Character Development Among Disadvantaged Urban Youth: A Planning Grant to Study the Impact of Cristo Rey Network’s Innovative Model

This planning grant will enable the research team to carefully develop an inviolable methodology to execute a rigorous study of the Cristo Rey Network, an organization comprised of 24 high schools that provide a quality, faith-based, college preparatory education to urban young people living in disadvantaged communities. The planning grant would provide the following resources to support the research and development of the plan: (1) a convening of key scholars, practitioners, and select experts; (2) conducting focus groups and key informant interviews with students and teachers in select schools in order to ground the research in specific school contexts; (3) the drawing of lessons from current literature on effective practices in urban schools for promoting achievement and character development; (4) seeking preliminary commitments for study participation from the schools in the Cristo Rey Network and peer schools (i.e. Green Dot Schools); and (5) developing the study design, and preliminary instrumentation. The team will test hypotheses related to Cristo Rey Network's emphasis on promoting student work study internships. The team will begin to formulate the big picture questions to be addressed. For example, does character development foster spiritual formation or is the opposite the case? We will identify those factors that inform the development of character, promote flourishing, and nourish spiritual formation. We will also determine the relationship among these important outcomes so that the education marketplace can gain knowledge from our findings. Finally, central to our goal we will isolate the unique effects of the work component to other variables.