When I visited Notre Dame a few years ago, I had the pleasure of meeting with a class of students preparing to become teachers in a program called ACE (Alliance for Catholic Education). ACE is considered the Catholic version of TFA, but it is far more serious and demanding than TFA. It is not a stepping stone to a job in finance, but a commitment to teach in difficult circumstances at low pay on behalf of a Catholic vision of social justice. The ACE students take classes during their undergraduate years to prepare them to teach; they have mentors while they are teaching; they live in community while teaching; they are paid far less than their counterparts in public schools; they return to Notre Dame for a summer of study; and they take teaching as a serious commitment. Father Scully at Notre Dame, who leads the program, is one of the most inspirational people I have ever met. I was honored to be his host for dinner in my home when he visited New York City, where he said a Mass for a small group of Catholic friends.
All of this is background for you to understand this impassioned letter written by ACE alumni to current ACE teachers.
The letter notes that Trump and DeVos chose to St. Andrew Catholic School in Orlando, where there are ACE teachers. The letter writers warned that Catholic schools should not allow themselves to be used by Trump to advance his policies, which run directly counter to the social justice mission of ACE educators and their mission. They wish it to be known that they do not want ACE or the children it serves to be used to legitimatize hateful policies by the Trump administration.
The letter begins like this:
Dear Leadership of the Notre Dame Alliance for Catholic Education Academies,
We, the undersigned alumni of the Alliance for Catholic Education, write to express our concerns about President Trump’s visit to St. Andrew Catholic School, a Notre Dame ACE Academy, in Orlando, Florida on Friday, March 3, 2017. We also write to offer our prayers for the St. Andrew school leadership, community and particularly the students in this time of unexpected attention.
This visit is an important symbolic moment that should be addressed by advocates of Catholic education. St. John XXIII encouraged unity in essentials, liberty in doubtful matters and charity throughout. We believe the essential unifying principle of serving the least among us is affronted by much of President Trump’s policy and rhetoric. The visit, regardless of its genesis, could be taken as tacit approval within the broader Catholic education community for these policies, including the scapegoating of immigrants, refugees and the economically marginalized in service of a nationalist stance and the targeting of Muslims as enemies of Christianity. Catholic schools have heroically served what Pope Francis has called the bruised, hurting and dirty Church. We fear this visit will associate Catholic schools with policies that violently conflict with their Gospel mission, and therefore ask ACE make a statement affirming our bedrock shared values. Protection of the least of these is the responsibility of us all, and especially those with the platforms to be heard.
Our first concern is that this visit has been designed to use the children and school community of St. Andrew as props by an administration that opposes core aspects of their identity. The primary focus of a visit to a Catholic school should be celebrating the mission of that school. Of course, politicians often use community organizations to advance their agendas. Further, past presidents of both party affiliations have visited Catholic schools to celebrate their identity and academic achievement. However, given the incompatibility of President Trump’s agenda with Catholic schools’ mission, we are concerned that this visit takes advantage of Catholic schools, students, families and communities without humanizing or benefiting them. President Trump did not visit a Catholic school during the recent Catholic Schools Week (though he did tweet about it). Why should his first visit to a Catholic school serve to benefit him and his agenda?
Our second concern is this visit could be taken as tacit support of policies that run counter to the mission of Catholic education and attack the very dignity of those served by Catholic schools. As current and former classroom educators, we know for many teachers, children and their families, President Trump’s campaign and administration have placed new stress upon the most vulnerable among us. For those of us in classrooms, we are facing challenging conversations about what the future holds for the children, youth and families we serve. As all those touched by ACE are well aware, many children in Catholic schools are already hard-pressed to maintain focus on their day-to-day learning given the challenges they face due to their race, class, language or country of origin outside of school. We know the St. Andrew community has worked tirelessly for decades to serve marginalized communities in Orlando. But this visit has not been designed to celebrate that fact; instead, it provides a platform for President Trump to showcase his marginalizing policies.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Good stuff! I will send this to the Catholic high school from which I graduated. It’s a real right-wing indoctrination factory that turned out Steve Scalise, the House Republican Majority Whip who once boasted of being “David Duke without the baggage.”
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The ACE catholic school teachers trained at Notre Dame U are committed to the teachings of Jesus, social justice and care for those who face many obstacles. Their statement rings true n should be printed in every catholic publication in the USA.
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I greatly respect the letter’s content and emphasis. However, I also looked for mention of whether or not the students at the school use vouchers in order to attend. Although of course I want every student to have the best education possible, I still wonder: Are vouchers used to attend religious schools a violation of the First Amendment? Can anyone answer the question for me?
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Where the violation of church/state separation comes into play is at the state level. And then it depends on the particular state’s constitution. Look up Blaine Amendments to find out more. There were also a couple of discussions a few days ago on this site.
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Private schools can do as they wish when they are privately funded. We are making a huge error in mixing public funding to private schools. It totally muddies the water. First, charters were supposed to save students from failing schools. Now, they want vouchers too. It is a slippery slope, and we have already slipped enough, especially since charters have achieved meager results. We already know vouchers are a total waste on schools of questionable value. Policymakers should have to look at evidence instead of who makes campaign contributions. This is not about improving education; it is about moving public money into private pockets.
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Thanks for reporting on this. I also want to draw attention to the fact that Trump used the school visit as a platform to advance the administration’s school-choice policy, and ACE is loudly in favor of school choice, vouchers, etc. (see ace.nd.edu/pea/). As much as such policies can be a boon to Catholic schools, such policies come quite literally at the expense of supporting a strong public-school system. This, in turn, will disproportionately hurt those who are already the most marginalized.
As an ACE alum, I am proud that my fellow alumni have spoken out about the general incompatibility between a xenophobic administration and the mission of Catholic schools. I want to add that ACE, as an institution, has taken a policy stance on school choice that does not make me proud.
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Thanks, Steve. When I spoke at Norte Dame, I lectured against school choice. I warned that it would harm most kids by withdrawing funding from the public schools, where most kids are enrolled, and might ultimately endanger the religious identity of Catholic schools. I don’t know how my message was received, but I appreciated that the institution was courageous enough to hear me out.
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Diane,
I’d echo what Steve has written. This isn’t to lay any blame at your feet as it would be really difficult, from the outside looking in, to know just how deeply ACE has aligned itself with the voucher movement. The alums who signed that letter were most offended by the very public decision to choose vouchers over the protection of the most vulnerable students and families in the name of ‘Catholic’ education. But this is entirely in keeping with the agenda ACE has pursued for quite a long time. One hope of the letter is to demonstrate that though ACE purports to be a leading voice in Catholic education, the teachers on the ground by and large are ambivalent if not outright resistant to the voucher push and its attendant inability or unwillingness to think about the effects that such systems have on public school resources. Some points in support of the above assertions:
1. When you came to ND, you were part of a University-wide forum on education. If it had been up to the leaders of ACE entirely, I don’t imagine you’d have been invited, though it’s important to note that you did provide some balance (and faculty to had to fight for that even) to a speaker series that featured Jeb Bush, Michelle Rhee, Wendy Kopp, Juan Rangel (of UNO in Chicago), as well as ancillary talks by Tony Bennett, Bob McDonnell and Chris Christie, among others.
2. Fr. Scully is indeed charming. He is also, in large part, a fundraiser, so his work is to charm people. That’s not indicting him, nor you, as I do think that friendship across ideological lines happens all the time. But make no mistake, he is the primary mover behind the voucher push in ACE, in Catholic schools, and in Indiana at a local level. The ideology at the top of the organization is pure market theory and it pervades. The people that leaders are ‘in rooms with’ are primarily reformers and think tankers, which is how you get things like this:
http://news.nd.edu/news/rev-tim-scully-receives-manhattan-institute-s-william-e-simon-prize/
The press conference at St. Andrew came about because of the longstanding relationship between ACE and Step Up for Students. I think the people who believe in this way genuinely see this as a way to save Catholic schools. The focus, though, is on the sense that Catholic schools are inherently good for kids. Recent research has shown that in terms of test scores, this may no longer be true. One other argument might be that they serve a strong social mission. I think the people who signed the letter believe that too, but it gets totally undermined by aligning with the rhetoric and hatred affiliated with the Trump administration.
3. The school is an ACE Academy which is essentially a version of KIPP lite that ACE is franchising in dioceses: https://ace.nd.edu/academies/
Note that they have taken a lot of the strategies of KIPP, the branding, the slogans as well as the massive testing imperatives as well as hiring away from KIPP. The point would be that indeed it might be a good school, but the stats that the superintendent quoted in the press conference a) don’t echo in any actual research and b) are very much in line with the near religious belief in choice as a social doctrine at the expense, many of us think, of actual kids and actual religion.
4. ACE teachers do not, in fact, receive any undergraduate training in education. They may if they are at Notre Dame, take courses in the Ed. Studies minor, but that’s incidental to their work in ACE. Some teachers who come in from other schools will have been education majors, so it can be a mix. But it’s important to know that though ACE Teaching Fellows (and I’m a former one) do receive more support in their second summer and year in the classroom over the year than TFA, in their first year of teaching they have had only 8 weeks of training in the summer. The percentages of ACE teachers who stay in the classroom is similarly low to TFA though ACE will often use the ‘still in education’ category to bump things up. The point isn’t that anyone is a bad person here, but that there are systemic issues that we should attend to and that data are important to attend closely to as always with reform initiatives.
5. There’s more, of course, but we don’t need inside baseball with this program anymore. The idea would be that the fact that ACE is now stuck in a pickle comes from the fact that at the top they believe, in nearly fundamentalist fashion, in school choice, and now very publicly at the expense of the kids who those of us teaching or who have taught, served as a part of the program. Catholic schools are wonderful. The hope is that people who are Catholic educators and Catholics generally see that there isn’t universal support for the voucher push and indeed, as with the data in Indiana, New Orleans, Milwaukee, etc. it’s actually harmful to students, to schools and to the republic.
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Kevin, thank you for your thoughtful and informed reply. I knew that my message at Notre Dame was not what is typically heard there. I was forthright and clear that vouchers harm public schools and are not good for society or even Catholic schools. ND was very gracious to me. A number of faculty let me know they agreed with me. Father Scully is indeed charming, and I look forward to having his blessing on my new apartment. Catholics (I live with one) often say the Church can’t afford to pay for their schools, but the reality is that they were accustomed to having the free labor of religious. The Church will have to decide how to deal with Trump’s threat to its social justice mission. It can’t cheer him on as the children and families it serves disappear.
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Reblogged this on Network Schools – Wayne Gersen and commented:
Kudos to the students who are committing themselves to teaching in struggling schools in the name of social justice. If only our legislators had the same level of commitment to the children attending public schools who struggle with a lack of resources.
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