Archbishop Hughes built the first Catholic school system in America not as an amenity but as an act of defiance — to protect Irish immigrant children from Protestant-dominated public schools that used the King James Bible as a textbook and treated Catholic identity as something to be corrected. What he built was a parallel civilization: schools, parishes, hospitals, universities, woven together around a common faith. At its peak, it was staffed almost entirely by religious orders who worked for little more than room and board.
That model produced something secular education has never matched — not just academic outcomes, but formed human beings, rooted in faith, embedded in community, shaped by the same values as the family that chose the school. Catholic schools serve families at $13,900 a year who receive something endowed private schools cannot provide at $65,000. The infrastructure that made it possible has changed. The mission has not. Forma exists to close that gap.
At its peak in 1965, his system educated 5.6 million children across 13,000 schools — the largest private school network in the history of the world, staffed almost entirely by religious orders who worked for little more than room and board. That model held for a hundred years. By 2005, fewer than 5,000 religious remained in American classrooms, down from 104,000 in 1965. The schools survived by replacing subsidized religious labor with lay teachers paid from tuition.
But tuition cannot rise to market without pricing out the families the schools were built to serve. The result is a permanent condition: excellent institutions, genuine community trust, documented outcomes — and no capital infrastructure to sustain them. Every attempt has been consulting. No one built the infrastructure.
Redefining how Catholic education draws upon its own resources — without the labor subsidy that carried the first hundred years — is the task of the next hundred. That is what Forma is building.
Brandon Allen is a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, a Princeton graduate, and the co-founder of Sequence Equity, an institutional capital firm. He serves on the board of Our Lady of Częstochowa Parish School in Jersey City — a 449-student Blue Ribbon school that became Forma’s first engagement and proof of concept.
He founded Forma because the schools that shaped his understanding of what Catholic education can be are the same schools being asked to do more with less every year. The infrastructure they need exists. No one has built it for them. That is the problem Forma is solving.
The first time Brandon encountered the Catholic school — its music, its community, its particular way of holding people together — he was a child watching Sister Act II. He was neither Catholic nor part of the Black church tradition it depicted. He wanted to be part of both. That impulse has never left. Forma is, in part, what it became.