Catholic leaders like New York’s Cardinal Dolan are wrongly pinning their hopes on vouchers, says education expert Sean Kennedy:
My concern with people like Cardinal Dolan and other people in the church, they’ve hung their hat exclusively on vouchers. The political reality is that vouchers are not coming to blue states anytime soon. And more importantly, vouchers are not going to save them if they don’t save themselves first.
Philadelphia’s Archbishop Chaput has pioneered a more promising model, explains Kennedy:
Let me stop and praise what’s going on in Philadelphia. . . . Chaput came in after huge cuts – 20 percent of all Philadelphia Catholic schools closed in one single year, which is just unprecedented. When the next round of closings came out with four high schools on the chopping block for the 2012-2013 school year, Chaput said no. And in February of last year, 2012, he said, “I’m going to find an alternative.”
So he decided to do something that very few people in the Church or any corporate governance structure would do—he gave up power. And he sought out the head of Cigna Insurance, and they found an organization called Faith in the Future, and they turned over not only all 17 Catholic high schools in the Philadelphia archdiocese, but also . . . get this, most people don’t understand it: the Catholic schools in Philadelphia run four special education schools. The idea that a private charity, with zero state funding, would take it on itself to do special education work, which is probably some of the most frustrating, expensive, and difficult work there is, it’s amazing—and no one praises the Church for that, but at the same time if you want to continue that enterprise you need to be able to sustain your work.
Those 21 schools were turned over to an organization now headed by a fellow named Casey Carter, who wrote the seminal book No Excuses in the late 1990s. Now Casey is running the Faith in the Future foundation, and they have turned a 6 million dollar deficit – archdiocese high school-wide – to a $500,000 deficit in six months.
Kennedy, a strong supporter of school choice, traces the current woes of Catholic schools to the complacency bred by their 150-year near monopoly on alternative education in America. Community loyalties and a lack of options gave them a guaranteed constituency, and surging vocations provided cheap labor. As vocations dry up and options expand, Catholic schools have to seek new ways to hold down costs and deliver results.
Philadelphia offers perhaps the best example of how to stop the seemingly endless reports of Catholic school closings. The Philadelphia Inquirer hailed the system’s progress in a report this month. Rev. James P. Olson, whose Bonner-Prendergast School had been on the chopping block, told the Inquirer, “We could not have even conceived of this a year ago . . . Sometimes when I go home and sit down at night, I think, ‘Did all this really happen?’”
March 15th, 2013 | 11:36 am
Are they really Catholic schools? Why are there not bumper crops of vocations coming out of those schools? Have these compromised the Faith by using secular curriculum?
I support NAPCIS schools and schools which hire faithful Catholics. These particular schools may not be what they seem to be.
March 15th, 2013 | 11:58 am
I am underwhelmed by the schools in my diocese. I haven’t done any extensive research, but just looking at the mission statements indicate the usual progressive preoccupations that hold sway in public schools: inclusiveness, self-esteem, student-centered, diversity, and so forth. How about, maybe, learning? Academic rigor? Doesn’t seem too popular.
I am sure these are probably not awful schools, but it’s just disturbing to see them echo the same effete, feel-good platitudes that make the public schools so mediocre. Oh, and almost all of them are coed. If they aren’t offering anything substantially different except maybe a vague “religious ed” class and monthly Mass, why should I bother paying tuition?
Fortunately there are a pair of schools run by Opus Dei, not the diocese, one for boys and one for girls, that seem to have a more serious, orthodox, and rigorous attitude.
March 15th, 2013 | 5:03 pm
Too soon to tell. This new arrangement has just begun, wait at least one whole school year before whining that no bumper crop of vocations has been produced.
March 15th, 2013 | 5:05 pm
I cannot speak for Catholic education in its entirety, but I think its a bit simple to take Catholic schools to task for their lack of vocational production or… well, whatever it is pgk is decrying above.
I am a parent of three and send my children to a Catholic 3K-8 school run by our parish, and have for some years now. The children are wonderfully and faithfully educated — other parents in our parish community have many examples to point to regarding how well prepared our kids are if/when they emerge to the local public high school. It’s also painfully apparent whenever my kids get together at family events with their cousins — who are attending public or Montessori schools — just how much deeper in faith and well-rounded in ethics and morals they are because of our educational choice even at an early age.
Granted, being in suburban Chicago generally means the best of many worlds in terms of education. But I think we would do better to listen to the analysis of men like Kennedy — who can clearly see the economics of education, the rise of intellectually-segregated charter schooling, and how that works against private schooling — than parading our insecurities by gnashing our teeth over how insufficiently punishing our schools may be in light of the decades of advancement in the educational sciences.
What Catholic schools teach and how they teach it today can work — I see it every day. But it is a demanding education, one that requires not only financial commitment but the involvement of the families of the students on many levels that public schools simply do not ask.
Getting people to see that the required commitment is a bonus, a selling point because of the rewards of a community of faith and not just more cost in time and money, is in my experience the hurdle we have to overcome. Charter schools will select for bright kids and…
March 15th, 2013 | 5:18 pm
Do Catholic hospitals only treat Catholics? Did Jesus only serve the Jews? Should Catholic Schools only teach Catholics?
March 15th, 2013 | 5:29 pm
PGK seems to have found Catholic schools to be much the same as we found them: expensive and full of ed-school types and the same recycle-be-diverse-rah-rah-feminism rubbish as the public schools. Homeschool your children – unless, of course, your wife has a “career” that’s more important to her than your children’s faith – and they will get a REAL Catholic education.
March 15th, 2013 | 5:49 pm
I don’t see a solution put forth here except turn Catholic schools over to a private corporation. How about some program for making them truly Catholic in culture? I’m not just talking about orthodox religion and practices but about intellectual culture and the heritage of human achievement. Having spent over four decades in education, I think many Catholic schools are merely unintellectual at best and anti-intellectual (and corrupt religiously) at worst.
March 15th, 2013 | 8:52 pm
I’m about the read the article but the comments here are disturbingly limited in thinking. It is impossible to diagnose what’s wrong or right about “Catholic schools” from a few Catholic schools one happens to know about. Catholic schools are vastly different in different areas of the country. I could tell you what’s wrong in many of my area’s Catholic schools (in my estimation) but I have no idea what Catholic schools are like in NYC and I woudlnt’ dream of saying I did.
March 16th, 2013 | 9:58 am
PGK, where are those Opus Dei schools located ? In which city ? Regards
March 16th, 2013 | 1:13 pm
pgk
I haven’t done any extensive research, but just looking at the mission statements indicate the usual progressive preoccupations that hold sway in public schools: inclusiveness, self-esteem, student-centered, diversity, and so forth. How about, maybe, learning? Academic rigor? Doesn’t seem too popular.
This illustrates the shortcomings with vouchers IMO. ‘Academic rigor’? What makes you think this is what parents want? Parents want their kids to get A’s and be told that their kids are as wonderful as they like to think they are. Don’t believe me? As any teacher what will generate more heat for them, giving 90% of kids A’s and B’s or failing an entire class? I don’t think it gets better when the parents are writing checks for thousands.
Vouchers are built on the premise of customer power, but customers use their own money. When you use someone else’s money, agendas get distorted. As taxpayer I have an interest in academically serious public schools. Parents have an interest not in the school but their children. Ask yourself as a parent, would you ask a teacher to ‘let your kid slide’ to preserve your child’s chance at a great college? Probably, your interests are aligned with your child, not preserving the school’s rep. for academic rigor.
Why should I transfer all of my say over schools to other people when it’s my money paying for them? Voucher fanatics have yet to provide an answer to that.
March 16th, 2013 | 3:23 pm
The political reality is that vouchers are not coming to blue states anytime soon.
Blue states?! Can anyone name a single red state that’s seriously considered scrapping its public schools and replacing them with vouchers? The only place vouchers seem to have any political traction are areas of deeply dysfunctional schools (which are almost always areas of much larger dysfunctions like high levels of crime, poverty and other social distress). Let’s dispense with the fiction that the only thing standing in the way of vouchers are supposedly powerful teachers’ unions and Democratic party machines.
March 17th, 2013 | 2:11 am
Homeschool your children – unless, of course, your wife has a “career” that’s more important to her than your children’s faith – and they will get a REAL Catholic education.
Homeschooling is a good and noble thing, but it is not for everyone – even if a family can afford to have a mother stay home to do it. Some parents have the gift for teaching. Fewer have the ability to do so all the way to grade 12. We need to have at least options available offering genuine Catholic formation and academic rigor Unfortunately, those tend to be non-diocesan private Catholic schools that are very expensive.
Catholic schools did indeed rest on their laurels, banking on built in ethnic constituencies and a cheap dedicated labor force (religious sisters). But the vocations dried up, Catholics began contracepting and migrating, and the schools were increasingly captured by secular educational models. Now leaders like ++Chaput must do the hard work of rebuilding diocesan schools as the kind of institutions capable of forming Catholic, successful young adults that they once were a few generations ago. And vouchers are not a silver bullet to that end.
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