The Closing of Urban Catholic Schools

Today’s New York Times and yesterday's Washington Post both include articles on how declining enrollments in some urban Catholic schools are prompting school closings as well as initiatives by Catholic schools to shift to operating as charter schools. The efforts of the Catholic Archdiocese in D.C. to continue to operate some schools as charters has been discussed in a prior blog post and received further examination in a Post report on Thursday.

Much of this coverage may be traced to the Thomas B. Fordham Institute's release last week of a new report, "Who Will save America’s Urban Catholic Schools?". The report observes that since 1990 over 300,000 students have been displaced from predominantly inner city Catholic schools when the facilities were closed due to the rising operating costs. The report warns that closings on a similar scale will be repeated in the next twenty years unless a variety of steps are taken by the Church, philanthropists, and government.  Citing the contributions Catholic schools have made by providing an educational lifeline in failing urban school districts, the report seeks to underscore the urgency of stemming the school closing trend.  However, the report does not cast voucher programs as the remedy to save urban Catholic education and acknowledges that enrollments in many Catholic schools in Milwaukee continue to sink despite that city's operation of the largest government-funded voucher program in the United States.

How the state governments of Rhode Island and Pennsylvania responded to the economic hardships and potential closings of parochial schools in those states in the late 1960's led to the Supreme Court's articulation of the now much criticized Lemon v. Kurtzman test for identifying the existence of an Establishment Clause violation in relationships between religious institutions and government entities.  In his final State of the Union address in January President Bush announced plans to hold a White House Summit on Inner City Children and Faith-Based Schools later this year.  Whether that event leads to the formulation of any new strategies to assist Catholic remains to be seen.       

JFB