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Catholic Schools: A Choice to Benefit Everyone
Catholic schools have left a profound historical impact, extending far beyond the Catholic community. They have welcomed generations of immigrant families, many of them economically poor, supporting them in the academic and faith formation of their children as well as in the process of enculturation and the promotion of good citizenship. To reach these goals, which benefit all of society, they have relied not on public funding but on the generous support of all Catholics, especially the religious women and men, who sacrificed their entire lives to assisting parents in educating their children.
Today, in addition to their traditional role among poor and immigrant families, Catholic schools continue their pastoral care for the family, now seriously endangered, with “their discreet insertion in the educational dynamics between parents and their children and very especially the unpretentious yet caring and sensitive help offered in those cases, more and more numerous above all in wealthy nations, of families which are ‘fragile’ or have broken up,” as the Sacred Congregation for Catholic Education (SCCE) observed in The Catholic School on the Threshold of the Third Millennium (Rome, December 28, 1997), n.3. The historical mission of parochial schools to poor families takes on a dramatic new urgency in the spiritual poverty of today’s materialistic secularism, witnessing a deterioration of family life, and in the midst of an insidious culture of death that threatens us and menaces the most vulnerable and impressionable members of our community, our young people.
Catholic schools are living proof that education is possible without secularization or the massive expenditure of public funds. Yet today, the sociopolitical situation “places an almost unbearable financial burden on families choosing not to send their children to state schools and constitutes a serious threat to the survival of the schools themselves. Moreover, such financial strain not only affects the recruiting and stability of teachers, but can also result in the exclusion from Catholic schools of those who cannot afford to pay, leading to a selection according to means which deprives the Catholic school of one of its distinguishing features, which is to be a school for all” (SCCE, The Catholic School, n. 7). In other words, Catholic schools are, in a sense, public.
Educational reform is a vital national and local election-year issue in which the success story of our Catholic schools needs to feature prominently. A fierce battle rages in our own State of New York regarding the best educational models. No one wants a return to the educational turmoil of mid-1960s New York City. But the same two ideological coalitions, roughly polarized into the civil-rights community and the teacher unions that brought us the education wars of that era now seemed poised for a repeat performance. The new match might be billed the Education Equality Project (EEP) versus the Economy Policy Institute (EPI). Without a referee or an alternative, there is the potential for an education-policy “War of the Roses.”
It is an old war. And both orthodoxies would benefit from less a dismissive attitude toward the Catholic school experience in their deliberations. Both sides, however, are united on one strategy: to access more taxpayer money. What they disagree on is how it should be spent which, in turn, is predicated upon the particular ideology or research-pool each subscribes to. The EEP (students first, more money for schools and teacher incentives) is persuaded that better teachers elicit better performance from students: hence, bonuses to attract the most qualified professionals to lower-income areas while weeding out incompetents through peer review are the way to go. Oddly missing from this view are clear expectations from students and parents: if kids or parents fail, punish the teacher. The more union-friendly EPI (families first), on the other hand, subscribes to studies since the sixties (James Coleman) that strongly link academic performance with socioeconomic status: hence, better schools and teachers alone will not enhance educational goals without economic advancement. Parents and students must be held accountable, too.
Politically, the EEP reformers seem to have the better hand at the moment. The voting public may be more disposed to giving money to poor kids and their schools than welfare and housing to their parents. Anti-union sentiment is easier to marshal. Each camp operates within a framework, however, that assumes public education can only be accomplished through a government monopoly of the means of production. Fortunately, the Catholic school alternative belies this bias.
We have all seen that the mere expenditure of money on schools does not guarantee the desired results. Our own Catholic schools provide an excellent and very cost-effective (by two-thirds) alternative, but can hardly remain competitive without a more level, fair and free playing field. The proposed Freedom of Education Act enables just that: freedom to parents who would otherwise be deprived—for financial or political reasons—of their right to choose the school they believe is best suited for their children. The Freedom of Education Act in the New York State Senate (S3627-A), introduced last March 1, 2007 in the Senate, remains active till the end of 2008. The bill is designed as relief not only for tuition-paying parents—and all of us who pay taxes for public schools—but also the system itself. Whether the bill survives will depend upon the choices citizens make in this year’s primaries and election.
As reasonable as it might seem, this fundamental right of parents to choose has not always been recognized. An 1894 amendment to the New York State Constitution directed the legislature “to provide for the maintenance and support of a system of free common schools, wherein all children of this state may be educated.” Many courts, at the behest of proponents of a single public educational system, interpreted the provision as a requirement that all parents must “choose” a state-operated school. In 1925, the Supreme Court of the United States rejected this position, striking down a model state law requiring parents to send children between ages 8 and 16 to a state school (Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U.S. 510). Though the legality of the 1894 New York State amendment was not before the Court in that case, Senate Bill No. S3627-A would go a long way to ensuring that this constitutionally protected right is more than mere promise.
The proposed act, it should be noted, is neither a gift to the tuition-payer nor a subsidy to the school since no money passes from any governmental entity to a beneficiary. The act merely allows participants to keep and spend a portion of their own money for educational expenses as they see fit, and so, by increasing the number of tuition-payers by this form of tax relief, every federal, state and local tax-payer benefits. Nothing, however, will happen without an actively mobilized Catholic community in which everyone takes the initiative to know the position of his or her local representatives and contacts the governor and the senators and assemblypersons to express support for the initiative.
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