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This chapter discusses two threats to the survival of Catholic high schools: the charter school movement and the ever-rising cost of going to a Catholic school. It also examines some new models for Catholic education, especially the Cristo Rey model, and new ways to raise money.

This chapter returns first to the question of the shape of the culture of the United States. More specifically, it examines the results of several national studies on adolescents and their religious beliefs. It also describes how some leaders in the neurosciences think that adolescents are at a special developmental point in their lives—right where religious beliefs can take deeper root. One of the most important conclusions of these studies is that the experiences youth have during their formative years, roughly between the ages of eleven and twenty-one, will have especially profound consequences on the way they think and act for years to come. Certainly, youth will adapt and change over the course of their adult lives, but these adaptations and changes will occur within rather stable parameters influenced by the experiences they had during their teenage and young adult years. Therefore, the years that youth spend in high school can have an important impact on the rest of their lives. In the light of these studies, the chapter concludes with several recommendations for working with adolescents in Catholic high schools.

This chapter makes the case for the argument that teaching is the most important of all the professions by describing how teachers, and not just administrators, are leaders in a special way. Becoming a good teacher can be learned through developing good pedagogical habits. Teaching in a Catholic high school allows a teacher the privilege of passing on the faith, first by example, and then by word. The best teachers are perpetual students themselves, and are students not only of what they teach, but also the culture. They have developed the habit of study, which at bottom is really a spiritual practice. The chapter concludes with several recommendations to strengthen the teaching profession.

Chapter 2 examines the Zobrests’ decision-making as they sought opportunities among various school systems available to them for mainstreaming their deaf son, Jim. We follow Jim’s education from the Arizona School for the Deaf and the Blind to the Catalina Foothills public schools in suburban Tucson and analyze the Zobrests’ decision to remove Jim from the public schools and place him in Salpointe Catholic High School. The general attraction of Roman Catholic schools in the cultural and social climate of the 1980s is discussed, as is the expectation that a Catholic high school would offer a deaf-friendly educational and social environment. Jim’s IEPs, his performance in school, and his social situation, as the only deaf student in each educational setting, are analyzed.

This chapter highlights five general themes in contemporary US culture that leaders of Catholic high schools need to understand. The first two are clearly historically rooted: the stress on individual and especially religious freedom, and then, as the different types of religious practices multiplied in the United States, the effort to privatize the expression of religion. The last three are recent cultural developments that are especially influential today. These are the impact of media, the therapeutic shape that religious belief takes in a culture that stresses individual choice in the midst of religious pluralism, and the growing number of people who have been described as the “spiritual but not religious”.

This chapter discusses the origins of the Zobrests’ lawsuit against their public school district in Tucson, which refused on constitutional grounds to pay for Jim’s sign language interpreter in a Catholic school. For the Zobrests, federal disability laws and the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause entitled Jim to have this essential service. What follows is an analysis of the zigzag line of thinking employed by the U.S. Supreme Court as it grappled with church-state issues in the twentieth century prior to its consideration of the Zobrest case. For years, two titans of constitutional law—Catholic neoconservative William Bentley Ball and civil libertarian Leo Pfeffer—battled over what was legally permissible with regard to freedom of religion. Ultimately, the court enunciated a controversial Lemon Test to address this thorny area of its jurisprudence.

This chapter looks at the considerable challenges that Jim Zobrest faced as he attended Salpointe Catholic High School in Tucson, as the only deaf student in that elite institution. Jim’s experiment in mainstreaming did not succeed in overcoming his social isolation within the high school. The school itself largely left Jim to his own devices to succeed in this hearing environment. Jim therefore relied heavily on his interpreter, Jim Santeford, and his younger brother, Sam, to facilitate conversation with his teachers, classmates, and coaches. The kinds, methodologies, and technologies of deaf communication are also considered. Despite mostly succeeding in the classroom, Jim grew increasingly alienated from the school he and his family chose because he was unable to start on his school’s championship-caliber basketball team.

The importance of World War I as a watershed in twentieth-century American history has long been recognized, and recent studies agree that that interpretation applies to higher education and to American Catholic history. Not surprisingly, it also applies to the development of Catholic higher education. The war did not in itself revolutionize that activity, but by reinforcing and accelerating tendencies already at work it closed the door on one epoch and set the stage for another. The decisive difference between the two eras was that the war settled in favor of the modernizing reformers the debate over the organizational issues discussed in Chapter 2. This came about because efforts to rationalize Catholic higher education were swept along in what David M. Kennedy has called “the great war-forced march toward a better articulated structuring of American life.” Coming after two decades of industrial consolidation and in the midst of a craze for “efficiency,” wartime mobilization brought the movement for planning and control to an unprecedented level of intensity. “Czars” were appointed, or national commissions established, to supervise industrial production, agriculture and food distribution, fuel supplies, labor, the railroads, and shipping. Mobilization of opinion was entrusted to the Committee on Public Information, which reached into every corner of the land, including the schools. This was all carried on at a high pitch of patriotism; the same emotion, along with the felt need to keep pace with ongoing changes, led to the creation of many voluntary agencies of coordination, such as the American Council on Education and the National Research Council, to mention two quite important for higher education. By far the most important result of this impulse among American Catholics was formation in 1917 of the National Catholic War Council and its transformation after the war into a permanent organization called the National Catholic Welfare Conference (both of which used the initials NCWC). Scholars have only recently begun to unravel the complexities of this story, but their work makes clear that, precisely because the NCWC represented so important a step toward centralization, its formation aroused fierce opposition from Catholics fearful of encroachments on their own freedom of action.