Faced with student attrition and a financial crisis, Catholic schools have to reinvent themselves. “The biggest threat that urban Catholic schools face is nostalgia,” John Eriksen, a Catholic schools superintendent from Paterson, New Jersey tells Time Magazine. ”We’ve been running these schools in a way that might have worked 30 or 40 years ago but doesn’t work now,” he says. Catholic schools have been reinventing themselves by converting to charters, and forging partnerships with philanthropists and foundations in an effort to stem their decline, the magazine notes.
Nearly 1 in 5 Catholic schools in the U.S. has closed its doors this decade. To non-Catholics, this may not appear to be something worth worrying about. But parochial schools are one of the largest (if not the largest) alternatives to the American public-education system, and their steady decline inordinately affects urban low-income minorities who would otherwise be left at the mercy of public schools that have proven incapable of educating them.
At National Review Online, Sol Stern says the Time piece is “a welcome look at the plight of urban Catholic schools.” But Stern argues their decline has been “exacerbated by public-school reform schemes that have been oversold to the public and, ironically, cheered by many conservatives and businesspeople.”
In New York City, for example, the Catholic schools are competing for teachers with a public school system that now has unheard-of sums of money to spend. In just the past seven years, the city’s education budget has increased from $12.7 billion to $22 billion. Teacher salaries have risen 43 percent across the board in six years, passing the $100,000 top-salary threshold for the first time. Ten years ago, the gap between the city’s top salaries for Catholic-school teachers and public-school teachers was around $28,000. It’s now $50,000. Catholic schools find themselves stuck on a treadmill in which they either have to raise salaries even higher — and pass the costs on to students’ families — or lose more teachers to the public schools.
The Time piece notwithstanding, it’s mystifing at how little attention Catholic schools get given their long history of effectively educating poor urban children. According to the National Catholic Education Association, 99% of Catholic secondary school students graduate, with 97% going on to college. And scale? Reform darling KIPP runs 66 public schools serving just over 16,000 students. Catholic schools serving 25 times more children have closed down this decade. Over a thousand schools, serving nearly half a million students, nearly all of whom, one assumes, went back into public schools, which have failed to produce anything like the results posted by Catholic schools.
The biggest problem facing Catholic schools is that they’ve had to mostly switch over their faculty from nuns to laypeople. When the nuns taught, the cost to run the school was very low & tuition was affordable to most families. Today, parochial schools in my area charge $6500+ per child for elementary and $10-15+k per child for high school. There is some financial aid available, but not much.
The other issue for me personally (though I suspect I’m likely in the minority) is how secularized Catholic schools have become. My DH went to parochial schools for K-12 and he had to attend daily Mass. The ones in my area have their students attend Mass at most once per week, and many fewer than that. The reason I was given for this is that fewer than half the students come from Catholic families, and most of those are not active participants in the faith. As a result, the schools have become only nominally Catholic.
Comment by Crimson Wife — October 14, 2009 @ 2:13 pm
I would have to agree with Crimson Wife on many points. My DD went to a parochial school for Pre-K through the middle of 4th grade, when we started homeschooling. They only attended Mass once a month and Holy Days. How “Catholic” a class was depended entirely on the teacher. Some were wonderful, others not so much.
However, one of the problems I noticed is that in the Catholic schools, many of the same educational problems have entered there that the public schools have. For example fuzzy math, reading based on “textbook programs” rather than real literature, lack of any substantial history, geography or even science. In short I was very disappointed with what my DD was receiving for my tuition dollars, in the neighborhood of $6,000 a year.
I know my DD was receiving a better education at the parochial school than she would have at my local public school. The curriculum my local school district has chosen is awful – even though I know that many of the teachers are wonderful. Which is one reason, among many, that I have chosen to homeschool.
Comment by Laura — October 15, 2009 @ 8:09 pm