In a time of crisis, Catholic schools offered a choice, not an echo

“New data suggest that the damage from shutting down schools has been worse than almost anyone expected,” the Economist tweeted recently to promote a new article in its pages that details the academic and social-emotional fallout caused by school shutdowns worldwide. While any spotlight on this cataclysm is welcome, the truth is that many people did expect these shutdowns to be terrible for students and their families. That’s why lots of parents and educators marshaled extraordinary leadership in a time of fear and uncertainty to reopen their schools after the initial Spring 2020 shutdown. And chief among these leaders were the principals and teachers in America’s Catholic schools.

What was it like to stand apart from the crowd in summer 2020 and insist that schools must re-open? For starters, it was scary. Now that the dust has settled, it’s easy to forget how much uncertainty there was two years ago, how little we knew, and how much reopening required a willingness to make hard decisions, guided as best we could at the time by science. It was by far the most challenging months I have experienced in more than twenty years working in schools.

It’s also easy to forget the harshness of the opposition that school leaders faced. Indeed, the preparation any school, district, network, or diocesan leader undertook as they worked to reopen in the fall of 2020 was done against the backdrop of a near constant drumbeat of attacks from teachers unions and their allies suggesting that reopening schools would be tantamount to murder.

In August 2020, for instance, the Washington Post’s Valerie Strauss published a piece highlighting a union-organized “national day of resistance” where “protesters carried fake coffins and gravestones as well as signs demanding schools stay closed until it is safe to reopen.” The Milwaukee Teachers Association tweeted to celebrate a “caravan” that pulled up to the statehouse to place “grave headstones for Health Secretary Andrea Palm to shut in-person schooling down until data says it’s safe.”

The sad truth is that these alarming protests worked, especially in blue America. Public schools in most big cities were effectively deterred from reopening on time for the 2020–21 school year. Union lobbying also helped district and charter schools secure more than one hundred billion dollars to pay for Covid-related health and safety upgrades, without any expectation that the schools would accelerate their reopening plans or even use the money to support anything related to reopening that year.

All the while, data continued to mount showing that children faced the lowest Covid-related health risks—and parents warned of the devastating impact that long-term and widespread closures were having on their children.

With that as a backdrop, it was nonpublic schools—Catholic schools chief among them—that led the way forward in reopening amidst uncertainty. Indeed, while just 43 percent of district schools and 34 percent of charter schools offered in-person learning in September 2020, fully 92 percent of Catholic schools offered in-person learning. To be sure, for charter schools housed in public school buildings, the decision to reopen may not have been theirs to make, yet the impact on families was the same. And the result was that many of the district schools and charter schools that were not open on the first day of the 2020–21 school year remained online for the bulk of the year, some not fully reopening until fall 2021.

While the impact of these Covid-related policy decisions on enrollment trends is still shaking out, emerging patterns suggest that more parents than ever are seeking alternatives. There has been a record-breaking increase in the number of families opting to homeschool their children during Covid. Educational innovations such as “microschools” and “learning pods” emerged as nontraditional options for families looking for alternatives to remote learning. And well-established enrollment patterns in public and Catholic schools appear to have shifted dramatically: After a decades-long decline, national Catholic school enrollment rebounded in 2021. By contrast, after a steady century-long increase, national public-school rosters took a nosedive, dropping by an estimated 3 percent between 2020 and 2021. While it remains to be seen whether enrollment trends will return to their old patterns, these shifts are noteworthy.^[1]

In this environment, it’s unsurprising that parent demand for school choice—particularly private school choice—has soared. According to the results of a survey administered by RealClear Opinion Research, 72 percent of registered voters support school choice. This represents an increase of 8 percentage points since April 2020. Even more critically, support for school choice increased across the political spectrum. Among Republicans and Independents, such support rose by 7 percentage points to 82 percent and 67 percent, respectively. More remarkably, it increased by 9 percentage points among self-identified Democrats, from 59 to 68 percent.

In May 2021, Jeb Bush declared 2021 “the year of school choice” after “seven new school choice programs were created and twenty-one existing programs were expanded across eighteen states.” Then the push to expand parental choice continued into 2022, demonstrated most recently when Arizona Governor Ducey signed into law a bill that allows any student in the state to receive “$6,500 per year per child for private school, homeschooling, microschools, tutoring, or any other kinds of educational service that helps meet the needs of their students outside the traditional public school system.”

All of that likely contributed to the game-changing enrollment increase that Catholic schools enjoyed in 2021–22. As we detail in a recent Manhattan Institute issue brief, Catholic school enrollment in 2021 increased by 3.8 percent—the largest year-over-year increase that the sector has seen in two decades.

The news couldn’t have come at a more important time for a weary sector. Catholic school enrollment had been declining precipitously for decades and reached a nadir in the fall of 2020, when the sector saw the largest year-over-year decline in five decades.

Over the past two years, however, Catholic schools—which have been overshadowed in the education-reform debates for much of the past two decades—showed real strength of leadership by standing apart from the conventional wisdom at a time when children and communities had few options. This leadership in a moment of crisis has also underscored the importance of a diverse school ecosystem to our nation, particularly in challenging times when it’s more important than ever to put the needs of students and their families first.