No, this is not just a rhetorical question.<\/p>\n
At church, I listened to the pastor, in lieu of a regular homily, talk about the new \u201cTo Teach Who Christ Is\u201d campaign. \u00a0As seems to be usual with these sorts of major fundraisers, this comes from a directive from the Archdiocese, and proceeds are split 65% to the parish, 35% to the Archdiocese for an endowment fund for schools at poor parishes.<\/p>\n
And I thought: \u00a0is it really worth it?<\/p>\n
Yes, I send my kids to a Catholic school (well, the younger two; the oldest is at the local public high school). \u00a0And I believe there\u2019s a lot of good in Catholic education, and the idea that religious education, and an emphasis on \u201ccharacter education\u201d is not limited to Sunday School (or whatever is experienced after school, at home); also, my oldest son, who in another school would have been a prime candidate for bullying, was instead well-treated by the other students.<\/p>\n
But even in my upper-middle-class suburb, the school is struggling. \u00a0Up until the recession, they regularly were filled to capacity. \u00a0Now, in most grades, they\u2019re down from three classrooms to two, which means a loss of economies of scale, for all the other expenses of a school besides the classroom teacher, such as specialized art, music, and gym teachers.<\/p>\n
Yes, I attended a school, Lutheran (Missouri Synod) with one class per grade, and there the classroom teacher taught art and gym; music was choir, combined for 5 \u2013 8th grades and taught by the 6th grade teacher, who was also the church organist and choir director, the librarian was a volunteer, and it was, by and large, fairly no-frills. \u00a0So it can be done \u2014 but the expectation now is that the school needs to compete with the local, quite good, public school to hold onto its student body.<\/p>\n
And that takes a lot of effort. \u00a0It\u2019s a lot more than parents coughing up the tuition. \u00a0It\u2019s the volunteering, for things that in a public school, would be covered by tuition, such as after-school activities and pizza day help (of course, public schools don\u2019t even need pizza day, because they have a full-blown cafeteria), and to raise money to fund additional spending, such as a new playground or an upgrade to technology, again, to keep pace with public schools.<\/p>\n
Now, to be sure, public schools have PTAs, but (I believe) the amount of time, energy, and money involved is much less than the financial and time commitment of parents to Catholic schools.<\/p>\n
And, again, is it worth it?<\/p>\n
There\u2019s an opportunity cost to it all. \u00a0While I know this is generalizing,\u00a0there are a lot of Protestant churches that put Catholic churches to shame in terms of the involvement of their members in church activities and charitable work, and I imagine this is due to the amount of energy spent on the parish school. \u00a0Even if not \u2014 even if there\u2019s no measurable difference in other sorts of involvement between churches with and without schools, at least in principle, if we closed the doors to the school tomorrow, it would open up quite a bit of capacity<\/em> for service and financial contributions in other ways.<\/p>\n And there are other ways that children can experience \u201cCatholic education\u201d besides an 8:00 \u2013 3:00 school day \u2014 maybe an extended after-school program, for instance.<\/p>\n Yes, if the local school district, which is complaining of enrollment spikes without seeming to notice they\u2019re getting kids who, if enrollment patterns hadn\u2019t changed, would have gone to the Catholic school, simply provided vouchers, everyone\u2019d be better off \u2014 except that there\u2019s no way to target the vouchers to that group of families that need the incentive to switch, without giving vouchers to every family. \u00a0And, in any case, that\u2019s just not going to happen. \u00a0It would be nice, yes, but would require a radical change in political climate.<\/p>\n And that\u2019s at a suburban school, whose financial difficulties pale in comparison to urban Catholic schools. \u00a0We\u2019re told that these schools are beacons of hope for poor families, especially in places where the public schools are full of chaos and disorder. \u00a0But the population of Irish and Italians and Poles who built these schools, at a time when they provided an alternative to public schools which (it\u2019s claimed) were effectively Protestant schools and unwelcoming to Catholics \u2014 that population is gone. \u00a0The Mexicans who have, in many cases, replaced them, don\u2019t come from a local tradition of parochial schools (though to be fair, neither did their predecessors, except to the extent that the schools in those countries had a religious bent to them even if nominally secular), and the combination of the lack of low-paid nuns* to work in them and, it\u2019s my impression, the absence of the same dedication to the school among the new immigrants as the old (in the past, attendance at the parish school was virtually mandatory, now parents may or may not elect it), leaves them dependent on outside funding in a way that wasn\u2019t the case a century ago.<\/p>\n (* Yes, Catholic school teachers are paid less than their public school counterparts, but their pay is far higher than in the days of the nuns. \u00a0The Archdiocese, in fact, strives, to the limits of the resources available, to provide a wage that\u2019s, if memory serves, maybe not equal, but perhaps 3\/4s the wage of a public school teacher. \u00a0Oh, and don\u2019t forget that our expectations of class size are far different than in the past.)<\/p>\n And \u2014 besides the residual whites and the new Hispanic immigrants, the other \u201cconstituency\u201d of Catholic schools, are non-Catholic poor children, who come for the educational environment. \u00a0Now, even disregarding the problems arising with a Catholic school with a large non-Catholic population (that is, the disputes about whether teachers are \u201cministers\u201d and subject to Catholic morals clauses, can be terminated for gay-marrying, etc.), it really does raise the question of to what extent Catholics should make herculean efforts to keep a parallel school system in operation as a form of charitable activity.<\/p>\n Once upon a time, nuns came to the United States and founded two types of institutions: \u00a0schools and hospitals. \u00a0The hospitals transformed into businesses, with very little that\u2019s charitable left of those institutions. \u00a0And the schools? \u00a0What, really, is their future? \u00a0To give up on them is a radical step, I know, but neither is it a good idea to throw good money after bad just because we can\u2019t conceive of a different way forward, and because of the sunk costs (financial and emotional both).<\/p>\n Having said all this: \u00a0I thought if I wrote this down, I\u2019d conclude with some really insightful counter-arguments, reasons to keep pressing forward. \u00a0But I think I\u2019ll have to take a cue from the old math and actuarial exam textbooks and say, as they do of proofs, \u201cthat\u2019s an exercise left to the reader.\u201d<\/p>\n