How Newark, NJ Catholic School Measures Success

[From article]
The film’s subtitle asks, “Want Inner City Schools to Finally Succeed?” If only it were as easy as merely wanting it. New Jersey, often with prodding from its courts, has spent staggering sums trying to fix Newark’s schools. Currently, the district’s graduation rate languishes at just 22 percent, despite spending about $25,000 per pupil. Much of that money has been wasted. Institutional inertia, slavish adherence to fashionable pedagogies that have never proved effective, and the power of special-interest groups, like teachers’ unions, have all blocked meaningful change. The kind of radical transformation that St. Benedict’s represents, with its 1,500-year-old guidepost, is hard to imagine except in the most extraordinary circumstances.
[. . .]
Scholars often point out that St. Benedict fashioned his precepts for community living based on that most basic of human institutions, the family. In Newark, the stable family has become increasingly rare. Only 30 percent of the city’s kids live in two-parent families. Some 60 percent live without fathers, raised instead by mothers or grandparents or in foster homes. That is perhaps one reason why St. Benedict’s doesn’t define its success solely in terms of academic achievement.
[. . .]
“How do I measure success?” he asks. “You’re able to graduate St. Benedict’s, have a mortgage, deal with your marriage, deal with your family, stick it out. How do I measure success? I got a father working with his son, in his son’s life.”
Amen.

http://www.city-journal.org/2014/bc0902sm.html

STEVEN MALANGA
It’s Hard to be Saints in the City
A new documentary shows how Benedictine monks make men out of Newark’s boys.
2 September 2014