Minnesota businessman Jack Remick and his wife, Mary Ann, are long-time supporters of the Alliance for Catholic Education, an extraordinarily successful program created at the University of Notre Dame to train teachers for needy Catholic schools. (See 1993 item on companion list of Education achievements.) In 2008, a gift from the Remicks allowed the Alliance to create an additional program for training principals to lead Catholic schools. ACE founder Timothy Scully reports that his organization is going to particularly zero in over the next decade “on forming principals and superintendents. School leaders establish the culture of high expectations; they hire the teachers. That’s why we are going to focus on the principal.”
Scully argues that “thoughtful philanthropists can have their greatest leverage on Catholic education by investing in leadership programs,” and that this will in turn change American inner cities. “Evidence shows that Catholic schools form citizens who are two and a half times more likely to graduate from college, who have high expectations, who are more tolerant, who are more generous. Those are the kinds of schools we need.”
In 2014 the Remicks donated $10 million to double the endowment of the ACE principal-training program. By then, approximately 250 of the program’s graduates were already leading Catholic schools across 41 states.
- Q&A with Timothy Scully, philanthropyroundtable.org/topic/excellence_in_philanthropy/qa_with_timothy_scully