Last week, the Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn announced that 26 Catholic schools will be closed in Brooklyn and Queens, about 15 percent of what was once a thriving parochial school system in those boroughs. Days later, the Archdiocese of New York announced it will close six schools in Manhattan and the Bronx.
Historian and Big Apple education observer Diane Ravitch immediately called on wealthy Catholics and big foundations to step forward and save these schools. Their closure, she wrote in the Daily News, "will deprive thousands of children of a meaningful choice in their education and diminish the supply of good schools in the city," an outcome she labeled "catastrophic." Tom Cusick, a civic leader in Manhattan, has announced a campaign, called "Teach the Little Children," to generate support for these schools from wealthy grads who have moved on.
A few thoughts seem in order.
First, it is undeniable that the closing of good schools (assuming these are good schools) is a terrible blow to the children of New York. The diocese swears that it will arrange somehow to place every student from these schools in other Catholic schools. But if even one is forced into a sub-par public school, that's a tragedy.
Second, vouchers would obviously save the schools. The anxious pleas of many students and parents in these schools is cause enough to suggest that vouchers are a moral imperative for poor families in the inner city. But Mayor Bloomberg and Governor Pataki—despite the former's willingness to micromanage public schools—won't touch the issue. What a shame.
Third, there is an interesting historical point to relish: Catholics were once under a cloud of suspicion as to whether they could be loyal Americans. The Catholic school system was a self-conscious attempt to shield Catholic children from a larger Protestant culture that was seen as hostile. Now, in the inner city, parents (many of them non-Catholic) turn to Catholic institutions to save their children from failed secular schools. Amazing.
That observation brings me to my final point: I have to wonder, is it entirely fair to ask Catholics to keep alive financially troubled inner city schools that are educating large numbers of non-Catholics? Many inner-city Catholic schools are in neighborhoods that have been emptied of the Irish and Italian immigrant families whose nickels and dimes built them. Some education reformers (I'm guilty of it, too) assume that Catholic bishops and parishioners will and should open their schools to a flood of non-Catholic children bearing vouchers.
Catholic schools in voucher cities like Cleveland, Milwaukee, and now Washington, D.C. have done just that. It's a tribute to Catholic leaders in these communities that they have engaged in what they consider to be an important work of charity and community service. (It doesn't hurt that voucher money, at least in the first two instances, has helped some Catholic families and has also assisted dioceses to keep schools open.)
But this raises important questions about "Catholic identity" and whether it has something to do with the quality of these schools. In what sense is a Catholic school with a largely non-Catholic student body still a Catholic school? And does that identity—by creating a common purpose and shared sense of mission in a school—have something to do with making it academically excellent? I suspect it does, and fear that, by diluting the Catholic identity of these schools, we may be gambling with their excellence.
In the end, I think we should take the gamble. I support vouchers, because the need for quality education in the inner city is so pressing that it outweighs longer-term concerns. But we should be watching, over time, to see how vouchers (and private scholarship programs that also divert non-Catholics to Catholic schools) affect Catholic education. We should watch these schools for signs of dilution of their Catholic identity and whether that detracts from their excellence. (Not to mention their spiritual moorings, but I won't bore you with Catholic inside baseball.) That's a caution that even non-Catholics, I think, can understand and appreciate.
"A call to action," by Diane Ravitch, New York Daily News, February 13, 2005
"Fighting to save Catholic schools," by Deborah Kolben and Joe Williams, New York Daily News, February 13, 2005
"More Catholic schools closing their doors," CBS News radio, February 16, 2005
Justin Torres is research director of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution.