By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
I hesitate to write what I am about to write. There are many well-run Catholic elementary and high schools, with dedicated and skilled administrators and teachers. Yet facts are facts. I bet many of you have heard Catholic parents with children in public schools say the same thing that I have heard: “Why would I send my kids to a Catholic school? The teachers are liberals and feminists who couldn’t get a job in the local public schools.”
The people who say this tend to live in stable suburban communities, where the local public schools are a source of community pride because of the academic success their graduates enjoy, along with the athletic teams, debate teams, theater groups, and science clubs that they offer to their students.
I did not hear much of this public school boosterism back when I lived in the New York City area, but it is commonplace in the diners and among the crowds at community events in the section of Connecticut where I live now. I routinely see adults wearing the polo shirts and baseball caps of the local high school athletic teams.
Consider the implications: It means that even if our legislators were to pass laws giving us tuition vouchers and tax credits, it might not mean that people will be lining up to get their children into Catholic schools. If we want to change that state of affairs, we must do something to enhance the current image of a Catholic education.
It is difficult to predict when critical mass will be reached in the push for tax credits and vouchers being made available for most American parents. But there is reason to think that the pressure is building. Just a few weeks ago on National Review’s online edition, former Florida governor and presidential candidate Jeb Bush added his voice to the chorus in an article entitled, “Saving America’s Education System.”
Bush noted that we spend “more on education than almost any other industrialized nation in the world” but that “wide achievement gaps remain,” with “only 8 percent of U.S. high school graduates truly college or career ready.” Beyond that, writes Bush, “Many workers don’t have the skills to compete in the 21st-century job market.”
What does he propose as an answer? Nothing short of “massively disrupting our education system” by “replacing the current model of funding bureaucracies” with a “new regime in which the money follows the child, guided by the decisions of parents.”
If Bush gets his way, there will be “no more assigned schools” based on where a family lives. “Parents of all income levels” will be “able to choose from a robust marketplace of options, including traditional neighborhood schools, magnet schools, charter schools, private schools, and virtual schools.”
He calls for information about school performance “to be readily available” for parents to make their choice, thereby “rewarding success, replicating it, and weeding out failing schools.”
Bush also envisions a “digital world,” where families “choose from a menu of courses and successful providers, which are available to traditional schools as well as home-school families.” This would mean that courses taught by an outstanding science or math teacher, for example, would not be available only at the single school where he or she works, but could be accessed online nationwide.
Where would the current federal Department of Education fit in? It wouldn’t. Bush wants to “move as much power out of Washington as possible. Education is a national priority, but it shouldn’t be a federal program. States have a much better understanding of how to serve their own students than anyone in the 202 area code, and parents are the very best judges of how their children will be best served.”
Pie in the sky? Maybe not. My question, I repeat, is what will happen if something like what Bush envisions ever becomes national policy, and the American people, provided with all these choices, pass by the current Catholic school model?
Can we come up with something different from the (possibly unfair) caricature of Catholic schools I referred to above: schools run by feminist nuns and lay teachers waiting for an opening to come up in the local public school?
Perhaps something like the model offered to First Teachers recently by a correspondent would do the trick. The correspondent called our attention to the curriculum at the Holy Innocents School of the Northwest in Federal Way, Wash. It may not be suitable for all families and all communities, but it offers some food for thought. According to our correspondent, the school was recognized by the Acton Institute “as one of the top 20 academic high schools in the U.S.” The Acton Institute is widely respected conservative think tank with the stated mission of promoting “a free and virtuous society characterized by individual liberty and sustained by religious principles.”
Holy Innocents provides both an elementary and a high school, offering, says our correspondent, “11 years of Latin and 2 years of Koine Greek.” The “grade school’s religion courses use all three St. Joseph Baltimore Catechisms.” The high school religion courses are “Theology, using Frank Sheed’s two books, Ethics using Austin Fagothey’s Right and Reason, along with an apologetics course written by the school’s founder and headmaster Dennis M. Cantwell.” The apologetics course discusses the social encyclicals, along with “articles from The Wanderer and Catholic Answer magazine and Scripture Matters by Scott Hahn.” The school’s math and science courses are both demanding and thorough.
The school day includes “prayers as a school at the start of the day, at noon before lunch, and at the end of the day,” also “Gregorian Chant hymns such as Pange Lingua and Veni Creator.”
Tuition at Holy Innocents is currently only $1,800 per year. This is made possible because “teachers do not take a salary but have ‘outside’ sources of income.” Moreover, the school does not take “money from any government or foundation.” Whether that would change if a plan such as the one Jeb Bush is proposing ever became a reality, is an intriguing question. I cannot predict the answer.
Holy Innocents has a small student body, currently fewer than 40 students. It is what permits them to operate on their current budget. One would think that a larger Catholic school that attempted to use their model would need to make changes to fit their circumstance.
The larger question is whether a replica of what Holy Innocents is offering would appeal to large numbers of modern Catholics in the United States, even if Jeb Bush’s call for a “new regime in which the money follows the child” were to be instituted. I say the jury is out.
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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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