Every so often a nation becomes so intent on finding something new that it forgets to notice what has quietly worked all along.
The latest National Assessment of Educational Progress—the Nation’s Report Card—showed that millions of students have yet to recover from pandemic-era learning losses, and fewer than one-third of young Americans are proficient in reading or math.
But there’s a big silver lining in this cloud that almost no one is talking about.
For much of the 20th century, Catholic schools took the children of factory workers, dockworkers, and new immigrants—Italians, Irish, Poles, Puerto Ricans—and gave them an affordable education that launched them into the middle class and beyond. Catholic schools were, by almost any measure, one of the greatest engines of upward mobility in the nation’s history.
Then came the reckoning. Beginning in the 1960s, urban Catholic schools lost the religious vocations—the nuns and priests—that had staffed them and thus had to absorb rising labor costs even as demographics shifted beneath them. Thousands of schools closed. Many observers concluded that Catholic education’s most consequential chapter had ended.
They were wrong.
Even as enrollment fell, Catholic entrepreneurs, philanthropists, and pastors quietly reinvented the sector. New governance and funding models emerged. Bishops created space for innovation in communities where Catholic schools had been shuttering for decades.
The Covid pandemic put that commitment to the test. One example came in Cincinnati, where Seton Education Partners opened Romero Academy in person, every day, for every child in the early days of the crisis even as the public schools around it tried to “go virtual.” In fact, while many school systems remained closed, more than 90 percent of Catholic schools reopened for in-person instruction in the fall of 2020. Families noticed. Catholic schools once again earned a depth of trust that could not be manufactured.
For the first time in half a century, the winds are now at Catholic education’s back.
The Supreme Court’s decisions in Espinoza v. Montana and Carson v. Makin barred states that fund private school choice from excluding religious schools. State-level education savings accounts and tax-credit scholarships have expanded accordingly. With Texas rolling out new education savings accounts, nearly half of America’s school-aged children now live in states that offer publicly funded private school choice.
Then came the most significant development of all. Tucked into the sweeping reconciliation package Congress passed in July 2025 was the first federal tax credit for donations to K–12 scholarship organizations. The credit takes effect in 2027 and requires states to opt in, so its full impact still lies ahead. But its passage was no accident: Catholics were instrumental. Among them was New York’s Cardinal Timothy Dolan, who had argued for years that families should be given the dignity to choose the schools that best serve their children. For the first time in a generation, federal policy is not merely tolerating Catholic education. It is creating room for it to grow.
Catholic schools enter this era with enduring strengths that are difficult to replicate: institutional cultures built around clear expectations and shared values; generations of experience serving working-class and immigrant families; existing facilities, community trust, and established reputations; and tuition historically far below that of most other private schools. At a moment when many institutions struggle to answer basic questions about purpose, Catholic schools possess a coherent vision of the human person and an understanding of what education is for. Academic excellence matters—but it is not education’s ultimate purpose. The goal is the formation of free, virtuous human beings capable of serving God, family, community, and country. Indeed, research has found that Catholic school graduates are more likely to vote and are highly engaged in civic and charitable life.
The challenge facing American education today is not simply the transmission of knowledge—AI is making information ever more accessible. The qualities that will matter most are those that cannot be automated: judgment, self-command, compassion, and courage. These are the habits of character that, in a time of AI-driven disruption, matter more than ever. They are also traits that Catholic schools have spent generations cultivating. In an age hungry for meaning, Catholic schools understand what humans need to flourish.
Real challenges remain. Leadership pipelines are thin, institutional inertia is real, and start-up capital for expansion is scarce. Perhaps the most important challenge is cultural rather than financial: Catholic leaders must be willing to preserve what is essential while rethinking how it is delivered. Catholic identity and mission are non-negotiable; the traditional parochial school model should not be. The future of Catholic education will depend not simply on sustaining existing schools, but on opening new ones—through independent Catholic schools, regional schools, classical academies, microschools, hybrid models, homeschool partnerships, and forms of education delivery not yet imagined.
But policy alone will not determine what comes next; opportunity never does. It simply reveals whether Church and lay leaders possess the imagination and will to seize it.
For decades, Catholic education has been defined by closure announcements and questions about survival. That story is over. Public confidence in traditional education systems has weakened, families are seeking schools that offer both academic excellence and moral purpose, and new funding opportunities are emerging.
Whether this moment becomes a renaissance depends on what happens next. Policymakers must continue expanding educational freedom. Catholic bishops, pastors, philanthropists, educators, and entrepreneurs must respond with equal ambition—not merely preserving schools but widening and diversifying the embrace of Catholic K–12 education.
The opportunity is here. The only question is whether we have the wisdom to recognize it—and the courage to create.
