The Everhart/Cusick Reviews: A Brief Exchange

Abstract

Cibulka et al. discuss the financial crisis inner-city private schools face. Costs have been rising because buildings are deteriorating and because fewer teaching nuns and brothers are available for staffing. As middle-class whites leave inner-city parishes, funding sources have declined and parish reserves are diminishing. The tuition tax credits and voucher plans that would bring these schools financial relief continue to flounder. Not the least of the reasons is the perception that these Catholic schools are somehow unAmerican-parochial in the worst sense. They isolate and segregate children. They fail to provide the socialization into the common culture that is the special virtue of public schooling, however poor their academic quality. Ethnographic studies of inner-city private schools would be valuable for examining the perception that these schools fail to socialize children into a common culture. My guess is that these schools inculcate traditional American values far more vigorously than the public schools. Inner-City Private Elementary Schools abounds with questions for the anthropologist. How do children who attend these schools handle the competing claims of street culture and school culture? Why do norms of shared work evolve at these private schools when teachers at public schools are so isolated from one another? Do religious rituals affect academic work by infusing a sense of higher purpose into everyday life? I hope this review will entice anthropologists and their graduate students to this research setting.