For more than 100 years, All Hallows High School in the South Bronx has been educating immigrant and lower-income boys. Early on, the students were Irish; later, they were Italian; today, they are Hispanic and black. In past generations, the school's teachers were largely members of the Irish Christian Brothers, men pledged to lives of poverty, chastity, and obedience and to a vocation of teaching those most in need. Today, only three brothers remain at the school, and more than a third of the teachers are themselves alumni. Despite demographic changes in the neighborhood and dramatic cultural change within the Catholic Church, All Hallows maintains its traditions, practices, and aims.
What's its secret—what holds this place together? I recently visited All Hallows to find out. I had heard great things about this old school and wanted to learn more. “Don't try to reduce what we do to a formula or recipe,” said Brunelle Griffith, English teacher and track coach. “It's larger than that and hard to describe.” It was a timely warning. For decades, education-policy researchers have sought to understand why some schools succeed where others fail. The best research tells us that the things that matter most in effective urban schools are hard to quantify—and even harder to replicate. Success is bound up in a shared sense of mission, reciprocity, trust, respect, and other intangibles that define strong relationships and forge social bonds. Yet, much of the policy debate around schooling still focuses on measurable inputs—spending, class sizes, teacher training, and curricular offerings. How can one measure a school's culture, or the relationships it fosters between educators, students, and their families? And even if one could, how could those findings be translated into practice for other schools to emulate?
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