As we conclude our 20th school year at Chicago Jesuit Academy, I am grateful for this annual opportunity to lovingly brag about our students and alumni and their accomplishments. They continue to strive toward our grad-at-grad ideals as young people who are seeking intellectual excellence, open to growth, loving, religious and committed to doing justice in the service of others. The ways in which they choose to live their lives inspire me and give me great hope for the future. Please know that I remain so grateful for your continued partnership in the work of building our CJA community ad majorem Dei gloriam.
This publication marks our fifth annual update. This year’s update is again a lengthy document that contains both new data about our students’ achievements and a reiteration of the foundational beliefs that inspire all that we aspire to accomplish as a community. I hope it serves as a touchstone for our CJA community and helps ground us in our unique way of proceeding as a Jesuit Catholic school.
Two years ago, I began this update by sharing that our parents tell us CJA is the school they have been searching for: a school that will truly partner with them in their child’s education. We strive to walk with our families as they raise their sons and daughters by opening our doors early for breakfast and staying open into the evening so that life can be a little easier for our working parents – especially our single parents who carry especially heavy loads. Across our nine-hour school day, our students receive three meals, personalized instruction, and access to social workers, a full-time nurse and learning specialists in addition to their teachers. They also explore their diverse talents through our co-curricular programs where they can learn to cook in our Culinary Arts Club, play music in our Band, problem solve in our Robotics Club or compete on our Soccer, Flag Football, Volleyball, Basketball, Lacrosse or Track teams. These resources are critically important to our students’ success, and comparable resources are difficult to find, terribly stretched or wholly absent in too many of the elementary schools that neighbor CJA.
The most essential part of our CJA community is the love that defines our way of proceeding – love that holds in careful balance the need for grace and compassion as well as rigor and urgency when we seek to help a young person grow. We are mindful that each child entrusted to our care must be known and seen as well as challenged and called to be their very best self. This is the hard work we do each day.
One important way we measure our progress is through our students’ academic growth and achievement as measured by the i-Ready Mathematics and Reading assessments that our students take three times each year. While our teachers have a very good sense of how each student is growing, these standardized assessments allow us to compare our students’ achievement and growth against national norms.
The data continues to tell a powerful story.
First, the frustrating part: Many of our students arrive at CJA testing well below grade level. At the start of the 2024-2025 school year, 46% of our enrolled students were testing two or more grades below their grade level in Mathematics and 37% were two or more grades behind in Reading. These students were largely concentrated among our newly enrolled 3rd, 4th and 5th graders. They were struggling not through any fault of their own, but because they had previously attended under-resourced or under-performing schools before enrolling at CJA. By May, we saw a very different story emerge: 91% of our students completed the 2024-2025 school year testing above, on or within one grade of their age-appropriate grade level in Mathematics, and 82% had done the same in Reading. Our students made these impressive gains while our school’s enrollment grew from 239 students (173 boys and 66 girls) in 2023-2024 to 318 students (198 boys and 120 girls) in 2024-2025.
We are still doing a detailed review of each student’s performance from the year, and the following charts provide an overview of our students’ growth from their i-Ready assessments at the start of the 2024-2025 school year through their final assessments in May 2025.
| Percentage of Students in Mathematics… | Fall 2024 | Spring 2025 | Fall to Spring % Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mid or above grade level | 2% | 23% | +1,050% |
| Early on grade level | 6% | 29% | +383% |
| One grade below grade level | 46% | 39% | -15% |
| Two grades below grade level | 33% | 7% | -79% |
| Three or more grades below | 13% | 2% | -85% |
| Percentage of Students in Reading… | Fall 2024 | Spring 2025 | Fall to Spring % Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mid or above grade level | 9% | 32% | +256% |
| Early on grade level | 23% | 20% | -13% |
| One grade below grade level | 31% | 30% | -3% |
| Two grades below grade level | 26% | 11% | -58% |
| Three or more grades below | 11% | 8% | -27% |
This year’s testing data mirrors our students’ patterns of growth and achievement from our prior school years. For example in Mathematics, the data shows high levels of growth across the 3rd, 4th and 5th grades even though our median student in each of those grades began their time at CJA at relatively low achievement levels. The 2024-2025 data shows our median students are growing at rates that are at least 1.2 to 2.0x the growth rates of their median peers nationally. By 6th, 7th and 8th grade, our median student in each of those grades has progressed to high performance levels in Mathematics with our median 8th grader testing just shy of the 80th percentile in May 2025.
We’re so proud of our students for earning these scores. Their progress is a testament to their commitment to their studies and their hard work as well as the dedication of their parents and our faculty and staff. While our median 3rd-grade or 4th-grade student might finish their first or second year of studies at CJA scoring only in the 33rd or 47th percentile, they are on a trajectory to grow to score in the 79th and the 83rd percentiles in Math and Reading respectively by the time of their 8th-grade graduation. Across six years, they will have leaped ahead of as many as 50% of their national peers and moved well ahead of the national median.
Our students’ impressive growth and achievements continue to beg the same important questions that I have shared in prior years. CJA is not an academically selective school, so shouldn’t our students’ growth and achievements be possible for most students in Chicago if only we would choose to invest more in them and become better stewards of the resources that already exist?
If we want to provide all children with access to an excellent education, if we believe every child is a unique gift to this world, and if we know each child is most likely to thrive in a school where they are known, loved and challenged, then aren’t we called to build schools that are more rigorous, diverse, equitable and inclusive than those we have today?
Aren’t we also called to ask hard questions about why the talented, strong and gifted young people whom we graduate from CJA each year too often begin their time at CJA far behind where they could be?
The data clearly shows that it’s not because our students don’t work hard. The data also shows that they have no shortage of talent. Instead, success was elusive before CJA for too many of our students because so few other schools have the extensive resources to offer longer school days, longer school years and personalized attention in a loving learning environment that holds in balance the competing goods of compassion, grace, rigor and urgency.
Why are so few schools able to do this?
People of good conscience will offer various answers. Some say it’s the lack of political will to offer broad school choice to families through vouchers or tax-credit scholarship programs. Others will say it’s a lack of political will to appropriately fund all public schools. Still others point to the brokenness of the public-school bureaucracy, the devaluing of teaching as a profession, systemic racism, the squandering of precious education dollars on administrative structures far away from students, the CTU, historical disinvestment in Chicago’s West Side… the list goes on.
I hear all these responses within our board and among our parents, faculty and staff. Across these diverse perspectives, I have also seen good people who hold opposing views stand side by side and work together to help CJA and our students thrive. Through our work at CJA, I have come to know that no group is a monolith in their thinking, and that is a very good thing. At CJA, we believe diverse opinions, robust debate and a whole lot of hard work are essential to keeping CJA a loving school community for all of our students and alumni. By valuing diverse opinions, we also model for our students the critical thinking they will be called to do throughout their life.
Unfortunately, in this hyper-politicized era, we continue to see that the very words we use to talk about all of this can become obstacles to the important work we need to do each day with our students and alumni.
* * *
More than two decades ago, when we were just beginning to dream about the idea of Chicago Jesuit Academy, I enrolled in an MBA program because I lacked the business knowledge I needed to help start CJA. My first weeks in business school felt like a dizzying parade of acronyms and finance terms. On the first day of orientation, I kept hearing classmates and professors talk about “I-banking.” I had no idea what that meant. When I quietly asked a member of my study group, he whispered, “investment banking,” and gave me an incredulous look.
It was clear I had a long night of reading in front of me.
Those first weeks of business school made me question if I belonged in the MBA program. However, when we dug into the ideas behind the terms and acronyms, I quickly found that the substance of business school was fairly straightforward and – for the most part – made good common sense. I was also fortunate to meet some very good friends who welcomed me into the fold and patiently helped me find my way.
I share this story because I think the substance of what we try to say can sometimes be obscured by the vocabulary we use. Words that mean one thing to us might mean something entirely different or nothing at all to someone else when heard through the filter of their lived experience. At our best, we all strive to hear the true meaning behind someone else’s words in the hope of knowing them well and finding common understanding and shared purpose. It is in this spirit that we share CJA’s annual update about our progress toward building a more diverse, equitable and just school community.
For us at CJA, this work has always been about strengthening and caring well for our community. Unfortunately, across the past five years, we have seen how – in some settings – the vocabulary of diversity, equity and inclusion work can become laden with political ideology or be used to exclude those who think or speak differently. As a result, words like “diversity, equity and inclusion” no longer carry simple denotative meanings. Instead, these words now carry connotations that pull them far from the meanings they originally had – and the meanings they continue to have – for us at CJA.
So, what do we mean when we talk about the importance of diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging at CJA?
First and most importantly, we mean that we strive to do all that we can to see the uniqueness of each human person. As we come to know one another across lines of difference, we receive a more full and complete glimpse of who God is. If we believe that every person is made in the image and likeness of God, then coming to know one another across lines of difference not only brings us together as human beings, it also draws us closer to God. In the Catholic tradition, this idea of imago Dei points us toward a belief that “the mystery of humanity cannot be grasped apart from the mystery of God.”
At CJA, this belief is meant to animate all that we do. It is at the heart of who we are as a Jesuit Catholic school for if we believe every child entrusted to our care is made in the image and likeness of God, then we have a sacred obligation to come to know and care well for each child’s unique gifts and needs. We must do all that we can to provide each child with an excellent education because school is the most important place – other than family – where a child comes to know, develop and refine their God-given gifts. We must do this work in close partnership with parents if we hope to help each student know they are loved by God and called to use their unique gifts in service to others throughout their lives.
That’s a tall order.
For all of us – for parents, for teachers, for students, for anyone who is trying to be a little better today than we were the day before – we often struggle to see the fullness of another person’s life. It can be tough for us to approach differences with curiosity or to ascribe charitable intentions to another’s actions when we don’t otherwise know someone’s motivations. We often miss the mark and fail to look upon one another with compassion. In the Catholic tradition, we call this missing of the mark “sin.” Sin keeps us from knowing one another and consequently keeps us from knowing God. We also know that sin isn’t just personal. It can have social, institutional and structural dimensions too. When we sin, we fail to see the full humanity of the person against whom we sin. Instead, we see that person as a means to an end or as someone set apart from ourselves or our group. We make them “the other” – the child who isn’t part of a circle of friends because they don’t wear the right clothes, didn’t make the right team, or don’t live in the right neighborhood. In our fear and ignorance, we also “other” whole groups because of a particular characteristic – whether it’s their gender, their race, their resources or some other attribute.
In 2001, Francis Cardinal George authored a pastoral letter titled Dwell in My Love. His letter sought to address the specific sin of racism in Chicago. He published the letter on April 4th – the 33rd anniversary of the martyring of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. – and his letter was written in response to a group of three white teenagers nearly beating Lenard Clark, a 13-year-old Black child, to death.
Cardinal George wrote, “One form of human division, conflict and fragmentation is racism: personal, social, institutional and structural. Racism mars our identity as a people, as the human race made in the image and likeness of God (Gen. 1:27).” He would later add, “Among our many moral concerns, racism continues to furnish a long-lasting substratum. It is the original sin of American society, enshrined as race slavery in our very Constitution for almost ninety years.” Less than twenty years later, the murder of George Floyd prompted CJA to commit to publishing an annual public review of our efforts to combat the sin of racism and live out our belief that every person is made in the image and likeness of God.
Three summers ago, a friend and long-time CJA supporter was kind enough to spend time in conversation with me about all this work. She encouraged me to write last year’s update and all future updates in a way that acknowledges these challenges while also providing more context for our way of proceeding at CJA. Since my conversation with her, I have tried to more clearly express not just what we do, but why we do it. Ultimately, I hope our work at CJA will be judged not by our words but by our deeds as we strive to live out St. Ignatius of Loyola’s rejoinder that “Love ought to show itself more in deeds than words.”
* * *
On 9 June 2020, CJA published a statement honoring Black lives in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. In that statement, we promised to review our diversity, equity and inclusion practices and share an annual update about our efforts to be a diverse, equitable and inclusive community each June. This work has included the following commitments:
There are many secular notions about what diversity, equity and inclusion work ought to look like. Some of these secular perspectives implicitly or explicitly champion a political ideology. We do not believe that is what we are called to do at CJA. Instead, we believe we are called to lean into our Jesuit Catholic mission and identity. Catholic social teaching – summarized well in this article by Rev. William Byron, S.J. – is our guide.
The Midwest Province of the Society of Jesus (the Midwest Province) is responsible for guaranteeing the Jesuit Catholic mission and identity of Chicago Jesuit Academy. Every six to seven years, the Midwest Province works with each of their Jesuit schools to complete a sponsorship review. In the 2022-2023 school year, CJA underwent our most recent sponsorship review with the Midwest Province. This included a formal visitation by representatives from our fellow Jesuit schools as well as a delegate from the Midwest Province. The delegation assessed our work using the Jesuit Schools Network’s (JSN’s) Our Way of Proceeding: Standards and Benchmarks for Jesuit Schools in the 21st Century and JSN’s revised Domain 5, “Faith That Lives Justice”, which includes diversity, equity and inclusion work as essential components of the mission and identity of all Jesuit schools. These JSN documents establish the following standards and expectations for all Jesuit pre-secondary and secondary schools:
The visiting team for the Midwest Province found that: “Chicago Jesuit Academy is an exemplar of care and love for students. [CJA] students can articulate their experience of being cared for as individuals by the school personnel. Moreover, students can articulate their experience of caring for others as individuals. This is truly a community that articulates, fosters, and lives the mission as a loving, academically rigorous school deeply rooted in servant leadership… The faculty of CJA are models for other Jesuit apostolates with their active, dedicated participation in learning teams where best practices are shared, new teachers are mentored, and academic instruction is reviewed to ensure all students receive the learning experience they need and deserve.” The visiting team “recommend[ed] to the Provincial that he reaffirm Chicago Jesuit Academy as an apostolate of the Society of Jesus,” and the Provincial has done so through the renewal of our formal sponsorship agreement with the Midwest Province.
Mission: Chicago Jesuit Academy is a loving and academically rigorous tuition-free Catholic elementary school for students and families from resilient communities impacted by historical disinvestment. We accompany our students and alumni from enrollment through the start of their careers as they develop their gifts and grow as men and women for others.
Means: Located in Austin on Chicago’s West Side, CJA admits students to all grades in our lower and middle school without regard for their race, ethnicity or religion, and CJA enrolls 3rd-, 4th- and 5th-grade students without regard for their past levels of academic achievement. We use small class sizes, extended school days and an 11-month school year to give personal care to our students and help them develop as whole persons. We accompany our alumni on their unique paths to meaningful employment and support them throughout high school, their post-secondary education and the start of their careers, always welcoming them back as leaders at CJA and in the broader community. CJA students, alumni, parents, faculty, staff, volunteers and benefactors listen to and learn from one another and make disciplined sacrifices to accomplish our shared mission. We partner with other schools and the broader community to create access to better educational resources, confront systemic racism and remove obstacles to educational equity. We call one another to find God in all things and be men and women for others who are open to growth, loving, religious, seeking intellectual excellence and committed to doing justice.
A West Side minister who was a mentor to me often reminded me that, “You can’t be what you can’t see.” He stressed the importance of giving our students and alumni the opportunity to meet people from various professional backgrounds who look like them and come from neighborhoods like Austin, Garfield Park and North Lawndale. I hope we are always mindful of his guidance, and we strive to give it special consideration at our graduation ceremonies and through our selection processes for our board of directors, committees, executive team, faculty and staff.
At each of our seventeen graduation ceremonies since 2009, the commencement address has served as the “last lesson” that our students receive before they become alumni of CJA. Each of our commencement speakers has been an incredibly accomplished person who has also been a Black or Hispanic man or woman whose life story is resonant with our students in powerful ways. In the hallway to our gymnasium, there is a framed picture of each commencement speaker with their bio so that everyone who comes to CJA can see them and be inspired by their stories.
More broadly, we are very fortunate to know an extraordinarily talented group of people who give generously of their time to volunteer or work at CJA. Within our board of directors, this includes doctors, engineers, finance experts, veterans, philanthropists, entrepreneurs, Jesuit priests, talented school and nonprofit leaders, lawyers, former teachers and other professionals.
At the height of the pandemic, this meant that we could turn to the two doctors on our board who have exceptional credentials and receive critically important strategic guidance and medical advice from them. It also meant those two doctors – who are Black women who know Chicago’s West Side well – were uniquely positioned to speak with our parent community about how they could protect their loved ones at a time when Black people were dying at disproportionate rates from COVID. I will forever owe Dr. Lauren Smith and Dr. Muriel Jean-Jacques a debt I will never be able to repay for their selflessness, courage and dedication to our CJA community throughout the pandemic.
When we host meetings of our board of directors or committees at CJA, our students see those adults and know they play an important role in caring for our school. It is critically important for our students to see in our directors and committee members images of who they might become. All of the members of our board of directors and committees give generously of their time and expertise. Many build deep and long-lasting relationships with our students, alumni and families, and there is a special resonance and perspective that the Black and Hispanic directors and committee members bring to those relationships that is uniquely impactful. Often, our students and alumni can more easily see in them their own stories, and that helps them dream big dreams for the future and know that they are strong, gifted and talented young people who can overcome the obstacles in their way. We want and we need people on our team at CJA who reflect the families, students and alumni we serve.
We do not have specific racial quotas or other demographic targets at CJA, but we do actively seek candidates for our board of directors, committees, executive team, faculty and staff whose lived experiences mirror those of our students, alumni and families.
Across the last six years, we have increased Black and Hispanic representation on our board of directors from 18% to 35%. That time period coincides with the construction of a 50,000-sq.-ft. addition; the launch of our girls’ program in the 2022-2023 school year, which was one year ahead of schedule; the expansion of our High School Bridge program to thirteen public and private elementary schools in disinvested communities throughout Chicago; and, significant revenue growth in support of our students and alumni to meet these new obligations.
By the 2026-2027 school year, we will enroll 400 students (200 boys and 200 girls) at CJA on full-tuition scholarships. By 2027-2028, we anticipate that we will reach the enrollment capacity for our campus at 426 students with 213 boys and 213 girls enrolled. Across that time, our High School Bridge program will scale to serve nearly 2,000 students annually from nineteen elementary schools across Chicago in addition to our work with our students and alumni at CJA.
| School Year | Black/African American | Latinx/Hispanic | White | Other | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020-2021 | 12% | 6% | 82% | NA | 100% |
| 2021-2022 | 20% | 10% | 70% | NA | 100% |
| 2022-2023 | 26% | 11% | 58% | 5% | 100% |
| 2023-2024 | 26% | 11% | 58% | 5% | 100% |
| 2024-2025 | 17% | 11% | 67% | 5% | 100% |
| 2025-2026 | 25% | 10% | 60% | 5% | 100% |
Across these six years, the female/male gender balance of the board of directors has ranged from 28%/72% to 37%/63% for voting members of the board. It is currently 30%/70%.
| School Year | Black/African American | Latinx/Hispanic | White | Multi- racial | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020-2021 | 14% | 0% | 71% | 14% | 100% |
| 2021-2022 | 14% | 0% | 57% | 29% | 100% |
| 2022-2023 | 0% | 0% | 67% | 33% | 100% |
| 2023-2024 | 0% | 0% | 71% | 29% | 100% |
| 2024-2025 | 0% | 0% | 71% | 29% | 100% |
| 2025-2026 | 14% | 0% | 71% | 14% | 100% |
In 2022, we created a new full-time “Director of Talent” position to recruit, develop and retain the talent we will need as we grow, and we promoted Ravae Duhaney to that role. At a time when the market for high-quality teaching talent remains incredibly tight, Ravae has done excellent work as a member of our Executive Team recruiting the teachers and staff we need as we grow while also caring for and developing the talented team already working at CJA.
We have also created the Ryan Teaching Fellowship to help career changers and other talented professionals who do not yet have their undergraduate degree or teaching credentials become teachers. The Ryan Teaching Fellowship is a three-year teacher training program that forms excellent educators out of hardworking, talented and good-hearted people who see teaching as their vocation. The Ryan Teaching Fellowship allows CJA to intentionally form and grow our faculty to meet the needs of our students as we more than double our enrollment across the next three years. Ideally, Fellows will continue to teach at CJA for many years, but our long-term goal is to create a cadre of lifelong educators – even if their career paths eventually lead them away from CJA.
| School Year | Black/African American | Latinx/ Hispanic | White | AAPI/ Asian-American | Multiracial | Other | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2014-2015 | 11% | 3% | 84% | 0% | 3% | 0% | 100% |
| 2019-2020 | 20% | 3% | 70% | 0% | 5% | 3% | 100% |
| 2024-2025 | 32% | 15% | 49% | 1% | 3% | 0% | 100% |
The female/male gender balance of the faculty and staff for the 2024-2025 school year was 66%/34%.
Economic expansion in the United States after World War II has often been credited with giving birth to a mass middle class. The G.I. Bill helped millions of veterans returning from war to secure higher education, jobs and healthcare, and a government-backed, low-interest, low-payment home financing system set vast numbers of Americans on a path to the financial security that came with owning a home.
From 1940 to 1960, the proportion of households that owned the home they lived in grew from 43 percent to 62 percent. [While] white Americans had a government-assisted path to that dream of home ownership, black Americans had a different experience. Federal policy and banking practices pushed black Americans into a secondary, unregulated market known as “contract selling” that often left them stripped of any wealth they had accumulated—or hoped to accumulate—through home ownership.
Between 75 percent and 95 percent of the homes sold to black families during the 1950s and 60s were sold on contract. On average, the price markup on homes sold on contract was 84 percent.
We found that African Americans purchasing on contract paid, on average, an additional $587 (in April 2019 dollars) more each month than they would have had they paid the fair price for their home and had a conventional or Federal Housing Authority (FHA) backed mortgage. The average black buyer also paid several points more in interest on their contract loan than the average white buyer paid on a conventional or an FHA backed mortgage.
“Over the two decades studied, the amount of wealth land sales contracts expropriated from Chicago’s black community was between 3.2 and 4.0 billion dollars.”
This history and the resultant structures – specifically, inequitable access to well-resourced and well-run schools that is tied to a child’s home address and school attendance boundaries – continue to be significant causes of the need for CJA’s existence.
In the past five years, these neighborhood partnerships have included hosting food distribution for not only our CJA families but also the surrounding community throughout the pandemic. We’ve hosted revitalized neighborhood block clubs for their regular community meetings and partnered with them for community clean-up days of service. We make CJA’s campus available as a community resource for nonprofits and community partners. We remain committed to building relationships with other community-based organizations and sharing those resources with our community. In addition to using our resource bank as a standard part of our case management, our College & Career Persistence and High School Bridge teams send regular newsletters to our alumni, our HSB students and their families to share information about opportunities, events and programs in the community and deepen our relationships with other community-based organizations.
Our work is far from done, and we continue to root all these commitments within our mission as a Jesuit Catholic institution. We are animated by our belief in the Resurrection, knowing the cross is not the summary statement for our human condition. We acknowledge that we are a people who regularly miss the mark, but we also believe we are loved, capable of repentance and redemption, and worthy of God’s mercy. In all that we do, we strive to model for our students and alumni our values by seeking intellectual excellence and being open to growth, loving, religious and committed to doing justice in the service of others.
In gratitude,
Matthew Lynch
President