Tag Archives | Catholic schools

More school choice can boost Florida’s success with Hispanic students

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On March 15, 2012 in Achievement Gap, Catholic education, General

One of the big, untold stories in Florida education over the past decade has been the rising academic achievement of Hispanic students. As researcher Matt Ladner has pointed out, on the fourth grade NAEP reading test, Hispanic students in Florida now tie or outscore the statewide average for ALL students in a majority of states. Meanwhile, in high schools, Hispanic students – who made up 25 percent of all Florida graduates last year – made up more than 25 percent of all graduates who passed at least one Advanced Placement exam.

Why doesn’t this make a bigger splash in Florida, where some demographers say Hispanics could be the majority in a few decades? I’ll save my conspiracy theories for another day. The bottom line is, this trend is not only a hopeful sign for the state’s future, it’s more evidence that public schools here are rising to huge challenges.

Now, that being said, it’s also true that the overall numbers still aren’t where anybody wants them to be, and that some school districts are making bigger gains than others. Among those with flatter trend lines: the Pinellas and Hillsborough districts right here in Tampa Bay.

I bring this up because Pinellas and Hillsborough counties also happen to be the next stop for an innovative program aimed at improving Catholic schools, particularly for low-income Hispanic students. Continue Reading →

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Christian Dallavis, working to revitalize Catholic schools – podcastED

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On March 9, 2012 in Achievement Gap, Catholic education, General, Religious education

Catholic schools used to be neighborhood schools. Many of them served immigrant familes. But since 2000 alone, more than 1,700 have closed in the United States, leaving voids in communities and diminishing school choice options for families who could use them now more than ever. In an effort to change that, the University of Notre Dame is leading a partnership that aims to improve the quality of Catholic schools, particularly for low-income, Hispanic families.

The university’s ACE Academies program began two years ago in Tucson, Arizona and is now rolling out at two schools in Tampa Bay (St. Joseph in Tampa and Sacred Heart in Pinellas Park). In this redefinED podcast, program director Christian Dallavis notes two important statistics: 1) two thirds of practicing Catholics in the U.S. who are under the age of 35 are Hispanic, and 2) only about 50 percent of Hispanic students graduate from high school in four years.

“We see the future of the church is on pace to be kind of radically undereducated,” Dallavis said. But “we also have a solution in that we know Catholic schools often put kids on a path to college in ways that they don’t have other opportunities to do so.”

It’s no coincidence the program came to Arizona and Florida. Both states have large Hispanic populations. Both offer tax credit scholarships to low income students.

“They provide a mechanism that allows Catholic schools and other faith-based schools to sustain their legacy of providing extraordinary educational opportunities to low-income families, immgrant communities, minority children, the people on the margins,” Dallavis said. “We see the tax credit as really providing the opportunity to allow the schools to thrive going into the future.”

But make no mistake. This effort isn’t about quantity. The Notre Dame folks know in this day and age, school quality, whether public or private, is essential – and they’re looking to beef up everything from curriculum to leadership to professional development. Their goal for the kids: College and Heaven. Enjoy the podcast.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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The ‘technocrats’ need not fear religion

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On February 8, 2012 in Catholic education, General, Parental Choice, Religious education

U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius didn’t set out to make life hard on Catholic hospitals, and it is not difficult to imagine why a guardian of health would come down on the side of contraception. But New York Times columnist David Brooks makes an enticing point as he examines how technocrats, to use his term, tend to cower from complexity and run from religion. He sees those same behaviors tying President Obama in knots on school vouchers.

Wrote Brooks:

“The administration’s policies on school vouchers and religious service providers are demoralizing because they weaken this ecology by reducing its diversity. By ending vouchers, the administration reduced the social intercourse between neighborhoods. By coercing the religious charities, it is teaching the faithful to distrust government, to segregate themselves from bureaucratic overreach, to pull inward.”

The communities that a young Barack Obama organized are deeply tied to the church, and those church leaders provide a form of social ballast. Indeed, one of the reasons most of the private schools participating in voucher or tax credit scholarship programs across the country are faith-based is that one of the missions of these schools is to help children who are in social or financial or educational need. That aligns with the mission of most of these private-option programs.

Florida is certainly an example. The Tax Credit Scholarship is available only to students whose household income qualifies them for free or reduced-price lunch, or 85 percent above poverty, and the actual average income this school year is only 12 percent above poverty. In turn, roughly four-fifths of the 38,375 students this year attend faith-based schools.

That these schools are tied in some way to religion can indeed give technocrats serious pause. They think of a wall that is supposed to separate church and state, and forget that the Establishment Cause was prompted by fears not that the government would cooperate with religions but that it would allow for only one. We’re a pluralistic nation, and the participating Florida schools make that point emphatically:  Of the participating religious schools, 36 percent are nondenominational, 17 percent Catholic, 16 percent Baptist, 5 percent Seventh Day Adventist, 3 percent Pentecostal, 3 percent Jewish, and the rest representing at least nine other faiths.

These schools are a snapshot of our communities, just as Catholic hospitals are a part of the medical landscape. As long as the government isn’t forcing children to attend them and as long as the options are religiously diverse, then technocrats have nothing to fear. In fact, there is a persuasive constitutional argument that the government can’t offer options that exclude religious ones. More importantly, these kinds of learning options strengthen the public education quilt by adding pieces of community fabric that sometimes can play a constructive role in helping disadvantaged children learn. That’s certainly something community organizer Barack Obama can appreciate.

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Why it matters that compulsory education can mean private schools

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On February 6, 2012 in Catholic education, General, Parental Choice, School Choice

The modern school choice movement was made possible by the 1925 Supreme Court decision, Pierce v. Society of Sisters.  This unanimous decision struck down an Oregon law, which was strongly supported by the Ku Klux Klan, requiring all Oregon children be educated in government-run schools.  The law was part of the KKK’s anti-Catholic campaign and was intended to force Catholic schools to close.

The court used the 14th Amendment as the basis for its decision. Writing for the court, Justice McReynolds asserted:

“The fundamental theory upon which all governments in this Union repose excludes any general power of the State to standardize its children by forcing them to accept instruction from public teachers only.  The child is not the mere creature of the State; those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations.”

As Joseph Viteritti, one of the country’s top experts in the relationship between the U.S. Constitution and school choice, has observed, the Pierce decision helped establish “the constitutionally protected right of parents to have their children educated in schools that reflected their own values, as well as the commensurate right of religious and private schools to coexist as viable alternatives to public schools.”

Unfortunately, all parents do not have an equal opportunity to exercise this constitutional right. Parents with sufficient resources may satisfy their state’s mandatory school attendance law by sending their children to secular or sectarian private schools, but parents with insufficient resources cannot. As Steve Sugarman recently wrote on this blog, just as the choices guaranteed by the Court’s Roe v. Wade decision require public funding to be fully realized, so do the choices guaranteed by the Pierce decision.

Over the last decade, school choice opponents have used state and federal constitutional provisions as the basis of legal attacks on various school choice programs, but these same provisions provide the basis for expanding and strengthening school choice. For example, if the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses require that government remain neutral when parents choose their child’s school, then shouldn’t the government provide equal financial support for the parents’ choice — regardless if the chosen school is secular or sectarian? Isn’t government putting its collective thumb on the scale when it financially supports parents to attend secular schools but not sectarian schools? And shouldn’t the Free Exercise Clause and the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee low-income parents the same access to sectarian schools as wealthy parents?

Though the Pierce decision is the better part of a century old, it may still have direct relevance to the issues playing out in a public education system that today is trying to keep pace with the individual needs of students and growing demands of parents. Liberty, equality and pluralism are so deeply embedded in the cultural DNA of America that parental choice seems inevitable.

 

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School choice, subsidiarity and the common good

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On January 17, 2012 in Catholic education, Education and Public Policy, General, Grassroots

Subsidiarity is an organizing principle rarely discussed outside the Catholic Church and the European Union, and it’s a shame so few academics and advocates of school choice in the United States talk about it. It is a principle that is skeptical about the ability of large bureaucracies to trump smaller units to function for the common good. At this past weekend’s inaugural international school choice conference in Fort Lauderdale, an Italian researcher introduced the concept to describe why a stubborn region in his country could not accept the government’s insistence that public education must be centrally administered. A sympathetic audience nodded in approval, but there was no obvious sign that the conference understood that its mission was just given political order.

If there was, it could have better informed the rhetorical jousting match that happened minutes later between Stanford University political scientist and union scourge Terry Moe and United Federation of Teachers vice president Leo Casey. For Moe, author of Special Interest: Teachers Unions and America’s Public Schools, the problem of public education is one of structure, organization. “Nobody has a coherent vision of the whole, and no one is organizing schools in the best interest of kids,” he said. Casey countered that Moe favors market-driven and top-down “punitive” reforms that diminish an institution of public education built from the ground up in a model of civil society.

Would that it were so. If we’re to take Casey at his word, then his union would favor the public support of an educational enterprise built in the American tradition of association and social charity with minimal interference from a higher order of government and bureaucracy, the kind of effort facilitated by charter school and school voucher policies. Moe was right to call out the union’s insincerity in promoting transformative reform and its role in maintaining a structure of public education that is largely unresponsive to the unique needs of schoolchildren. But, except for calling for an end to the collective bargaining of work rules among public school teachers, he stopped short of defining how we can reorganize our governance of public education.

If the principles of subsidiarity were more commonly dispatched in our nation’s school reform debates, it could inspire more competing ideologies to find common ground and it could expand our definition of what we consider “public.” We have wrung our hands over what could have stopped the closure and consolidation of 49 Catholic schools in Philadelphia, but we have failed to collectively acknowledge that the urban Catholic school meets the original definition of the “common school” better than many schools that today we call public. The Philadelphia families whose households have been upended by the news have ordered their lives around the social capital they’ve invested in these schools, and the school closings leave fewer stakeholders who share the common goal of reaching out to the city’s most disadvantaged.

Former assistant education secretary Bruno V. Manno once wrote that subsidiarity is not only a principle of justice, but one of empowerment . “The doctrine of subsidiarity values both individual liberty and community,” Manno said. “It is a way of formulating and pursuing true social order. Even though groups have varying interests, subsidiarity implies that common ends are not antithetical to the pursuit of particular interests.”

For states to grasp Moe’s plea to develop “a coherent vision of the whole,” they’ll have to see how traditional schools, parochial schools, charter schools and virtual schools can maximize their unique characteristics and organize around the common goal of a quality education for all. In many ways, that will force us to grasp political concepts foreign to our ears. But in other ways, it simply defines what we’ve been searching for all along.

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Dozens of Philly Catholic schools to close or combine

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On January 6, 2012 in Catholic education, General

From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

The Archdiocese of Philadelphia plans to close four Catholic high schools and 44 elementary schools will be closed or partnered with other schools, officials told school administrators and priests at a close-door meeting at Neumann University this morning.

West Catholic, St. Hubert, Monsignor Bonner-Archbishop Prendergast in Drexel Hill and Conwell-Egan in Fairless Hills will be shuttered in June, according to Rita Schwartz, president of the union that represents the high school teachers and attended the session.

“It was a very sad meeting,” Schwartz said.

While officials from the archdiocese attempted to be upbeat and talk about how the changes would strengthen Catholic education in the region, she said that the school administrators and others need time to grieve.

The news came as members of a 16-member commission presented the recommendations from their yearlong study of Catholic education.

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A bleak future for a saint’s legacy

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On January 5, 2012 in Catholic education, General

Today, the Catholic Church celebrates the feast of St. John Neumann, a Philadelphia bishop who is credited with establishing the first unified system of Catholic schools under a diocesan board. Neumann himself increased the number of Catholic schools from two to 100 in his diocese. By tomorrow, a blue ribbon committee in Philadelphia is expected to release its final report on the future of Catholic schooling in the city. And as a columnist noted in today’s Philadelphia Inquirer, the plan will likely recommend closing and merging many elementary and high schools.

St. Joseph University’s Robert H. Palestini explores what this portends:

Like other schools, Catholic schools benefit not just those who attend them, but all the region’s residents, by producing responsible, productive citizens. When the late William Fishman, a cofounder of the company that became Aramark, was asked why a Jewish man would devote so much of his time to the Catholic schools, he said it was a matter of “enlightened self-interest”: The products of these schools would be the employees of his and other Philadelphia companies.

We are all familiar by now with the plight of Catholic schools in Philadelphia and other large cities. For a variety of reasons, the Delaware Valley’s Catholic school enrollment has declined from more than 200,000 to about 60,000, and the future of the remaining schools is in doubt.

Providing for the continued effectiveness of these schools, especially the urban ones, was the charge given to the archdiocesan commission. Its task should also concern everyone who cares about maintaining the high quality of life in our region, reducing educational inequality, ending the cycle of poverty, and turning around America’s inner cities. There is much evidence that Catholic schools can play an important role in doing that.

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Five degrees of separation — a changing American anomaly

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On November 16, 2011 in Charter Schools, Education and Public Policy, Education Research, General, Parent empowerment, School Choice

Editor’s note: Gloria Romero is a former Democratic senator from California and the California director of Democrats for Education Reform. She serves on the board of the American Center for School Choice. Peter H. Hanley is the center’s executive director.

Only in education have we empowered strangers and geography rather than parents to make choices as to what is best for children. Essentially, parents and children are tied to the land — much like peasants under feudalism. Five digits, known as ZIP code, continue to allocate and segregate students. We use handy phrases like “neighborhood schools” and “local control.” But we don’t dare try that in housing, or healthcare, or places of worship. Racial discrimination was barred long ago, freeing us to live in any neighborhood. It’s unthinkable that a local health department official could look at your address and assign your child to a doctor or dentist. You are free to worship at the church or temple of your choice.

Yet in American education, someone in your local school district, who does not know you or your child, orders you each fall to send the child to a school based on these five digits regardless of whether its programs fit your child’s and family’s needs or delivers strong academic outcomes.

The best thing about the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law is that it opened our eyes — real data revealing a widening achievement gap for students of minority and low-income parents. We also learned that, too often, bargained contracts give highly effective teachers the choice to “opt-out” of schools where they are most needed. Further, many charter and independent schools have demonstrated that children in poverty can perform at high academic levels.

But, the times they are a changin’!

Gradually, ZIP code is being challenged and replaced with choice. Forty states have authorized public charter schools, which operate without many of the bureaucratic requirements of traditional schools, but with high accountability expectations. Between 1993 and 2007, the percent of families who were able to choose their child’s school, either within the public school system or at private schools, has increased from 20 percent to 27 percent.

Progress, however, has been uneven as the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) found that families with low incomes, composed of a single parent or of parents with only a high school diploma or less, and Latino families have not been increasing their ability to make educational choices.

This year, 42 states have introduced legislation, most targeted for the underserved, to create or expand school vouchers or tax credit scholarship programs. The latter allow businesses and individuals to receive a tax credit for a donation to a nonprofit organization that in turn provides scholarship money, mostly to low-income families. Already this year, 12 states and the District of Columbia enacted programs to permit parents to choose schools, including private schools, which best serve their children. Moreover, 15 states have introduced legislation modeled on California’s landmark Parent Trigger Act, which empowers parents to force change in persistently underperforming public schools.

NCES also found that parents who are “very satisfied” with multiple aspects of their children’s school rose dramatically as their ability to exercise choice grew. Data consistently shows at least a 10-percentage point difference for those that had public school choice and a 25-point difference for those that had private school choice over parents that did not have choice.

Americans value freedom and like choices in their lives, so these trends are not surprising. Indeed, some parents are willing to be arrested and even go to jail for trying to enroll their children in schools which they know can better serve their children. Parents will challenge ZIP code controls, sign petitions, and form turnaround movements when their “neighborhood” school is chronically failing. Yet opposition to expanding parental choice to all schools — including private schools — persists. These schools, especially religious schools, have served urban communities for decades, but have been closing at alarming rates. Aside from the strong academic credentials of most of these schools, a recent Notre Dame Law School analysis found that in Chicago “the presence of a Catholic school in a police beat appears to suppress crime.”

America needs more good schools, traditional public, charter, and private, which serve families well. We need an honest and forthright debate over parental responsibilities and choice in public education, especially whether five digits should continue to be the most powerful five degrees of separation from the American Dream. Whether it’s Johnny or Juanita, it’s time to make parents the architects of their children’s future.

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On public schools, Catholic schools and educating the whole child

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On October 7, 2011 in Catholic education, General, Testing and Accountability

Our perceptions of inadequacy of public schools has led politically to our infatuation with standardized testing, and that has upended the mission to educate the whole child, writes Philip V. Robey, an executive with the National Catholic Educational Association and a former principal and teacher in public schools and Catholic schools.

In his Education Week commentary, Robey says the larger field of education could learn some things from the administration of Catholic schools:

When Catholic schools say they teach the whole child, they mean it. By nature and mission, these schools operate in such a way that moral choices and character values are just as strongly emphasized as educational performance. This emphasis contributes to a culture fostering the notion that it is important to use our gifts well, and be appreciative of them …

… In high-stakes testing environments, the educational emphasis falls on adults and their ability to raise students’ scores. The stakes are important enough that financial incentives are sometimes used as enticements. While, on the surface, this sort of rewarding may seem harmless, it can undermine the educational process by putting such a heavy emphasis on test scores that there is little energy for much else.

Statements like that would find a friendly audience in Diane Ravitch, Matt Damon and the masses behind Save Our Schools. So why do these same advocates become unraveled at the prospect of publicly funding a scholarship that could bring a low-income child to one of Robey’s schools?

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When civil protest turns uncivil

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On August 29, 2011 in Catholic education, General, School Choice

We can disagree on the merits of school choice and on the need to provide low-income families with even faith-based educational options. But we’re a long way from civility when we berate a Catholic school principal and tell her we’re ashamed to have her in our neighborhood, as one person does about 1:47 into this footage of a Milwaukee protest filmed by Wisconsin’s MacIver Institute.

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