During his time in the United States, Pope Francis will make a quiet stop at East Harlem’s Our Lady Queen of Angels. His visit to this 120-year-old elementary school, which educates an overwhelmingly low-income and minority student body, underscores the Church’s centuries-long commitment to the disadvantaged. But it will also shine a light on an unreported story in urban education: the budding renaissance of Catholic schools.
For fifty years, inner-city Catholic schools have been shuttering, victims of shifting city demographics, changes in the workforce, the advent of charter schooling, and much more. Impoverished families have too few accessible school options to begin with, so this erosion of parochial schools has been especially painful. A substantial body of evidence shows that Catholic schools have an unusual ability to help underserved kids succeed. Newer research suggests that longstanding urban Catholic schools foster social capital outside their walls, helping to decrease crime and other societal ills.
In the early 1970s, Daniel Patrick Moynihan (a White House adviser at the time) saw a looming crisis and warned President Nixon about the tragic consequences if these schools disappeared. Little was done; as a White House aide thirty-five years later, I was part of an effort to re-sound the same alarm, organizing a White House summit and authoring a report on the worsening threat to faith-based urban schools.
The prognosis then was ominous. It looked as if divine intervention would be required. But less than a decade later, America’s miracle-working civil society is beginning to come to the rescue. Thanks largely to the energy of social entrepreneurs, the generosity of donors, and—counterintuitively—the lessons of charter schooling, urban Catholic education may be on the rebound.
In hindsight, it’s becoming clear that Catholic education’s foundational virtue, its steady adherence to venerable principles and practices, was also holding it back. Yes, it was right to serve the underserved, stubbornly believe in every child, set the highest standards, and teach character. But many of its approaches to staffing, leading, organizing, governing, and funding its schools had become anachronistic. A rejuvenation was needed.
Like the European Renaissance, this rebirth blends the old and the new. There are new networks of Catholic schools modeled after successful charter management organizations (think Catholic versions of the Knowledge Is Power Program, such as the Faith in the Future Foundation). There are Notre Dame’s ACE program, often called the “Catholic Teach For America,” and other new pipelines of teachers and leaders. There are new tech-driven school models using virtual and “blended” strategies for instruction. There are innovative approaches to financing, including the Drexel Fund (the first-ever venture philanthropy fund for Catholic and other private schools) and Cristo Rey’s work-study program, which sends high schoolers into offices one day every week to help pay for their education.
Though many of these innovations put some distance between schools and the old parish- and diocesan-based systems that used to control them, they are dedicated to preserving the authenticity of Catholic education.
So on Friday, Pope Francis won’t simply be touring a high-performing, high-poverty school that’s been part of Harlem’s social fabric for over a century. Our Lady Queen of Angels is also part of Partnership Schools, one of the nation’s new independent Catholic-school networks. The Partnership’s superintendent, Kathleen Porter-Magee, isn’t just a former Catholic school student and teacher; she was also an executive of one of the nation’s best charter school organizations. The network’s board includes representatives from the New York archdiocese as well as business and philanthropic leaders.
There’s more reason for optimism now about the future of Catholic education than at any time in the last half-century. Those hoping to learn more might check out my guidebook for Catholic school donors, soon to be published by the Philanthropy Roundtable (excerpted here).
But for those interested in K–12 education more broadly, there’s also an important lesson to be learned. The revitalization of this sector of schools is a modern-day barn-raising. It’s a quiet triumph of civil society: collective action with public benefits but absent centralized government direction.
Through the loosely coordinated collaboration of parents, educators, faith leaders, social entrepreneurs, colleges, and philanthropists, an organic movement has developed. It’s growing sturdier while evolving to meet an array of needs in a variety of locations.
This is precisely how education reform was described ten years ago. But because of the field’s growing technocratic tendency—the view that brainy central administrators know best—the public education version is increasingly seen by many as top-down. Indeed, Washington has inserted itself into accountability, standards, tests, teacher evaluations, and more, provoking a backlash.
It is highly instructive that perhaps the world’s most famous hierarchical organization, the Roman Catholic Church, has made substantial progress with its schools by preserving its principles and devolving power to civil society. The next White House occupant should take note.
Editor’s note: This post was originally published in a slightly different form at National Review Online.
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