Excellence. Achievement. Success. Rigor.
These bedrock notions underscore long-held values regarding education and its purpose. They exist for good reason. Particularly in Catholic education, where educators are called to help students find, celebrate, and live out their God-given gifts, high expectations convey our faith in students’ ability to actualize those gifts. Unerring faith in our students and their capacity for excellence animates Jesuit education and its commitment to cura personalis. However, varying notions of rigor and its place in Jesuit education influence how that commitment is manifested in our schools and classrooms—and some can distort faith-driven visions of what we are called to “achieve” for and with young people.
Implicit in the Universal Apostolic Preferences of the Society of Jesus (2019) is the holy desire to do better—to be better—for and with young people for the greater glory of God. As educators and leaders in Catholic Jesuit schools, our commitment to accompanying young people in the creation of a hope-filled future calls us to grow so that we can be better for others. This means modeling for and forming young people to do the same. Spirit-led desires to achieve this vision of “success” evoke feelings of consolation. And yet, the very human and worldly realities surrounding our schools present other concrete “success” stories and outcomes that we feel responsible to provide for our students: college admissions, career preparedness, scholarships, and leadership roles. Though these worldly goals are not always at odds with the true purpose of a Jesuit education (as they can be worthwhile pathways to a life of service to others and to God), when they displace or even usurp that purpose our notions of rigor change significantly. Rigor for the exclusive sake of performance and achievement is a much different “why” than rigor for the sake of forming souls. This limited notion of rigor may constrict our expectations for teachers and students in our schools. It can lead to setting one uniform but arbitrary bar for excellence that puts cura personalis on the sidelines. It can lead us to question whether “care” and “rigor”can coexist.
The pandemic and its aftermath brought the seeming dichotomy between care and rigor to the surface for many educators, not least of which those working in Jesuit schools. The first COVID-19 related school closure happened on February 27, 2020 in Washington state. At their peak, school closures impacted more than 55 million students in public and private schools across the U.S. (National Center for Education Statistics, 2022). Most of those schools pivoted abruptly to distance learning models for which, despite their Herculean efforts, many were grossly unprepared. Many teachers found it impossible to uphold the status quo of academic rigor while teaching from behind a screen, and students unused to the freedom of learning from their bedrooms and basements struggled to engage. Less than two years later, researchers were calling the impacts of learning loss associated with the pandemic “devastating” (Kuhfeld et al., 2022). Learning loss exacerbated pre-existing achievement gaps, and the the margin between low- and high-poverty students increased dramatically (Doan-Nguyen, 2023; Center for Education Policy Research, 2024). Even as many schools seem to be regaining what was “lost,” the data present an uncertain picture. As recently as July 2024, new data from NWEA’s MAP-Growth assessment shows that academic achievement is not only stalled: it is losing ground (Sparks, 2024).
Those demoralizing outcomes might be enough to prompt even the most Ignatian educator to double down on traditional notions of rigor. It could be equally tempting to believe that “care” for students’ well-being throughout the pandemic resulted in a lack of rigor. We are, however, entering a new era in education in which rigor for rigor’s sake doesn’t make much sense—nor does it seem to serve anyone very well—in the dynamic complexities of students’ or teachers’ realities. It certainly doesn’t align with the ideals of Jesuit education, even in schools where “rigor” has become synonymous with some school’s identities. Still, the questions remain: how do we move forward? How do we best serve students’ unique needs? What role does rigor play in conversations about what it means to provide our students with an exceptional and authentic Jesuit education? What does “success” look like in a Jesuit school now and in the future?
The 2023 Annual Symposium for Jesuit educators, sponsored by the Jesuit Schools Network and moderated by Dr. Kristin Ross Cully, Director of Inquiry and New Ventures for the JSN, sought to take up these questions by interrogating the enduring dichotomy between rigor and care in our schools. In her opening remarks, Dr. Ross Cully (2023) highlighted traditional criteria for assessing rigor in our schools—challenging, tough, difficult, excellent, and hard—against others like “deeper learning” and growth. The Jesuit ideal of “magis,” Ross Cully (2023) noted—though literally translated to mean “more” or “better”—has less to do with quantity than quality. More authentic practices of magis instead call us to rise “above or beyond normal expectations” (Creighton University). How might educators rise above “normal” expectations of rigor so that they can better serve our Jesuit mission?
In his talk on the history of rigor in Jesuit schools, Cristiano Casalini (2023) noted that we still feel a “tension” between two views of rigor: one associated with elitism and exclusivity, a kind of “performance-driven education,” and one associated with inclusivity, well-being, and equality. Casalini (2023), however, emphasized that rigor was not historically something exclusively or even primarily associated with student performance in Jesuit education. Instead, the most rigorous demands were more directly placed on educators and administrators for the attainment of excellent educational outcomes for students (Casalini, 2023). In addition, the early Jesuits sought to embrace both the “rigor and professionalism of the scholastics” and the “more personal, subjective work of the humanists” (Pall-Szabo, 2023, pp. 6-7). The Ratio Studiorum, informed by The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola, embodies this spirit of holding seemingly disparate ideals in balance. From this perspective, a spirit of moderation and harmony infuses challenging intellectual tasks, academic achievement is inseparable from spiritual and moral formation, and the paradoxical deployment of uniformity alongside flexibility drives instructional practice (Maher et al., 1999). The First Principle and Foundation of the Exercises reminds us that “we must hold ourselves in balance [emphasis added] before all of these created gifts” to avoid fixing our desires on worldly goals of “success” (Fleming, 1978). What do we need to let go of so that we can accompany our students in seeking the greater glory of God? What forms of rigor might those pursuits demand of us?
It is our hope that this first issue of Ignatian Pedagogy in Practice might invite readers to reimagine typical notions of rigor in their own educational contexts. The issue’s contributing authors present a range of perspectives but communicate a collective call to action: embrace expansion over restriction, prioritize cura personalis, and recognize that rigor is, ironically, most easily achieved when we demonstrate flexibility in our work with students. Collectively, their work suggests that care and rigor are not in fact opposing actions but instead complementary and even reciprocal endeavors that require one another if we are to truly fulfill our Jesuit mission to help all students find and celebrate their gifts.
Casalini, C. (2023, April 17). The modern-day concept of rigor—was it always a focus in Jesuit schools? A historical perspective of academic excellence in Jesuit education. Academic rigor in Jesuit education [Symposium]. Ignatian Inquiry After School Virtual Symposium. Jesuit Schools Network. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vx-yMF0nR7I
Center for Education Policy Research. (2024, January 31). Students are making a ‘surprising’ rebound from pandemic closures: But some may never catch up. Harvard University.
Creighton University. (n.d.). Our core values. Creighton University. https://www.creighton.edu/sites/default/files/Core-Values.pdf.
Doan-Nguyen, R. (2023, July 17). Post-COVID learning losses. Harvard Magazine. https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2023/07/kane-covid-learning-losses
Fleming, D. (1978). Spiritual exercises of St Ignatius: A literal translation and a contemporary reading (2nd ed.). Institute of Jesuit Sources.
Kuhfeld, M., Soland, J., Lewis, K., & Morton, E. (2022, March 3). The pandemic has had devastating impacts on learning: What will it take to help students catch up? The Brookings Institution. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-pandemic-has-had-devastating-impacts-on-learning-what-will-it-take-to-help-students-catch-up/
Maher, M. W., Shore, P., & Parker, K. L. (1999). From 1599-1999: Celebrating the Ratio Studiorum at Saint Louis University. Conversations on Jesuit Higher Education, 16, 47-51. https://epublications.marquette.edu/conversations/vol16/iss1/8
National Center for Education Statistics. (2022, August). U.S. education in the time of COVID. https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/annualreports/topical-studies/covid/
Pall-Szabo, F. D. (2023). Ratio Studiorum and the Jesuit education in CLUJ. Society and Politics, 17(1), 5-25. https://socpol.uvvg.ro/docs/2023-1/1.%20Pall-Szabo.pdf
Ross Cully, K. (2023, April 17). Introduction. Academic rigor in Jesuit education [Symposium]. Ignatian Inquiry After School Virtual Symposium. Jesuit Schools Network. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vx-yMF0nR7I Society of Jesus. (2019). Universal apostolic preferences of the Society of Jesus, 2019-2029. https://www.jesuits.global/sj_files/2020/05/2019-06_19feb19_eng.pdf
Sparks, S. D. (2024, July 25). Students’ learning recovery has stalled: What that looks like. Education Week. https://www.edweek.org/leadership/students-learning-recovery-has-stalled-what-that-looks-like/2024/07