By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
Charles Zech, the director of Villanova University’s Center for Church Management and Business Ethics, has written an article titled “Reinventing Catholic Schools” in the August 29 issue of America magazine that is well worth the time of anyone concerned with the fate of parish schools in the United States. He touches all the bases, providing us with a clear-headed and objective analysis of the decisions that face us.
Zech is on our side. He attended Catholic schools from grammar school through graduate school. He wants Catholic education to be a vibrant presence in American life, but also wants us to face what will be necessary to make that happen.
“Simply put,” he writes, “the economics of the old parochial school system no longer work, and the result is serious financial stress”; “it is time to recognize this reality and search for a new model.”
To underscore his point, Zech observes that “according to the Official Catholic Directory, since 1965 the number of Catholic elementary schools has declined by 50 percent, while the number of students attending Catholic elementary schools has declined by 69 percent.”
He cites the reasons: the dramatic decrease in the number of “women religious, most of whom carried out their apostolate by teaching in parochial schools.” The lay teachers who replaced the teaching sisters may be underpaid in comparison to public school teachers but their “compensation is many times that of the sisters.”
He also points to the “mismatch between the current location of parochial schools and the location of the Catholic population.” Catholics at one time were “heavily concentrated in the urban areas of the Northeast and Midwest.” They now live mainly in the suburbs. This leaves parishes and dioceses with “nearly empty parochial schools” or “serving a population that struggles to afford parochial school tuition” and which is often not Catholic.
Zech thinks it admirable that the Church strives to educate their new inner-city, non-Catholic student bodies — “as the saying goes, we serve this population not because they are Catholic but because we are” — but recognizes the financial stress is becoming unmanageable.
Zech also points to an unpleasant reality: the demand side. Many “millennial Catholics” are “not getting married in the church and are not having their children baptized. This decreases the potential market for parochial schools.”
What does Zech propose as an answer? He points to three approaches that might work. One would be creating regional Catholic schools that would draw their students from many different parishes. But Zech wonders if Catholics would provide the financial support for schools not tied to their local communities: “When everyone owns the school, no one owns the school.”
He also offers the hope that we may one day secure public funding in the form of tax credits or educational vouchers. He offers a caveat, however. Vouchers and tax credits historically provide assistance that “falls far short of the cost of the child’s education.” He is correct about that. A voucher for a few thousand dollars is not going to be a game-changer for a Catholic family of four with tuition bills of $10,000 or more per child at a Catholic school.
Zech’s third proposal is that we try a tactic that has worked in the “Washington, D.C., Indianapolis, and Miami Archdioceses.” It is to convert “parochial schools into public charter schools.” This would require the formerly Catholic school to “eliminate any vestiges of Catholic identity during the school day” and provide religious training only in after-school programs.
No doubt, such an approach will strike many readers of this column as a sellout of the Catholic identity of these schools. But it need not be, at least in theory. The “after school” religious training at these “Catholic” charter schools could begin in the early afternoon and not give the appearance of being some extracurricular add-on. It would also permit the students a school day no longer than that at local public schools. Moreover, the “secular” portion of the school day could provide what Zech calls the “rigorous and values-based education that have always been the hallmark of parochial schools.”
That could be done. There is nothing about a core curriculum that stresses responsibility, honesty, piety, self-discipline, and respect for our fellow men and women that violates the First Amendment. When combined with a serious and rigorous after school religious education program, it could provide an education comparable to the best of the Catholic schools of the past — while receiving full taxpayer funding.
First Teachers welcomes responses from our readers about which of these approaches is the most viable and attractive. My own preference — at least for the moment — would be to work for vouchers or tax credits that would cover the full cost of a Catholic school education, rather than turn Catholic schools into charter schools.
Such a situation obtains in much of Canada at the present time. Ironically, it could be that the current objection to tax credits and vouchers in the United States — which is that Catholics would be given preferential treatment over the rest of the population in such an arrangement — would end if taxpayer support for schools run by religious groups became a reality. How so? Because it is likely that large numbers of Protestant and Jewish groups would begin to open their own schools to take advantage of the public funding.
Permit me to add another possibility to Zech’s list. It was the preferred option of a pastor of mine back in the 1980s. What he tried to do was convince those in charge of our public schools to permit local parishes to provide classes in religion taught by Catholic instructors during the regular public school day. This would permit Catholic students at the public school in question to go from their math and English classes to a religion class — all in the same building. It would make classes in Catholic religious education one of the school’s course offerings, an elective, if you will.
My pastor used to say, “All I want is a classroom in the public school during the school day. I’ll send the teacher.” He never got a serious hearing from the local school authorities. But maybe times have changed.
In any event, the subtitle to Zech’s article is “The system as we know it must change.” It is hard to take issue with that conclusion.
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Readers are invited to submit comments and questions about this and other educational issues. The e-mail address for First Teachers is fitzpatrijames@sbcglobal.net, and the mailing address is P.O. Box 15, Wallingford CT 06492.
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