Lost in the dust stirred up by Joel Klein's resignation the other day was a historic announcement that the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York was going to close thirty-two schools in the city.?That represents some 17 percent of its 185 schools and affects?some 4500 of?its 80,000 students.
Nationwide, Catholic schools have been closing in droves, but it remains the largest private school system in the country, with over two million students in more than 7,000 K-12 schools.? And nobody questions the system's?academic successes. (See Sol Stern here.)
Why should non-Catholics care?
Leaving aside for a moment the question of academic quality, what many church-and-state purists forget is that these are two million kids that taxpayers don't have to educate.? So we should at least thank the papists for saving us what Scott Hamilton, in Fordham's 2008 report, ?Who Will Save America's Urban Catholic Schools? estimated?at ?more than $20 billion a year.? (In New York City, where it costs nearly $17,000 per public school student, those 4,500 Catholic school kids will cost the taxpayer $76,500,000!)
But the Catholics are also educating a lot of inner city kids?mostly non-Catholic?who have been lost by traditional public schools. And they are doing it well.
Solutions to the Catholic school crisis are varied. I reported on new initiatives by the Jesuits and Christian Brothers for ?Who Will Save? and also found some interesting and innovative programs while writing a story for Education Next a few years ago. Some states give modest tax breaks to private school parents?in New York state taxpayers pay some health and transportation costs for private school kids?but any kind of substantial public aid for Catholic schools is probably far off.? And vouchers and charters have not necessarily helped the Catholics; in fact, some believe that charters especially have done the Catholic school system more harm than good.
More recently, the talk has turned to religious charter schools. Although, as?Remmert Dekker noted in his Gadfly review of Blurring the Lines: Charter, Public, Private, and Religious Schools Come Together, the book ?further stokes that fiery conversation.?? (I was at a Manhattan Institute affair a few years ago in which one of the panelists, flush with excitement about the benefits of charter schools, suggested that the new age would include many religious charter schools. Sol Stern, one of the panelists, and then on a minor crusade against the Kahlil Gibran International Academy for the Study of Arab Language and Culture, ended the discussion, as I recall, by raising his eyebrows and asking, ?Will they teach jihad??)
Finally, I have just finished a report for Education Next on an experiment in Chicago that stands the ?religious charter? question on its head: the Christian Brothers, with 600 300 years of experience, ?at Arne Duncan's invitation, are running two public charter schools that are NOT religious. They call them Catalyst Schools. Some might call it an educational Hail Mary!
But the Brothers?seem to be?reading too much?St. Francis, who once advised his disciples, ?Share the Gospel at all costs?and if necessary, use words.? That won't help traditional Catholic schools, which insist on lots of religious words, but so far so good at Catalyst: the Brothers aren't preaching the gospel, just living it.
?Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow
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*From an old?Catholic joke, based on a mishearing of the Latin for ?The Lord Be With You,? Dominus Vobiscum.
