More Hope for Catholic Education

Ryan’s post on the Cristo Rey Jesuit High School reminded me of another flourishing initiative in Catholic education: Notre Dame’s A.C.E. program. Now fifteen years old, the Alliance for Catholic Education teaches the teachers—training more than 1,000 college graduates, since 1993, and placing them at under-resourced rural and inner-city Catholic schools for two years of educational service.

In last week’s National Review Online , Notre Dame professor and FT contributor Rick Garnett reflects on A.C.E.’s lasting impact—for the schools, the teachers, and the communities they serve:

What started as a single teacher-training program at a single University has not only been replicated at 15 other Catholic universities and colleges but has also produced a leadership-training program for Catholic-school administrators and principals, a consulting enterprise that assists schools and dioceses in planning and operations, and a Christian lay movement of former A.C.E. teachers who are eager to continue reflecting on the spiritual dimension of the vocation to teaching.

Should non-Catholics care? Sure, the success of A.C.E. might prove a consolation in these hard times for fans of the Fighting Irish, but does it really matter?
. . .

America’s Catholic schools represent perhaps one of the most dramatic donations of time, talent, and treasure to the political community’s common good that the nation has ever seen . . . . We hear a lot these days about “social capital,” and about the anchoring institutions that are so important to the health of communities and the formation of character. It is important to a free society that non-government institutions thrive. Such institutions enrich and diversify what we call “civil society.” They are like bridges and buffers that mediate between the individual and the state. They are the necessary infrastructure for communities and relationships in which loyalties and values are formed and passed on and where persons develop and flourish. In our history, few institutions have played this role like Catholic schools.

Garnett concludes by quoting from A.C.E. founder Fr. Tim Scully’s address to the White House Summit on Inner-City Children and Faith-Based Schools: “In the end, the crisis we currently face is a crisis of imagination and of will—and that’s good news, for we lack neither. Together, we cannot and will not fail. We know the dark statistics and the gloomy trends—it’s important we know them if we’re going to right them. But let us not get so used to looking at the darkness that we allow it to cover up the light: signs of hope abound if we have the imagination and will to see them.”