The theme for this year's Catholic Schools Week (wrapping up today) is "Catholic Schools: the Good News in Education." There is plenty of good news. Catholic schools are doing their best to educate children from all walks of life, and tuition-assistance programs around the country like Cincinnati's Catholic Inner-City Schools Education Fund (CISE) underscore the Church's commitment to the poor. Moreover, one senses that much of the "felt-banner" silliness that infected religious education in recent decades is behind us.
Yet, unfortunately, there is a fair amount of "bad news" this year. School closings, having sadly become routine events in recent years, seem to be accelerating, and many schools seemingly "in the black," are experiencing long-term enrollment declines. In New York City, nineteen Catholic schools are slated for closure. Here in Cincinnati, six are on the bubble; one, Ss. Peter & Paul, is auctioning a Corvette donated by a generous parishioner to help raise the $600,000 required to keep its doors open. Unfortunately, they won't get much in the way of help from the diocese, which recently revealed it is less then three years away from bankruptcy.
There are many reasons for the troubled state of our Catholic schools: the continued demographic shift by Catholics to suburbs with well-established and government-funded public school systems; the expenses associated with the rise of lay teachers and administrators who require more in the way of income than the priests and nuns who preceded them; and the plummeting size of the average Catholic family which drives down enrollment. To top it all off, rising tuition rates have made schools founded to serve the poor, by the likes of Katharine Drexel and Mother Seton, a luxury affordable mostly by the wealthy and the middle class.
There is also the matter of preserving identity. Catholic school officials feel tremendous pressure to compete with secular public schools. Thus expensive "extras" like new gymnasiums, expanded facilities, and after-school programs are proposed. Yet in some respects, this is a race to the bottom. School resources are, in the short run, "fixed." For every new secular extra, less time and money are available for enhancing a distinctively Catholic identity. Once that identity falls below a certain level, parents logically wonder whether a Catholic school is worth the added expense when they can obtain much of the same thing for "free" at the neighborhood public school.
The much ballyhooed "Blue Ribbon Schools" award offered by the U.S. Department of Education is a case in point. To win this designation, Catholic schools must submit to a rigorous set of criteria that includes extracurricular offerings, exceptional academic performance, and expansive foreign language programs. Virtually none of the criteria are related to Catholic identity, heritage, or culture.
One Cincinnati Catholic school, which displays its blue ribbon on everything from t-shirts to banners to bumper stickers, overhauled its curriculum to include Spanish in every grade level in pursuit of the award. At around the same time, an elective, before-hours course in Latin, once a staple of Catholic elementary schools, was dropped.
It should be pointed out none of these trends happened without the support of many parents. The idea that there ought to be a bank of computers in every classroom, despite the lack of evidence that it has any correlation with academic achievement, is very popular.
A better approach is the one taken by Cincinnati's St. Edmund Campion Academy, a small but growing independent K-12 Catholic school. Without the support of a parish or diocesan subsidy, it offers a classically-oriented curriculum rooted in a distinctively Catholic identity at a tuition rate near or below other neighboring Catholic schools.
The Academy's efforts haven't gone unnoticed, as it was added to the Acton Institute's 2006 "Catholic High School Honor Roll." This award was created to "acknowledge those schools that maintain high academic standards, uphold their Catholic identities, and prepare their students to actively engage the world."
There are other promising signs of new life. It's been observed that, in terms of the socially-acceptable number of children, "three is the new two." There does seem to be anecdotal evidence to support the idea that Catholic parents are opening to the idea of having more children.
The late Pope John Paul II's revolution in catechesis is just beginning to be felt. The doctrines contained in the Catechism of the Catholic Church are trickling down into religion textbooks, and they may inject new lifeblood into the struggle to maintain the identity of Catholic schools.
Moreover, as independent schools like St. Edmund Campion Academy continue to grow, perhaps "traditional" parish schools will borrow ideas from them instead of competing for ribbons from Caesar.
Let us hope and pray that there is enough time; on January 30, the Archdiocese of Cincinnati announced that Ss. Peter & Paul will close.
