These are interesting observations by Justin Torres. It may be true that in voucher cities, Catholic schools educate large numbers of non-Catholic children. And he is right to ask about their reason for existence if they are not educating Catholic children in the Catholic faith.
Yet the situation in New York City is different from what he describes. New York is no voucher city. Mayor Bloomberg is strongly opposed to vouchers, and Governor George Pataki has never seriously proposed vouchers. Given the fact that one house of the state legislature is firmly in Democratic hands, no one expects a voucher program to pass in the imaginable future. And since the next governor of New York at the current reading will be Democrat Eliot Spitzer, the odds of voucher legislation recede to the vanishing point.
Thus, there are no vouchers in New York City and there are not likely to be any in (I would guess) my lifetime, and perhaps beyond. The Catholic schools exist solely on a combination of tuition (far less than the actual cost of educating each pupil) and whatever can be raised by parents and supplied as subsidy by the Diocese or an order of nuns. I pointed out in my article in the Daily News that no cultural or educational institution in New York City could survive solely on admission fees. Every major institution is graced with a board of high-powered philanthropists who raise large sums of money to create an endowment and to underwrite the costs of operation. Every private school, even those with sky-high tuition, relies on fund raising and endowment-building to meet its budget. Why should Catholic schools, which educate the children of working-class and poor families, be expected to pay their own way with tuition and bake sales?
Why are Catholic schools losing enrollment? The conventional explanation is demographic shifts, the exodus of Irish and Italian families to the suburbs. But this is not the whole story. The Irish and Italian communities have been replaced by a large immigration of Hispanic families and Catholics from other regions. This new immigration is poor and cannot afford the $2,500-$4,000 that it costs to place their children in a Catholic school. The tuition burden is unsustainable for a family with more than one child.
The reason that so many Catholic schools are closing is not because there are fewer Catholic families, or that Catholic families don't want a Catholic education. It is because the new Catholic immigration cannot afford to send their children to these schools.
Absent vouchers, which will be absent, Catholic schools in the inner city will continue to close their doors. Their buildings will be grabbed up by the Department of Education, which is eager for new space for its mini-schools. Stable, proven schools will be replaced by new schools that may or may not be any good.
The only way to save Catholic education would be if the leadership of the Diocese established a board of powerful philanthropists to build an endowment. It should have a goal of, say, $500 million. In my dream world, the chairwoman of such a board would be Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, who raised over $100 million for New York City's public schools; this money, sad to say, was barely enough to pay for the cost overrun of last year's budget. Did it buy paper clips and pencils? Who knows? The same money invested in Catholic schools would have given an education to thousands of indigent children. Why would Caroline Kennedy not do as much for Catholic education, where her efforts would make a real difference?
Meanwhile the men who run the Diocese of Brooklyn and Queens and the Archdiocese of New York are negotiating with the NYC Department of Education to sell their buildings. Poor children in the city—the children of impoverished Catholic families—will have small and diminishing opportunities to choose a different school if they seek something better than the local government school. The life is draining out of Catholic education. That is sad, sad for the children, sad for the families, and ultimately a loss to New York City.
Diane Ravitch is research professor at New York University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution
