Despite their high success rate, Catholic schools in the US are struggling for funding – and for survival – says Jamie MacGuire.
According to a recent US Assessment of Educational Progress study, during the Covid pandemic public (ie state) school students lost a shocking 10 per cent points in maths and 6 per cent in reading, while results for Catholic schools held firm. This is a case of history repeating itself yet again.
In 1979 Johns Hopkins and University of Chicago sociologist James Coleman surveyed some 70,000 students across the country and concluded to his own surprise that Catholic high school students – in particular minority students – learned more and had higher graduation rates than their public school peers. A 2005 study re-affirmed the Coleman Report’s finding that Catholic high schools “substantially increase the probability of graduating from high school and attending college”.
Coleman credited what he called “social capital” for this difference in results. What he meant was that Catholic schools represent a voluntary community that comes together in shared values. Therefore, teachers, students and, perhaps most importantly, parents are all invested in the schools’ mission and performance. Focused mission directs everyone in a community to work towards a common goal.
Over the last four decades heated arguments over “school choice” in America have pitted the legitimate right of parents to choose the public school best for their children versus the public school education bureaucracy (former US Education Secretary William J Bennett called it “The Blob”), which continued to insist upon a static and increasingly dysfunctional system of forcing students into “zoned” (ie geographically near) institutions, however poor and unsuited they might be for their pupils. Early public school choice experiments in East Harlem and Milwaukee led to additional programmes in Cleveland, Arizona and elsewhere, but the Blob always pushed back, paranoid at the thought of losing control.
Additionally, with regard to Catholic schools there was always a well-established constitutional principle outlawing state funding of religious (mostly Catholic) schools, a holdover from the notoriously anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic Blaine Amendments forced on state constitutions by the then Protestant Establishm Partnership Schools ent in the 19th century. (Interestingly, this restriction was never applied to the GI Bill of Rights, which funded many soldiers returning from WW II when they sought to further their educations).
Since the 1980s a number of not for profit organisations like Student Sponsor Partners (Peter Flanigan) and the Children’s Scholarship Fund (Ted Forstmann and John Walton) have been funding tuition for children otherwise incapable of attending non-public schools, and legal cases have arisen, such as in Oklahoma where the church-state divide is being tested in a virtual Catholic school seeking state funding, that the Supreme Court will decide next year.
This is in marked contrast to the UK, where there has long been state subsidy for religious education.
Despite superior performance, American Catholic schools have operated under severe financial pressure, impacted by the loss of vocations that once provided low-cost teaching, an increasingly secular culture and the heartbreaking toll of sexual abuse accusations, which for so long the bishops tried to stonewall, until legislation eliminating the statute of limitations passed in multiple jurisdictions.
In the large archdiocese of New York, for example, which runs from Staten Island almost all the way north to Albany, the Catholic schools once educated 140,000 students. Today, after multiple rounds of school closings the number is down to 53,000, a situation rendered all the more tragic given the proven superiority of Catholic school outcomes. Statistics like these prevail across the country. According to the National Centre for Educational Statistics, in 1960 more than five million students were enrolled in American Catholic schools. That number has now declined to just over two million today. Between 2010 and 2020 Catholic schools lost an average of 38,000 students a year.
As disheartening as this is, however, the very fact that Catholic schools continue to outperform their public school peers provides a beacon of hope for a better future. The Inner City Scholarship Fund, the Partnership Schools, Faith in the Future and many other organisations like the Alliance for Catholic Education at Notre Dame stand ready “to sustain and strengthen under-resourced Catholic schools through leadership formation, research and professional services to ensure that young people, especially low income young people, have the gift to experience the gift of an excellent Catholic education”.
There are bright spots on the post-Covid horizon, such as the diocese of Rockville Centre on Long Island, where the exodus of Catholics from New York City during the pandemic has created long waiting lists for the suburban Catholic schools, which continue to provide superior education.
Commenting on the superior performance during Covid of the Catholic schools, Manhattan Institute Director of Education Policy, Ray Domanico, said: “I think the explanation here is clear. Catholic schools were quicker to return to hybrid learning (a few days a week in school) and then full time in school learning than were public schools.”
He added, “I have come to believe that the future of Catholic schools has to come from innovators outside of the traditional diocesan offices and certainly from the parish school model.”
So far, the bishops of the United States have been too busy putting out other fires to assume the leadership role that built the largely immigrant Catholic school systems of the 19th century in a new epoch, but the opportunity is there, and if they decline to grasp it, the laity will have no choice but to seize the day, yet again.
Partnership Schools
These 11 Catholic schools are presently operating in Cleveland and New York but are expected to expand elsewhere as their demonstrated success creates more demand. The Partnership Schools offer a managed network in which programme development, hiring, training, and all support functions are centralised and shared in the network home office, thus avoiding redundancies and creating significant savings. The Partnership Schools strategic approach is to grant autonomy to each school to manage accountability for results, introduce economies of scale for fundraising and operations, design a knowledge-rich curriculum and the teachers needed to implement it fully and create joyful, value-infused school cultures anchored in Catholic tradition. The Partnership Schools recruit philanthropic trustees to support their vision and presently educate 3,500 students with 378 educators, staff and fellows.
Hawthorn School
The Hawthorn School, situated in what was formerly St Patrick’s parochial school, provides what it calls a “classical education” for students in Bedford, New York, an affluent community in the horse country of northern Westchester County an hour outside New York City. It was founded by followers of the teachings of Opus Dei founder St Jose Maria Escriva, according to which “all of one’s life – one’s work, family life and the ordinary events of each day – are opportunities for growing in authentic humanity and growing closer to God”. The school’s humanities reading list is impressive for its range and complexity compared to public schools: CS Lewis, James Thurber, Mark Twain, GK Chesterton, Harper Lee and Shakespeare, in addition to Frankenstein, the Odyssey and the Psalms. Although expensive compared to public schooling ($18,000 per year) Hawthorn is a compelling example of a small but growing group of religious schools that have adopted the classical education approach. As more states embrace educational pluralism, the parental marketplace will reward those schools that offer the best results, and, despite teacher union opposition public monies are likely soon to follow.
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