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The University of Notre Dame’s Alliance for Catholic Education (ACE) bestowed master’s degrees on 108 Catholic school educators and leaders at 3:30 p.m. Saturday (July 12) at the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center. U.S. Sen. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania was the featured commencement speaker.

Notre Dame granted master of education degrees to 83 ACE Teaching Fellows who have served the last two years in 30 different communities across the nation in the innovative program that was founded in response to a call for talented, recent college graduates to serve as instructional leaders for children in under-resourced Catholic schools. Twenty-five educators received a master of arts in educational leadership from the Mary Ann Remick Leadership Program. The initiative is the largest program of its kind, providing world-class formation to passionate Catholic school leaders.

This year’s graduates continue Notre Dame’s 20-year legacy of fueling Catholic schools with passionate leaders. These men and women bring a new imagination and zeal to help strengthen Catholic schools and empower marginalized children. The cohort of graduates brings the total number of ACE Teaching Fellows to more than 1,300 alumni who have served as classroom teachers in one of ACE’s partner schools nationwide. Seventy percent of them have continued their careers in K-12 education.

Since its inception in 2002, the Mary Ann Remick Leadership Program has embraced a vision of leadership that promotes strong Catholic school culture, applies executive management skills and fosters academic excellence. More than 250 Remick Leadership graduates serve Catholic schools in 38 states and 82 dioceses around the world.

Casey offered the commencement address as a member of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions. Before his distinguished career in law and public service in Pennsylvania and his first election to the U.S. Senate in 2006, Casey performed a year of voluntary service as a fifth-grade teacher and eighth-grade coach in inner-city Philadelphia.

Notre Dame Vice President and Senior Associate Provost Christine Maziar conferred the degrees on behalf of the University. The annual Commencement exercises also featured remarks by Rev. Timothy R. Scully, C.S.C., the Hackett Family Director of the Institute for Educational Initiatives, who founded the Alliance for Catholic Education in 1993 along with Rev. Sean McGraw, C.S.C.

“We are blessed with talented and faith-filled graduates seeking to extend the gift of a great Catholic school education to as many children as possible. Their tireless commitment provides a witness of hope for Notre Dame, the Church and our nation,” said Father Scully. “They remind us that every child, especially the most vulnerable, must have the opportunity for a quality education. We are deeply grateful for their service and the support of their families.”

Contact: Bill Schmitt, Alliance for Catholic Education, 574-631-3893, 

“Why do Saint Peter and Saint Paul share a feast day?  Saint Polycarp has his own feast day, and whoever heard of him?  I thought he was a fish!”

From the grand ambo of the Basilica, Father Joe Corpora, C.S.C. (here pictured speaking at the Latino Enrollment Institute), juxtaposes two leaders of the early Church: Peter, the uneducated fisherman who thrice denied his best friend; and Paul, the eloquent spokesman for a Messiah he never met and whose followers he had persecuted.  It is difficult to imagine two men more different.  Why, asks Father Corpora, does the Church celebrate two such contradictory characters on the same day?

According to Father Corpora, the answer lies in a central similarity between Saints Peter and Paul: complete dependence on God.  Both great sinners who experienced even greater forgiveness, Peter and Paul remind us that the Church is vast enough to embrace paradox.  The Church celebrates contradiction so that we, too, can rejoice in the diverse ways that Christians live out the Gospel with complete dependence on God.

In my first weeks as a summer intern, I have encountered this truth through the remarkably diverse ministries of ACE.  United by complete dependence on God, ACErs carry out their shared mission to Catholic schools in wonderfully paradoxical ways. 

Students at St. Paul School in Seattle, a school that serves lower income Asian Pacific Islander and African-American students, are achieving impressive academic gains using an innovative blended learning and school improvement model developed by the Alliance for Catholic Education (ACE) at the University of Notre Dame.

As measured by the Northwest Evaluation Association Measurement of Academic Progress (NWEA MAP), students achieved 147% of growth targets in math and 122% in reading during the first year of the program, similar to a school wide average of a year and a half of growth in math and a year and a quarter in reading. The average eighth grade student achieved 233% of growth targets in math—akin to two and one-third years of growth—over the past academic year.

“The initial results are particularly promising,” Rev. Timothy Scully, C.S.C, the founder of the Alliance for Catholic Education, said. “St. Paul students are performing remarkably well—we are thrilled by the promise this model shows, and believe it can be a powerful tool that more schools like St. Paul can deploy to continue the Catholic school legacy of providing students with an excellent education.”

Blended learning is an emerging model of computer-aided instruction that facilitates more personalized and self-paced learning to more effectively meet the learning needs of each student.  ACE’s approach to blended learning and school strengthening also includes improvements to instructional leadership, enrollment management, and marketing that draws lessons from ACE’s significant experience serving K-12 Catholic schools throughout the country.

St. Paul is seeing school-wide success with its new instructional model.  While the national norm for NWEA MAP performance is for fifty percent of students to meet or exceed their growth targets, seventy-three percent of students at St. Paul exceeded their targets in reading. Eighty-one percent reached the feat in math.

Financially fragile and under-enrolled, St. Paul also saw an enrollment increase of 10 percent over the past year and expects another 10 percent increase in the year to come.  As a part of the ongoing relationship between Notre Dame and the Archdiocese of Seattle, both the Archdiocese and the Fulcrum Foundation said they regard the partnership as a significant success and a model for school strengthening throughout the area.

TJ D’Agostino, who directs the project at Notre Dame, said the success St. Paul students are experiencing is due to teachers more effectively meeting the needs of each child with the benefit of powerful blended learning software, and school leaders continuously strengthening teachers with targeted professional growth in high yield areas like the use of data and deepening a culture of high expectations, key areas of focus for the training and support that ACE provides.

“Blended learning can be a powerful driver for schools to provide a customized education for every child,” D’Agostino said, “though it is most impactful when paired with other best-practices, like data driven instruction, professional learning communities for teachers, and ongoing instructional coaching.  We work closely with the principal and a team of lead teachers to implement these comprehensive strategies.  The results have been transformative.”

The Seattle Office for Catholic Schools and Fulcrum Foundation invited ACE to consider their community as the inaugural site for a new blended learning model, and the city was selected after analysis showed strong local support for the partnership and affirmed the schools’ capacity to serve area students effectively.

Scully, along with Rev. Sean McGraw, C.S.C., founded ACE 20 years ago to fuel Catholic schools with talent and energy. With a presence in every state in the country and programs that address all aspects of Catholic education, ACE has become the premier provider of talent and resources for Catholic schools. Embracing methods from other pioneers in the field, and supported by research on the potential of blending learning, ACE feels this model can be a useful tool to help struggling, inner-city Catholic schools.

St. Paul School is one of the first schools to leverage a premier university’s research and resources to deploy a blending learning and school improvement model. ACE hopes to expand the model of support to other cities in the future. 

After traveling 30,000 miles to visit more than 16,000 Catholic school students throughout the past year, the Alliance for Catholic Education’s celebration of the gift of Catholic schools is just beginning.

The Fighting for Our Children’s Future National Bus Tour visited 65 K-12 Catholic schools across 35 states to celebrate the vital role these and thousands of other Catholic schools play in serving poor and marginalized students and their communities. According to ACE’s founders, those 30,000 miles are just the first step in changing the narrative on Catholic schools — a narrative that has been plagued with school closures for the last decade.

“The story being told in Catholic schools should be one of zeal, one of joy and one of promise,” Rev. Timothy R. Scully, C.S.C., founder of the Alliance for Catholic Education at the University of Notre Dame, said. “We set out with the mantra that ‘Catholic schools are good for America,’ that they are absolutely vital for our children, our communities and our nation. The stories we have witnessed on the road and the amazing people we have met along the way have deepened our commitment to Notre Dame’s mission to serve these sacred places.”

Father Scully noted that research clearly shows a continuing Catholic school advantage. Ninety-nine percent of Catholic school students graduate high school on time, and 85 percent attend college. Studies also show that Catholic school graduates tend to be more civically engaged, more likely to vote, more tolerant of diverse views, more committed to service as adults and less likely to be incarcerated than their peers.

Despite this advantage, Catholic schools have struggled in recent years. ACE’s tour, and its mission to strengthen, sustain and transform these schools, set out to raise awareness of the success of this proven model and of the profound impact the schools have on nearly two million students who attend them.

“The future of Catholic schools is bright, but our work is just beginning,” said Rev. Sean McGraw, C.S.C., who co-founded ACE 20 years ago with Scully. “We continue to engage in an effort to provide solutions to what is certainly America’s greatest civic challenge: ensuring that every American child, especially the most vulnerable, has the opportunity for a quality education.”

The National Bus Tour kicked off in Dallas in October 2013 in conjunction with the Notre Dame Shamrock Seriesfootball game before visiting schools and honoring local education champions in the Midwest and on the East Coast. In November, as the bus rolled into New York City, the Manhattan Institute honored Father Scully with the William E. Simon Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Social Entrepreneurship for his founding and leadership of ACE.

The bus headed south in February to revisit ACE’s roots and long-standing partnerships throughout the Gulf Coast. March featured visits throughout Oklahoma, Colorado and Texas, while April included trips to Chicago and Minnesota. The tour wrapped up the 2013-2014 academic year in May with trips through West Coast cities.

On Monday (June 9), the University of Notre Dame will welcome the bus and the ACE team home, and will honor two members of the South Bend and Notre Dame communities — Jay Caponigro and Maritza Robles — with the University of Notre Dame Champion for Education Award. ACE will also present the Notre Dame Sorin Award for Service to Catholic Schools to Brian and Jeannelle Brady, without whom the bus tour would not have been possible. The homecoming coincides with the start of the ACE Summer, when more than 800 teachers, school leaders and Catholic school supporters — including 95 new teachers who make up ACE ACE Teaching Fellows’s 21st cohort — converge on Notre Dame’s campus for leadership formation and other opportunities focused on building a brighter future for Catholic schools.

Contact: Bill Schmitt, 574-631-3893, , @ACEatND, @theACEBus

The Alliance for Catholic Education (ACE) has announced the members of its newest cohort of teaching fellows – a group of ninety-five recent college graduates whose record of academic achievement, dedication to serving marginalized communities, and zeal for empowering children through Catholic schools was described by the Program’s founder, Fr. Tim Scully, CSC as “a truly extraordinary sign of hope.” Fr. Scully, who also serves as a Fellow of the University and a Professor of Political Science, notes that this class, ACE’s 21st, was selected from one of the most competitive applicant pools in the Program’s history.

ACE 21 includes graduates from colleges and universities throughout the United States and abroad, including Notre Dame, Georgetown, the University of Wisconsin, Ateneo de Manila University, New York University, and St. Patrick’s College of Dublin. Through their two-year teaching fellowship, each member will earn a fully-funded graduate degree from Notre Dame while serving as a classroom teacher in one of ACE’s partner schools and living in intentional community with other ACE teachers. ACE now partners with more than 100 Catholic schools serving marginalized populations in 31 cities throughout the country. Since the Program’s launch in 1993, ACE has formed more than 1,200 such teachers – approximately 70% remain in K–12 education, while others have gone on to successful careers in business, engineering, medicine, law, and the academy.

“The cornerstone of our work in ACE is forming talent – that is, supporting aspiring teachers and leaders with the aptitude, imagination, and zeal to help strengthen and transform Catholic schools and empower marginalized children” said John Schoenig, ACE’s Director of Teacher Formation and Education Policy. “We couldn’t be happier with this new group of ACE teachers. In so many ways, they represent precisely what we aspire to as a program."