Customer Reviews

More Than a Dream: The Cristo Rey Story: How One School's Vision Is Changing the World

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More than a Dream offers an insightful, and all too rare glimpse at the dramatic impact a school can have on students' lives. We walk alongside four students portrayed here as they confront neighborhood gangs, a mother's loss, a basketball court and ultimately, college. They are the true measure of whether this far-fetched idea for a school actually works. A thought-provoking read all around...

Ever wonder how ideas and innovations become reality? Pick up 'More than a Dream'.

The Cristo Rey story balances the challenges of institutional change with the triumphs of personal dedication, and confronts head-on the failures of today's approach to education for low-income families. Along the way you'll meet CEO's and gang members, teenage moms and Catholic priests. The journey promises to be thought provoking, contentious, heart-warming and full of inspirational anecdotes for every reader.

I couldn't put it down.

This book captured my attention, provoked many thoughts, and sparked my enthusiasm for what the Cristo Rey schools are doing to make a significant difference in inner-city schools. G.R.Kearney took me, the reader, on an incredible journey...from when the Chicago school was only a dream to where it is today...a unique and promising school providing an amazing education to low-income families. The tireless efforts of the founders, supporters, teachers, volunteers, and students have been rewarded with successes both big and small...making this book impossible to ignore! Thank you to G.R. Kearney for telling a story that deserves to be heard by the world!

In More than a Dream, GR Kearney highlights the success of the Cristo Rey school model, an innovative private-partnership tuition payment program that is opening new doors for students in over a dozen schools nationwide. This insightful book is an inspirational read.

Check out Kearney's first work "The Small Things" as well.

What makes this book so special is that it focuses in on perhaps the most daunting challenge our country faces today...educational inequality in inner-city schools. Further, what makes this books so great is that it provides hope and inspiration through the example that Christo Rey has set forth as the gold standard for reforming inner-city education.

In America, the level of educational inequality is mind-boggling. Students growing up in low-income neighborhoods face challenges that are hardly believable. Take for example, the following stats:

*Nine-year-olds growing up in low-income communities are already three grade levels behind their peers in high-income communities.

*Half of them won't graduate from high school by the time they're 18.

*Those who do graduate will, on average, read and do math at the level of eighth graders in high-income communities. Only 1 in 10 will graduate from college.

This book serves as an example as to what is right in the complicated and somewhat troubling world of inner-city education. Christo Rey's success should be shared with the world as the role model for other schools. I'm certain that anyone who reads this will find it to be inspirational and time well spent.

The book recounts the story of the founding of Cristo Rey, from idea through year seven. Though Kearney worked at the school for two years, the book is mostly dispassionate -- and certainly more dispassionate than expected given the title. Kearney did a good job of writing the school profile that he promised and avoiding the sappy memoir that it could have turned into.

Cristo Rey was initially conceived in 1992 by Father Brad Schaeffer, at that time the Provincial for the Chicago region, who respected the elite Jesuit schools in the city and around the country (he'd earlier been principal of one), but felt that Jesuits were called to help those with the most need. He eventually settled on opening a high school in the poor and heavily-Hispanic Pilsen/Little Village neighborhoods. For a while, various people puzzled over how to create a school that would be affordable to the neediest residents of the school. They eventually settled on a plan for students to work at firms around town one day a week (later adjusted to one day/week + an additional day/month), with the firms paying the school directly (well, actually a separately incorporated non-profit org connected to the school) in order to fund the students' education. After opening in 1996, the school got off to a bit of a rocky start, but eventually was able to attract millions of dollars in grants and now routinely sends 90+% of its students to college -- eventually leading people around the country to ask how they could replicate the school. The Cristo Rey Network now consists of 24 schools around the country.

The book alternates between the school's story and the story of a number of Cristo Rey students. Though too many details, and far too many names, were included, the story generally flows well. The readers are initially hit with a number of Jesuit abbreviations that would confuse many, but Kearney does take a little time to explain Jesuit history and get readers up to speed. Personally, I would have appreciated a glossary of Jesuit terms and abbreviations in the front or back of the book.

Nonetheless, the book definitely provides useful knowledge for anybody interested in urban education. It's no substitute for seeing schools in person, but it's the next best thing.

While the most distinctive feature of Cristo Rey is its jobs programs, the book spends more time discussing the day-to-day workings of the school. And the Cristo Rey that comes into focus as the book progresses is one that engages in fairly liberal pedagogy . . . teachers believe in creating courses that will engage students rather than simply teaching the basics. The principals of the school describe the school as "student-centered" again and again. In the first few years, the students took a course their first year designed to "equip them with the ability to constantly learn what they felt they needed to know" rather than "teaching knowledge for the sake of knowledge" (pp. 200-201). Students took part in an "Active Learners" capstone project, explained thusly by one teacher: "Traditionally, we think of students as absorbing the knowledge of the teachers. We wanted to teach the students to actually create knowledge, to become producers of knowledge." (p. 209)

Teachers spent far more time planning curricula than at most schools because they seemed to be obsessed with finding a better way to do things. Kearney writes that many teachers routinely stayed until at least 8pm and arrived around the crack of dawn (which might have been one of the reasons that so few of the founding teachers were still around by the end of the book). The book clearly depicts a school in which teachers see their job as more of a calling than anything else; indeed, the school hires more and more volunteer teachers as the school grows.

What really jumped out at me, though, was that the portrait Kearney painted of Cristo Rey was almost entirely different than the one painted by Whitman. In Whitman's book, he extols the virtues of Cristo Rey's paternalistic, no-nonsense approach to education. In Kearney's book, he depicts a notably progressive faculty experimenting with new ways of helping students -- though the school does seem to become more traditional as the years pass by. Whitman writes that Cristo Rey's jobs training program "provides a dose of cultural imperialism" (p. 131), while Kearney seems to emphasize that the jobs training program evolved to be less didactic and more interactive over time. Kearney describes the angst over expelling students, particularly ones that had been fired from their jobs. Eventually the faculty decides to create a second chance program for these students. Whitman quotes the principal as saying "If a student loses a job a second time, we would ask them to leave. You can't be dubbed unemployable and be a student here" (p. 133). Kearney describes one student (who graduated) who "quickly became a discipline problem," who, "by the end of his first semester, was handing in less than 25% of his homework assignments" (pp. 245-246). Whitman writes of a school where no nonsense is tolerated and a student complains of getting detention for chewing gum, wearing tight pants, missing two homework assignments, coming to school or class late, or talking to friends (p. 133).

I'm not sure if these versions of Cristo Rey are incompatible, or if the authors just see the school in a different light. But it's very clear that Whitman views the school's no-nonsense, paternalistic approach to education as its defining characteristic while Kearney mentions very little that would seem to indicate this is one of the school's notable features. Given that Whitman observed the school a few years after Kearney did it may also be the case that the school evolved from a progressive approach to a more zero tolerance approach over the years.

While it seems clear from both accounts that Cristo Rey is doing a remarkable and laudable job, and I very much appreciate both their innovative approach to education and their dedication to an important goal, the policy person in me can't help but worry whether they are truly educating the neediest students anymore or to what extent the school is replicable.

Despite those qualms, I have little doubt that the people running Cristo Rey are remarkable and deserving of every bit of attention they have received. Kearney's book is an excellent, and easily readable, description of how the school came about and how it overcame numerous obstacles. It doesn't have the heft of a research volume, but it's equally illuminating.

This is an excellent book that outlines the foundation of the first Cristo Rey school in Chicago. The Jesuits created Cristo Rey Chicago in the late 1990's, and now the Cristo Rey Network includes over 20 schools. The Jesuits started the program to provide a college prep high school experience for economically challenged students in the inner city. I teach at the Cristo Rey school in Kansas City, and found this book an invaluable resource to my own teaching / administrative roles. It was great to read about the Jesuit's initial desire that drove them to found the school, and also to read about the logistic struggles they faced in those tough first years. Since it is such an inspiring story, I'd recommend to anyone outside of education as well.

What an inspiring book! The detail with which Kearney tackles this story conveys the dedication, hard work, hope, and faith of everyone involved in developing Cristo Rey High School and the Corporate Internship Program. The extensive research that the author presents makes it an easy read; one that outlines the power of people from different backgrounds working together for a common goal. A must read for anyone undertaking a feat that at one time or another seems insurmountable.

G.R. Kearney did a terrific job on researching this book, and not just the technical stuff. The human element of the story comes alive under the watchful eye of Kearney's storytelling. The students, teachers, staff & administrators at Cristo Rey owe a great debt to Kearney for his bringing light to the innovative systems put in place there.

If you have heard one too many depressing statistics about how education in the US is on a serious decline- read this book to lift your spirits. Creativity & hard work brought this project to life & gives hope to an ailing system.

My hat goes off to Kearney & I recommend this book to everyone.

What started as an idea in the early 1990s has grown to become a growing national network of high schools in many of America's toughest urban environments. GR Kearney tells the story of the Cristo Rey Network which started as the small Cristo Rey Jesuit High School in Chicago in 1994 and has grown to include nearly 2 dozen schools nationwide. Kearney tells the story from several perspectives, interviewing founding members of the faculty, staff and board of the school as well as weaving tales of students throughout the pages. Kearney himself volunteered at the original Cristo Rey school and lends a perspective that is critical to understanding the Cristo Rey story.

More Than a Dream is a must read for those looking to make a difference, or at least want to read about some people who have, in the lives of thousands of innercity youth in America's urban battlefields.