Can Catholic Schools Be Saved? Lacking Nuns and Often Students, a Shrinking System Looks for Answers (2007)

Bobby and I stood outside the small public elementary school our children attended, pondering our respective 1st graders' prospects. weeds poked up the asphalt, the windows on the 30 year-old building were dirty, the playground equipment was rotting. Inside the K-2 school, some 600 kids were being prepared for academic underachievement: in a few more years two-thirds of them would be unable to read at grade level. Nothing wrong with this place, Bobby finally said, that a busload of nuns wouldn't solve. I laughed. I knew exactly what he meant. We grew up on opposite sides of the country (he in New York and I in Oregon), but we both grew up Catholic, in the '50s, and meant one thing if nothing else: nuns. guardians of moral order and academic achievement for several generations of Catholic boys and girls, these robed religious women ruled with--well, with rulers. And paddles. And, sometimes, fists. Before tough love there was Sister Patrick Mary or Sister Elizabeth Maureen. Before No Child Left Behind there were behinds burnished by a swift kick from a foot emerged without warning from under several acres of robes. Indeed, our childhood memories, different in detail, were singular in their moral clarity: we knew what a busload of nuns could do. They would march up and down the aisles. (Yes, there would be aisles, in a room filled with 30 to 50 kids--phooey on class size.) And with a glance from behind their starched white wimples, we would learn. problem is there no longer are busloads of nuns; in fact, most schools would be lucky to have a Mini Cooper's worth of such minimum-wage professional teachers. Their ranks have declined by a staggering 62 percent since 1965 (from 180,000 to 68,000). staff composition of Catholic schools has similarly been turned on its head, from some 90 percent female religious in the '50s to less than 5 percent today (see Figure 1). The school system had literally been built on their backs, reported Anthony Bryk, Valerie Lee, and Peter Holland in their 1992 study Catholic Schools and the Common Good, through the services they contributed in the form of the very low salaries they accepted. Consequently, costs have soared; average annual tuition has gone from next to nothing to more than $2,400 in elementary schools and almost $6,000 in high schools. Despite a growing Catholic population (from 45 million in 1965 to almost 77 million today, making it the largest Christian denomination in the United States), Catholic school enrollment has plummeted, from 5.2 million students in nearly 13,000 schools in 1960 to 2.5 million in 9,000 schools in 1990. After a promising increase in the late 1990s, enrollment had by 2006 dropped to 2.3 million students in 7,500 schools. And the steep decline would have been even steeper if these sectarian schools had to rely on their own flock for enrollment: almost 14 percent of Catholic school enrollment is now non-Catholic, up from less than 3 percent in 1970 (see Figure 2). When Catholic schools educated 12 percent of all schoolchildren in the United States, in 1965, the proportion of Catholics in the general population was 24 percent. Catholics still make up about one-quarter of the American population, but their schools enroll less than 5 percent of all students (see Figure 3). What happened to the Catholics? What happened to a school system at one time educated one of every eight American children? And did it quite well. May I Have Your Attention, Please! As most educators know, Catholic schools work and have worked for a long time. Sociologist James Coleman and colleagues Thomas Hoffer and Sally Kilgore, in 1982, were among the first to document Catholic schools' academic successes, in High School Achievement: Public and Private Schools. A variety of studies since, by scholars at the University of Chicago, Northwestern, the Brookings Institution, and Harvard, have all supported the conclusion Catholic schools do a better job educating children, especially the poor and minorities, than public schools. …