholic Schools and the Common Good.”
Among other things, the study tracked achievement of inner-city minority children who went to Catholic schools against public school students with comparable skills and background.
The basic pattern it found was that African-American Catholic high school students improved scholastically far faster than their public school counterparts.
In mathematics, for example, their math achievement scores improved by 3 years, 3 months between the sophomore and senior year in Catholic schools, while increasing only by 1 year, 5 months in public schools.
Catholic high schools have been in American inner-cities just as long as their public counterparts. But the well-documented failures of inner-city public schools in the last several decades haven’t materialized in the inner-city Catholic schools.
Public high schools in Chicago, for example, often have dropout rates hovering at 50 percent or more, and the idea of going on to college is an absurd dream for all but a few graduates. And social harmony certainly doesn’t prevail in schools that need metal detectors and armed police patrols. Chicago’s Catholic high schools graduate 98 per cent of their seniors, and 84 per cent of them go on to college.
Why city Catholic schools keep ticking nicely along while public schools keep faltering and sputtering has been a question asked with increasing frequency by researchers like Bryk.
Certainly it helps that Catholic schools are private and can pick and choose whom they will educate, finding the most motivated children. They also can kick out with impunity children who chronically or pathologically misbehave. Public schools can do neither.
“It’s not just that they get better kids,” says Bryk, “because Catholic schools clearly do something different with them once they’re there. They are organized differently than public schools.”
For one thing, most Catholic schools operate almost autonomously, fulfilling the wishes of people directly involved in the life of the school, rather than a central school bureaucracy, Bryk says.
The sense of communal effort on the part of teachers, students and parents, all working together for a common goal, also is strongly present in Catholic schools. As a result, Catholic schools have much higher academic expectations for the students and have plans in place to help them meet those expectations.
“We’re constrained by our own imaginations (as to) what we think public schools should be and can and can’t do,” Bryk says. “There’s no reason why public schools can’t reorganize and act more like Catholic schools.”
Merrill Zenner, a Jewish businessman who admits to having no knowledge or theories about education, essentially came to the same conclusion as Bryk.
About 10 years ago when he was chairman of the Reliable Corp., an office supply company near the school, Zenner heard about the elaborate building restoration in progress at St. Ignatius. Having a personal interest in restoration, Zenner called Rowe, who invited him to come over and look around. Zenner knew little about the school until that visit.
He recalls, “I loved the restorative work, but I was overwhelmed with what I saw the school was doing with minority kids.”
Rowe, not one to overlook anybody’s enthusiasm for his school, began talking to Zenner about the school’s sponsorship program, in which well-to-do donors underwrite needy kids’ tuitions. Zenner ended up sponsoring four minority students a year, assigning mentors from his business to each of them, giving them summer jobs in the bargain. He has since sold his business, but continues to sponsor children at the school.
“We’ve not had one failure in all the years we’ve been doing this,” says Zenner. “All of our kids have gone on to college. That says a lot about what that school is doing. It also says a heck of a lot about those kids.”