A WSJ article about the Cristo Rey network of schools:

Cristo Rey high schools are not charters, which take public money. These are private schools, financed with a clever, innovative system, which I will describe in a moment.

I mention charters because one of the alleged sins of alternative schools for minority students, such as Cristo Rey, is that they "cream" the public system's smart, high-achieving students.

Cristo Rey explicitly does not take the highest-scoring students. Father Joe Parkes, the energetic Jesuit who serves as president of Cristo Rey New York High School, noted that the first time this year's graduates took the Iowa Test of Educational Development, their average score fell in the 48th percentile. Cristo Rey pulls its student body from the middle of the pack, at best. Four years later, they go to college.

This is not the miracle of the loaves and the fishes. It is a system that works, literally. The system's financial support model, which pays students to work, is surely one of the most innovative ideas seen in awhile in American education.

Every student at a Cristo Rey high school works full time one day a week with a local private company or not-for-profit. For entry-level work—real work, not make-work—the companies pay student teams between $20,000 (Denver) and $30,000 (Washington, D.C.). That money goes into the school's annual budget.

The employer gets a Cristo Rey student every day of the week, freshmen through seniors. So on a Tuesday, the school might assemble all the sophomores and shepherd them to work, and gather them in at day's end. This means the students have to do five days of school work in four days, and that alone may have a lot to do with the success rate.

That work contributes about 65% of a school's budget and keeps average tuitions low, at about $2,350. As a former president of the network has noted, "Our students are by far and away our biggest donor."

This is the honorable tradition of working your way through school.

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