Saving Catholic Schools

City magazine has a lengthy, detailed piece by Sol Stern about the increasingly difficult work of keeping Catholic schools open, especially in the heart of major urban centers.

There was nothing preordained about a separate Catholic school system in the United States. Largely founded in mid-nineteenth-century New York by the city’s first archbishop, John Hughes, the Catholic school movement sought to combat anti-Catholic discrimination and to lift up Irish immigrants from widespread social dysfunction and unspeakable poverty (see “How Dagger John Saved New York’s Irish,” Spring 1997).

The Catholic schools succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest hopes. Little more than a century after Hughes’s schools opened their doors, Catholics had become one of the wealthiest Christian denominations in the country and—as the election of John F. Kennedy symbolized—fully assimilated into the American mainstream. The sixties also saw the high-water mark of Catholic school expansion. In 1965, 13,300 Catholic schools dotted the country, enrolling 5.6 million students—10 percent of all U.S. students in grades K–12. Almost all of them were practicing Catholics; roughly 50 percent of school-age Catholic kids attended parochial elementary schools.

But the Catholic community’s very success was what precipitated the Catholic schools’ long-term decline. Secure in the American mainstream, Catholics began to feel the tug of secularism and became less inclined to send their children to parochial schools. By 1995, the number of Catholic schools in the U.S. had fallen to 8,220, with a total enrollment of just 2.6 million students, though the overall Catholic population had almost doubled since 1965. Some leading Catholic intellectuals began to ask whether maintaining a separate school system had outlived its usefulness. Perhaps it would be better instead to direct resources into religious education programs and revitalizing parish life. And with many having no personal stake in Catholic education, American Catholics also became less likely to make financial contributions to keep the schools going.

Despite American bishops’ strong backing, the schools continue to struggle. The most recent figures from the National Catholic Education Association show national Catholic school enrollment at an all-time low of 2.3 million. The total number of Catholic schools is down to 7,500, and only 15 percent of Catholic children now attend parochial elementary schools.

The decline has reached crisis proportions in the urban centers, primarily in the Northeast and the Great Lakes region, where Catholic schools now valiantly try to do for poor black and Hispanic children what they once did for the Irish underclass and other white ethnics, long since departed from the cities. The full magnitude of the problem is apparent in Bishop Hughes’s city. Gotham’s two archdioceses—New York and Brooklyn—make headlines every year not for the considerable accomplishments of their schools but for their sorrowful announcements of more school closings.

What are some of the challenges?

At least one cause of the rising costs is well known. Until the mid-1960s, Catholic school faculties were predominantly teaching nuns, who received little or no pay. Today, almost all the teachers are lay, and most belong to teachers’ unions. Their demands for higher salaries would be hard for the schools to ignore, even if the Catholic Church weren’t bound by its own social-justice traditions to honor unions.

In New York, the schools are also feeling economic pressure from a public school monopoly that now has unheard-of sums of money to spend. In just the past three years, the city’s education budget has swollen by $4 billion. Teacher salaries have risen 41 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.

Read the entire piece.

Comments

[Dan]

We have two children in Catholic elementary school but are thinking of sending them to a secular private school instead due to the extreme mediocrity of the Catholic school. I would be more inclined to stick with the Catholic school if it gave our children a good grounding in orthodox Catholicism but it doesn't appear to be doing even that. Instead, the kids are being fed with feel good quasi New Age nonsense. (Just recently one of my sons, a fifth grader, came home and said that the teacher told them that "all religions are the same." My son recounted this in a sarcastic manner -- even he knew it was nonsense.) I've had it. As far as I'm concerned, the school really isn't worth saving. I've long since concluded that whether or not they attend Catholic school I will have to be their primary catechist.

[latinae]

I can't speak for NYC, but around here the Catholic schools aren't particularly Catholic. I will spare you all the details that led us to home school. But the notion that "Despite American bishops’ strong backing ..." is ludicrous. They admonish people to pay and support and send their children, but they turn the thing over to the most conscienceless, uncharitable, sort-of-vowed (to what I can't imagine) people who are clueless to Catholicism. Catholic education is in desperate need of Catholicism.
Most Bishops in this country need to begin evangelizing their priests, followed immediately by the evangelization of their schools before, of course, they all disappear.

[Christine]

I love my children's catholic school, although I admit it is stuggling to keep up with all the "bells and whistles" that the local public school district is able to provide. Our school is very faithful, my children come home and teach me things that I didn't learn in my catholic school in the 70's and 80's, for example the fatima prayer, and my daughter recently convinced my husband and I to go to confession more frequently so that we are not recieving the Eucharist in a state of sin. Our school is a true community and it has bolstered our family's faith by providing us with lots of faithful (and struggling to be faithful) catholic friends.

[joe]

It is a sad, sad thing that "our" Catholic school is the exception and not the rule. It is academically rigorous, doctrinally sound, loving and faithful (run my the Carmelite Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Los Angeles...that's why) and it is a disgrace that not every school is the same.

-J.

[Robert Miller]

The purpose of the parochial schools of the 19th century was not to "save" Irish immigrants from losing their faith. They had too strong faith and too high culture to be bamboozled by low-class Puritans.

The real purpose of the parochial schools was to advance the Catholic "public thing" in this benighted land. In reality, it was the pre-World War II era Germans who did most to advance the parochial school movement (especially during the Nativist eruption of the 1850s and the Americanist incident of the 1880s/1890s). The Catholic Germans knew from experience how vital Catholic public life is to persevering personal Catholic faith (cf. Ratzinger's Memoirs and John M. Haas' Foreword to Ratzinger's "On Conscience"). But the Germans began to fade in the 1940s, and the Irish (here and in Ireland) allowed themselves to be seduced by the "success" of the Kennedy Clan who embraced the base-bred Puritan education and culture of the US.

Catholic education in this country has to be countercultural in order to survive and to form a Catholic public life.

[Ed Peters]

RM, (and notwithstadning that I don't feel America is a "benighted land", etc.,) you are right on about the deep damage the Kennedy's have done to the Catholic faith here. Oh have they a heavy reckoning to make.

[Robert Miller]

Ed:

Thanks for the back-handed compliment.

I really think, though, that Insight Scoop ought to open up a thread on "Americanism". Obviously, I believe it is a bigger problem than you do. But it is a real issue: I respect "Right" Murrayites and old-fashioned Burkeans for their objectives. I just don't think they can get there from here.

I think a full debate in these pages would be healthy and enlightening.

[Jay Mitchell]

Dan, Ed, Robert Miller, Joe, Christine:

I admire your rigor and want for orthodoxy in the schools. However, you are being a bit esoteric in wailing about the Kennedy's, Burkeans, Americanism, benighted land, etc. I think you had agendas that miss the point of Sol Stern's inspiring article which started this thread: The Catholic schools in the urban centers of America remain the best education choice for our children, but are on the precipice of non-existence without a more modern mechanism of munificent funding, and spiritual support from all the faithful. To be more direct: for underserved but eager parents in our big cities, the catholic schools remain our best last hope for educating the next generation of well-educated citizens, and educating these/our children (catholic or not) is a fundamental mission of the American Catholic Church I do not think that Catholic schools were never supposed to supplant parents as the primary catechist in our children's lives. Even if the school was the most rigorours and orthodox, parents living example in enacting their faith with perserverance, devotion, charity, mercy, temperance in everyday life in their homes and at their jobs would still be the primary and best teaching of Catholicism before their children. But for the schools, I live in Oakland, California. My son has had two catholic schools closed out from under our family, and it is a cause for great sorrow. I am currently researching which school in the diocese to send my son in August. Yes, we will continue to send our child to catholic school, despite parish pressure to choose charter schools. In Oakland (and NYC, Detroit, etc.) public schools and their faux alternatives of charter schools are horrible on academics, weak in classroom discipline/classroom management/basic safety, and devoid of christian values and Catholic formation, and financially/spiritually corrupt despite huge amounts of money and decades of attempts at reform(latest public school scandal... and in Oakland there is a new one every eight weeks... the administration of the highest rated charter high school was discovered to be changing grades and keeping weaker students from taking standardized tests to insure funding from the school district and accreditation).

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