Lance Izumi says that many at-risk students receive better education in Catholic schools.
Recent evidence suggests that they do.
Looking at African-American students with similar socioeconomic backgrounds, the Heritage study made some amazing discoveries. Also, this performance gap widened between the fourth and eighth grades. Even more striking, according to the study, was the finding that the impact of Catholic schooling is more significant than family and income factors. Such results don't surprise me, especially after my visit last week to St. Thomas the Apostle Catholic elementary school located in a poor Hispanic section of downtown Los Angeles. At St. Thomas, Cardinal Roger Mahoney, the archbishop of Los Angeles, gave a press conference to highlight the 28,000 scholarships given out by the archdiocese's Education Foundation over the past ten years.