Looking for Solutions to the Catholic-School Crisis
He is neither old nor a priest nor particularly attached to time-honored traditions. At 35, John Eriksen, one of the nation's youngest Catholic-school superintendents, offers a ruthless assessment of parochial education. "The biggest threat that urban Catholic schools face is nostalgia," he says both of districts nationwide and of his own diocese of Paterson, N.J. A Notre Dame and Harvard graduate fluent in Spanish and Arabic, Eriksen is part of the next generation of Catholic leaders in search of new ways to halt decades of student attrition. "We've been running these schools in a way that might have worked 30 or 40 years ago but doesn't work now," he says.
Of that, there is no doubt. Nearly 1 in 5 Catholic schools in the U.S. has closed its doors this decade. To non-Catholics, this may not appear to be something worth worrying about. But parochial schools are one of the largest (if not the largest) alternatives to the American public-education system, and their steady decline inordinately affects urban low-income minorities who would otherwise be left at the mercy of public schools that have proven incapable of educating them...
... Enrollment in Catholic schools peaked in the 1960s, when more than 5 million students attended nearly 13,500 parochial schools. Since then, both enrollment and the number of schools have dropped by more than half. Why? For starters, the number of priests, nuns and brothers able to teach for free has plummeted. In 1950, 90% of the teachers in Catholic schools came from religious orders; by 1967, the figure was 58%; today, it is 4%. This shift has meant that schools have had to raise tuition in order to pay more lay teachers. Meanwhile, increasingly middle-class Irish and Italian families started moving to the suburbs, leaving urban Catholic schools to cater to a majority of lower-income blacks and Hispanics. Less money coming into the church has led to even higher tuition, fewer students who can afford to attend the schools and the potential for even more closures...
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Of that, there is no doubt. Nearly 1 in 5 Catholic schools in the U.S. has closed its doors this decade. To non-Catholics, this may not appear to be something worth worrying about. But parochial schools are one of the largest (if not the largest) alternatives to the American public-education system, and their steady decline inordinately affects urban low-income minorities who would otherwise be left at the mercy of public schools that have proven incapable of educating them...
... Enrollment in Catholic schools peaked in the 1960s, when more than 5 million students attended nearly 13,500 parochial schools. Since then, both enrollment and the number of schools have dropped by more than half. Why? For starters, the number of priests, nuns and brothers able to teach for free has plummeted. In 1950, 90% of the teachers in Catholic schools came from religious orders; by 1967, the figure was 58%; today, it is 4%. This shift has meant that schools have had to raise tuition in order to pay more lay teachers. Meanwhile, increasingly middle-class Irish and Italian families started moving to the suburbs, leaving urban Catholic schools to cater to a majority of lower-income blacks and Hispanics. Less money coming into the church has led to even higher tuition, fewer students who can afford to attend the schools and the potential for even more closures...