Tomas Diaz's List: Education

• Over the years, a body of scholarly evidence has accumulated showing that Catholic schools have not only excellent academic results overall, but also a peculiar ability to help disadvantaged students. In the 1980s, the eminent sociologist James Coleman found that Catholic schools, more than public schools, were generating similar achievement results among different types of students. A decade later, other researchers reported similar results, finding that Catholic schools were somehow able "simultaneously to achieve relatively high levels of student learning [and] distribute this learning more equitably with regard to race and class than in the public sector." And in more recent years, many other researchers — including Paul Peterson, Derek Neal, and Andrew Greeley — have continued to find Catholic-school benefits (especially for at-risk students), including higher test scores, improved high-school graduation rates, and higher rates of college attendance. Catholic schools, in other words, somehow manage to narrow the "achievement gap."
• many aging Baby Boomers who attended parochial schools might point to another of Catholic schooling's distinctive features. They likely recall memorization, recitation, a tightly ordered school day, lectures on diligence, and, most of all, discipline. Indeed, few would likely describe their childhood schools as the idealized learning environment embraced by today's progressive educators, where instruction is "student centered," where children can "explore," and where routine and repetition are abjured.
• Interestingly, today's extraordinarily high-performing urban charter schools — arguably the greatest story in public education in a generation — bear a curious resemblance to the Catholic schools of Baby Boomer memory. Though they have no crucifixes on the walls and any form of corporal punishment is strictly forbidden, outstanding inner-city charters — like those in the Knowledge Is Power Program, Achievement First, and Uncommon Schools networks — believe deeply in order. They also assign mountains of homework, set high expectations, and pursue academic achievement for all students, regardless of background, with a secular religious zeal.
• with millions of Catholics today firmly rooted in the middle class and above, it's also easy to forget that 50, 75, and 100 years ago, America's urban poor were often recent Catholic immigrants facing many of the same obstacles as today's impoverished inner-city families. Given that a huge proportion of these children attended parochial schools, it's not unreasonable to wonder whether Catholic education played a decisive role in the upward mobility of broad swaths of the American public — and whether that achievement can be repeated with poor students today.
• Some of the lowest-performing urban public-school systems are also those that spend the most money per pupil — but despite Catholic schools' record of helping disadvantaged students learn, and despite their desperate need for financial resources, these institutions are denied any direct public support.
• It is long past time for policymakers to fix the legal peculiarities that currently prevent the establishment of religious charter schools. Through a voucher program, a private school can legally receive government aid and keep its religious aspects while avoiding the state's accountability system. A religious charter-school system would serve the same educational and spiritual needs in America's inner cities — and it would have the added benefit of holding the schools accountable for their results. Yet today such a program would be illegal. Until that changes, hundreds of Catholic schools serving some of the nation's poorest students — schools that could be kept alive as religious charters — will be needlessly lost.
• What is needed now, then, is for a big-city Catholic bishop to acknowledge that chartering and Catholic education are a natural fit. For generations, Catholic schools educated countless poor children; chartering was created to allow a wide variety of non-profit groups to run excellent schools, frequently serving children in need. By allowing Catholic schools to receive government funding, a religious-charter policy could honor the traditions of both Catholic education and the chartering movement, allow these schools to carry on their service to the most at-risk urban students, and adhere to state standards, assessments, and accountability frameworks.

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