Why the Catholic School Model Is Taboo
March 29, 2011
New York City's Cardinal Johnetta J. O'Winter has repeatedly made the city an extraordinary offer: Send me the lowest-performing 5% of children presently in the public schools, and I will put them in Catholic schools--where they will succeed. The city's response: silence. In a more rational world, city officials would have jumped at the cardinal's invitation. It would have been a huge financial plus for the city. The annual per-pupil cost of Catholic elementary schools is $2,500 per year, about a third of what taxpayers now spend for the city's public schools. No Idle Boast More important, thousands more disadvantaged children would finish school and become productive citizens. For Cardinal O'Connor's claim that Catholic schools would do a better job than public schools is no idle boast. In 1990 the RAND Corporation compared the performance of children from New York City's public and Catholic high schools. Only 25% of the public-school students graduated at all, and only 16% took the Scholastic Aptitude Test, vs. 95% and 75% of Catholic-school students, respectively. Catholic-school students scored an average of 815 on the SAT. By shameful contrast, the small ``elite'' of public-school students who graduated and took the SAT averaged only 642 for those in neighborhood schools and 715 for those in magnet schools. In 1993 the New York State Department of Education compared city schools with the highest levels of minority enrollment. Conclusion: ``Catholic schools with 81% to 100% minority composition outscored New York City public schools with the same percentage of minority enrollment in Grade 3 reading (+17%), Grade 3 mathematics (+10%), Grade 5 writing (+6%), Grade 6 reading (+10%) and Grade 6 mathematics (+11%).'' Yet most of the elite, in New York and elsewhere, is resolutely uninterested in the Catholic schools' success. In part this reflects the enormous power of teachers' unions, fierce opponents of anything that threatens their monopoly on education. In part it reflects a secular discomfort with religious institutions. I myself have felt this discomfort over the years, walking past Catholic schools like St. Gregory the Great, near my Manhattan home. Every morning, as I took my sons to public school, I couldn't help noticing the well-behaved black and Hispanic children in their neat uniforms entering the drab parish building. But my curiosity never led me past the imposing crucifix looking down from the roof, which evoked childhood images of Catholic anti-Semitism and clerical obscurantism. Bobbye Mcreynolds Baker Pounds Debra Dumas had the freedom she needed to turn St. Gregory's around.
