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This chapter first lays out the book's three arguments. First, Catholic schools have an enduring value which deserves greater support from parents, pastors, and the religious and public sector. Second, the value of Catholic schools, so dependent in the past on the services and pedagogical skills of thousands of religious sisters, brothers and priests, can be sustained by dedicated, justly compensated, and appropriately educated lay leaders. And third, since Catholic culture has weakened dramatically over the last fifty years, Catholic educators must address critically the dominant culture that shapes so much of the way students—indeed, not just students, but many educators themselves—think today. The chapter then presents some statistics on the closing of Catholic schools and discusses the ambivalence over Catholic schools. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

This chapter examines several historical and cultural developments necessary for understanding the current challenges that face educators in today's Catholic schools. During the colonial period religion and education were seamlessly woven together. By the middle and late nineteenth century, however, waves of immigrants posed new threats to Americans who thought that the greatest need was to “Americanize” the “unwashed” immigrants. Many Americans, therefore, welcomed the common school movement, begun by Horace Mann (1796–1859), a Unitarian minister, who designed the schools to provide a common socialization for all citizens. Mann's educational program promoted a generic Protestantism, beginning with daily readings from the King James Bible. In response, the Catholic bishops felt they had to establish their own educational system. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the high school movement gained great momentum, but had little effect on most Catholic high schools, that is, until the 1960s, when it became more and more difficult to sustain Catholic schools in the ways they had been sustained for most of the first half of the twentieth century.

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 focuses on the moral dimensions of leadership in Catholic schools. The chapter unfolds in two steps. First, it offers a description of four moral virtues—prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance—and how important it is for people to acquire all four, especially if they are to be good leaders. Second, it looks at five specific challenges that confront leaders of Catholic high schools. These are the shift to lay leadership; the formation of lay boards; lay spirituality; the hiring and forming of faculty and staff; and the teaching of religion. To meet these challenges adequately, leaders in Catholic schools need to develop the four moral virtues.

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 explores three issues: first, how the leaders of public schools have largely abandoned the teaching of religion but have worked at moral formation, and the difficulties they've encountered in that effort; second, the critical importance of personal example in learning morality; and third, why the leaders of Catholic schools have an advantage over their public counterparts, since they, carrying out the work of moral formation, can draw explicitly upon a rich religious tradition that includes a doctrinal framework and religious and moral practices. It begins with a few notes from history that will provide some perspective on how, for a very long time, religious and moral education remained intimately linked. It then looks at some of the difficulties public schools face when they try to provide character education and moral formation. Finally, it describes doctrinal dimensions and various practices of Catholicism and how they help Catholic schools provide rich moral and religious formation.

Visions of a Christian society in the South Pacific varied within Protestantism, as well as between Protestants and Roman Catholics. Some settlers argued for a secular society, as distinct from one without religious tests or an established church. Primary education was the main area of disagreement, with secular systems established in most colonies by the 1870s, leaving Roman Catholics and Lutherans to finance their own schools. Pressures for political and religious cooperation were strong, leading to Methodist and Presbyterian unions and federation of the Australian colonies. Land wars in New Zealand and New Caledonia left a bitter legacy.

This chapter considers the funding side of the School Question up to the Civil War. Using the New York Free School Society as an example, it traces the development of the rule prohibiting the public funding of denominational and religious-based schooling. It discusses the first significant conflict over efforts to fund Catholic parochial schools that arose in New York between 1840 and 1842. It also discusses how the no-funding principle developed into a legal/constitutional rule. The chapter examines the development of express provisions in state constitutions prohibiting the funding of religious schools, and it concludes with an analysis of the impact of anti-Catholic nativism on the School Question.

This chapter discusses the essay contest on Christian doctrine sponsored by the Archdiocese of Philadelphia—a subject that had recently become the cornerstone of the curriculum in the city's Catholic schools. Mary Donohue, a student at Cathedral Girls' High School Centre, received a prize for her composition, “The Home Art.” Her teachers, the Sisters of St. Joseph, must have been particularly pleased. The congregation took a proprietary interest in Christian doctrine: one of their own, Sister Assisium McEvoy, was the author of the official archdiocesan textbook on the subject. No doubt the nuns were also flattered by the essay's content. Donohue described the home as woman's true vocation, “unless she is called to one that is higher and holier … that of a lifework in God's own household—a vocation to religion.”

This chapter provides an overview of the Catholic school system in the United States, beginning with the rise of parish parochial schools as response to nativism and anti-Catholic bias in early public schools, proceeding to discuss their exponential growth from the late-nineteenth through mid-twentieth centuries and their contraction in response to suburbanization, and concluding with current trends, including declining enrollments and current school closures. Special attention is paid to the structure of the Catholic school system, to early debates about school funding, to the enactment of “Blaine Amendments” in state constitutions, the role of Catholic schools in urban neighborhoods, Catholic schools’ response to racial integration of parishes and neighborhoods, and their late-twentieth-century role as high-quality educational opportunities for disadvantaged students.

This chapter describes charter schools in the United States. Particular attention is paid to the connections between Catholic schools and charter schools, including the competitive pressures that charter schools place on Catholic schools, on charter schools’ role as an alternative to more-ambitious school choice efforts, on the development of “quasi-religious” charter schools, and on the debate within the Catholic school sector about whether bishops should “convert” Catholic schools to secular charter schools in order to secure public funding. The chapter concludes by reviewing three such conversion experiments. The chapter also covers the remarkable ascendancy of charter schools since Minnesota enacted the first charter school law in 1991, distinctions between charter school laws and their effects on the charter school landscape in various states, on the diversity of among individual charter schools, and debates about charter schools’ academic performance.

This chapter focuses on the theological foundations of leadership in Catholic schools. The Christian tradition offers valuable wisdom for leaders of Christian educational institutions. It reminds them that besides being their own persons, they are even before that members of a community blessed with different skills and gifts, committed to both intellectual and moral learning, aware and appreciative of the many forms that leadership takes, challenged by the social responsibilities that flow from the Gospel and, finally, sensitive to the fragility of everyone, especially themselves and those with whom they work and teach. Drawing explicitly upon these theologically grounded themes in the building of the school community of teachers and staff is something that leaders of Catholic schools can do that public school leaders are unable to do.

This chapter examines whether Catholic teenagers attending Catholic high school make a difference in their religious faith and practice five years later, at ages 18–23, compared to Catholics who as teenagers attended public schools. This is an extremely important question within American Catholicism, since it has implications for resource allocations. The chapter reveals significant differences, but also shows that most of the difference of Catholic schooling seems to be a “selection” effect related to the higher religiousness of parents who send their children to Catholic schools. It suggests that the independent schooling effect may be minimal. It also does show, however, that Catholic schooling can have a positive effect on subsequent religiousness for students with low-religiousness parents. Cautions and limitations of the analysis are also highlighted.

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.

This chapter addresses implications for urban neighborhoods of both (1) the rapid disappearance of Catholic schools, and (2) the rise of charter schools. Previous chapters linked Catholic school closures to increased disorder and crime, and decreased social cohesion, in Chicago neighborhoods. This chapter turns to two unanswered questions. First, do the results reflect the work that open Catholic schools do as neighborhood institutions or a “loss effect?” Second, do the results find “school effects” generally or “Catholic school effects” in particular? The chapter begins to answer both questions by comparing the effects of open Catholic and charter schools on neighborhood crime rates. Police beats with open Catholic schools have lower rates of serious crime than those without one. Usually, a charter appears to have no statistically significant effect on crime rates.

Recollections from former students often present a positive appreciation of black Catholic schools primarily for their educational quality but also, in many cases, for their emphasis on self-worth and also, occasionally, on black culture and heritage. African American Catholics valued black schools and churches as religious and community institutions. Prelates generally sought to achieve desegregation by closing or downgrading black Catholic institutions. African American Catholics differed in their response. While some black Catholics reluctantly accepted such action as a necessary price for desegregation, others opposed these measures, upset by the one-sided nature of Catholic desegregation and inspired by the rise of black con consciousness in the second half of the 1960s. Some disillusioned African Americans, especially younger Catholics, left the church.

This chapter illustrates how Fr. George Clements creatively combined Black Power with the methods of early-twentieth-century missionaries with great success in his pastorate at Holy Angels parish. It examines the relationships Clements forged with other Black Power organizations and explores the life of Holy Angels Catholic school. It expands the scope of the story from the previous chapter and discusses the establishment of national Black Catholic institutions and organizations. Ultimately, it argues that, faced with opposition from fellow Black Catholics who resisted the influence of Black Power, activists became missionaries of a sort as they worked to convert their coreligionists to a particular understanding of what it meant to be Black and Catholic. They brought to life a distinctively Black Catholicism in the process. It devotes attention to what activists meant by “authentic Blackness” and whether it was compatible with Catholic religious practice.

This chapter traces the evolution of nonsectarian education, Bible reading in the schools, and the funding of religious schools in the years following the Blaine Amendment. It discusses the impact of the Blaine Amendment on state constitutional provisions prohibiting religious school funding and the gradual secularization of public education in the latter nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It concludes with an analysis of the early decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court on religious school funding and religious instruction in the public schools (1947–1963). It demonstrates that the Court's decisions built on legal principles that had developed during the nineteenth century.