Catholic Elementary Schools Research Articles

Catholic Schools and Broken Windows

Our previous work has suggested that the closure of Catholic elementary schools generates disorder and suppresses social cohesion in urban neighborhoods — findings that support the conclusion that Catholic elementary schools create neighborhood social capital. We extend our inquiry here by asking if Catholic school closures might also affect crime rates. Using factors independent from neighborhood indicators, specifically school and parish leadership characteristics, we created an exogenous factor that predicted which Catholic schools might close in urban Chicago, and used that factor, with sociodemographic variables, to predict police-beat-level crime rates. We find that Catholic school closures slow the rate of decline of crime in a police beat compared to beats with no Catholic school closure. We also find that higher perceived disorder predicted higher initial levels of crime. Our findings provide insight into which policing policies are effective and the benefits of involving religious institutions in crime-prevention efforts. They also lend support to “school-choice” mechanisms, such as vouchers or tax credits, that would provide financial resources to students attending urban Catholic schools.

Supporting Mental Health and Wellness among Private School Students: A Survey of Catholic Elementary and Secondary Schools

Little systematic inquiry has focused on school-based mental health services in the Catholic education sector, which educates more than two million children annually in the United States. More than 400 Catholic elementary and secondary schools were surveyed to inform a baseline environmental scan measuring how Catholic schools nationally are serving children's mental health needs. The article sheds light on patterns of mental health staffing and resource provision, student psychosocial and mental health issues, mental health service provision, and barriers to and challenges of mental health service provision. The findings are contextualized by comparison with estimates of public school mental health service provision, consideration of funding issues pertinent to the private school sector, and the continuing need for strategic assessment and action planning to support student mental health.

Cheaper by the Dozen: Using Sibling Discounts at Catholic Schools to Estimate the Price Elasticity of Private School Attendance

The effect of vouchers on sorting between private and public schools depends upon the price elasticity of demand for private schooling. Estimating this elasticity is empirically challenging because prices and quantities are jointly determined in the market for private schooling. We exploit a unique and previously undocumented source of variation in private school tuition to estimate this key parameter. A majority of Catholic elementary schools offer discounts to families that enroll more than one child in the school in a given year. Catholic school tuition costs therefore depend upon the interaction of the number and spacing of a family's children with the pricing policies of the local school. This within-neighborhood variation in tuition prices allows us to control for unobserved determinants of demand with a set fine geographic group fixed effects while still identifying the price parameter. We analyze this variation by using data on over 3700 school tuition schedules collected from Catholic schools around the nation, matched to restricted Census data that identifies precise location that can be matched to the nearest Catholic school. We find that a standard deviation decrease in tuition prices increases the probability that a family will send its children to private school by one half percentage point, which translates into an elasticity of Catholic school attendance with respect to tuition costs of -0.19. Our subgroup results suggest that a voucher program would disproportionately induce into private schools those who, along observable dimensions, are unlike those who currently attend private school.

The Impact of Catholic School Identity and Organizational Leadership on the Vitality of Catholic Elementary Schools

In order to fulfill their role of teaching children to receive Jesus and live out his call to create the Kingdom of God on earth and in heaven, Catholic schools need to possess and foster the distinctive characteristics of Catholic school identity. This study examined the relationship between Catholic school identity and organizational leadership and the extent to which these predict aspects of school vitality in Catholic elementary schools. The results of the analyses point to the signifi cant predictive relationship of Catholic school identity on each subscale of school vitality and at least one subscale of organizational leadership on three of the four subscales of school vitality. In addition, years of teaching in Catholic schools and percent of Catholic students are signifi cant predictors of Catholic school identity.

Improving Bilingual Service Delivery in Catholic Schools through Two-Way Immersion

Catholic elementary schools underserve Latino students, especially those who are bilingual. This paper presents a conceptual argument for Catholic elementary schools to improve this by pursuing the two-way immersion model of bilingual service delivery in Spanish and English. The argument is presented in three stages. First, we show that Catholic elementary schools underserve Latino families in general, and bilingual Latino students with limited profi ciency in English in particular. Next, we present evidence from research literature and a case study that the two-way immersion approach to bilingual service delivery is philosophically and functionally well suited for Catholic schooling. We conclude by suggesting the implications of this argument for Catholic as well as other private sector schools.

Slogging and Stumbling Toward Social Justice in a Private Elementary School: The Complicated Case of St. Malachy

This case study examines St. Malachy, an urban Catholic elementary school primarily serving children traditionally marginalized by race, class, linguistic heritage, and disability. As a private school, St. Malachy serves the public good by recruiting and retaining such traditionally marginalized students. As empirical studies involving Catholic schools frequently juxtapose them with public schools, the author presents this examination from a different tack. Neither vilifying nor glorifying Catholic schooling, this study critically examines the pursuit of social justice in this school context. Data gathered through a 1-year study show that formal and informal leaders in St. Malachy adapted their governance, aggressively sought community resources, and focused their professional development to build the capacity to serve their increasingly pluralistic student population. The analysis confirms the deepening realization that striving toward social justice is a messy, contradictory, and complicated pursuit, and that schools in both public and private sectors are allies in this pursuit.

A Catholic Higher Education Collaborative: Focusing on New Ways of Supporting Catholic Elementary and Secondary Schools

This article discusses highlights from the Catholic Higher Education Collaborative conference (CHEC) held at Loyola Marymount University (LMU) in January 2009. The conference, a result of a 2007 dialogue on Catholic schooling hosted by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, was the first of six to be held at Catholic colleges and universities throughout the country. The purpose of the conference was to seek new and creative ways for Catholic higher education to partner with the nation’s K-12 Catholic schools. The theme of the LMU conference was “Catholic Schools and The Immigrant Church: Lessons from the Past and a Bridge to the Future.” This article includes information about the development of CHEC, a brief review of the history of immigrants and Catholic schools, an overview of conference keynote talks, and concludes with future initiatives developed from the conference in support of Catholic schools.

Faculty Prayer in Catholic Schools: A Survey of Practices and Meaning

This article presents a research study that utilized a web-based survey to gather data about the communal prayer experiences of faculty members in Catholic elementary and secondary schools in the United States and the meaning that such prayer holds to its participants. Key findings show that faculty prayer experiences take place readily, though frequency and form vary greatly. Faculty prayer is valued and desired by the overwhelming majority of its participants. Challenges are also acknowledged with the most prevalent relating to time and/or scheduling issues. Suggestions for addressing needs and challenges are provided.

Awakenings: Ecumenism, Feminism, Ecology

When I was asked to reflect on the future of theological education in Canada my thoughts turned to three significant developments during the past thirty years. Recently, in the laborious process of vacating my office, I had the welcome benefit of reviewing my thirty years in theological education. As I sorted through reams of material I recognized three particularly significant and formative developments for me: ecumenism, feminism, and ecology. At first I thought of these movements as conversions but now see them more as awakenings. Each awakening has profoundly influenced my theology. As we look toward the future of theological education I hope that they will continue to shape theological education. Thirty years ago I was a graduate student and beginning a career as a teacher of theology in the St. Michael’s Faculty of Theology, a member school of the ecumenical consortium, the Toronto School of Theology. There I joined a number of illustrious colleagues including Professor Joanne McWilliam and Professor Gregory Baum. It seems strange that I should have been awakening to ecumenism in the seventies. However, I was a pre-Vatican II Catholic who grew up in what might be described as a Catholic ghetto. A Catholic home, parish, and school formed my environment. I entered religious life in 1951 at a time when that life was circumscribed by many rules. I attended Toronto Teachers’ College and later the University of Toronto but my interaction with the other students was limited. I worked in the Catholic elementary school system as a teacher, principal, and resource teacher in religious education. The changes initiated by Vatican II transformed my life. The external changes in the lives of women religious were dramatic and reflected a theological shift from a world-denying spirituality to one that embraced the world. While general chapters met and carefully worked out changes in every facet of our lives, I experienced this shift personally. I exchanged my religious name, Sister Loyola, for my baptismal name, Ellen. I set aside the distinctive habit and veil and followed the practice of the first Sisters of St. Joseph in seventeenth-century France who dressed like ‘‘respectable widows.’’ I moved

A Professional Development Model for Math and Science Educators in Catholic Elementary Schools: Challenges and Successes

Catholic elementary schools must continue to invest in the professional development of math and science teachers in order to prepare students for the challenging work that lies ahead of them. The purpose of the study was to examine the degree to which the Initiative for Catholic Schools (ICS), a 2-year professional development program for science and math teachers, demonstrated positive outcomes within the context of Catholic elementary education across the five levels of impact for a professional development program: participants’ reactions, participants’ learning, organization support and change, participants’ use of new knowledge and skills, and student learning outcomes. The results provide evidence of positive outcomes in the participants’ reactions, participants’ learning, organization support and change, and participants’ use of new knowledge and skills. The impact on student learning outcomes was less consistent and varied by grade level.

Catholic Schools, Urban Neighborhoods, and Education Reform

More than 1,600 Catholic elementary and secondary schools have closed or been consolidated during the last two decades. The Archdiocese of Chicago alone (the subject of our study) has closed 148 schools since 1984. Primarily because urban Catholic schools have a strong track record of educating disadvantaged children who do not, generally, fare well in public schools, these school closures have prompted concern in education policy circles. While we are inclined to agree that Catholic school closures contribute to a broader educational crisis, this paper shies away from debates about educational outcomes. Rather than focusing on the work done inside the schools, we focus on what goes on outside them. Specifically, using three decades of data drawn from the census and from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (“PHDCN”), we seek to understand what a Catholic school means to an urban neighborhood. We do so primarily by measuring various effects of elementary school closures in the Chicago neighborhoods where they operated for decades. We find strong evidence that Catholic elementary schools are important generators of social capital in urban neighborhoods: Our study suggests that neighborhood social cohesion decreases and disorder increases following an elementary school closure, even after controlling for numerous demographic variables that would tend to predict neighborhood decline and disaggregating the school closure decision from those variable as well. This paper discusses these findings and situates them within important land-use and education-policy debates.

The Effect of Catholic Schooling on Math and Reading Development in Kindergarten Through Fifth Grade

Prior research estimating the effect of Catholic schooling has focused on high school, where evidence suggests a positive effect of Catholic versus public schooling. In this article, we estimate the effect of attending a Catholic elementary school rather than a public school on the math and reading skills of children in kindergarten through fifth grade. We use nationally representative data and a set of matching estimators to estimate the average effect of Catholic schooling and the extent to which the effect varies across educational markets. When we use public school students nationwide or within the same county to provide a counterfactual estimate of how Catholic school students would have performed in public schools, we find strong evidence indicating that Catholic elementary schools are less successful at teaching math skills than public schools (Catholic school students are 3–4 months behind public school students by third and fifth grade), but no more or less successful at teaching reading skills. Moreover, unlike prior research, we find no consistent evidence that the effects of Catholic schooling vary substantially by race or urbanicity, though our power to detect such differences is weak.

The Grammar of Catholic Schooling and Radically “Catholic” Schools

A “grammar of Catholic schooling” inhibits many elementary and secondary Catholic schools from reflecting on how they practice Catholic Social Teaching (CST). The values of human dignity, the common good and a preferential option for the marginalized are central to CST. Schools can live these values by serving children who live in poverty, are racial, ethnic, and linguistic minorities, or have disabilities. This article demonstrates how a grammar of Catholic schooling has allowed Catholic schools to fall into recruitment and retention patterns antithetical to CST. Drawing upon a multicase, qualitative study of three urban Catholic elementary schools serving marginalized students, the article illustrates how select Catholic schools are breaking the grammar of Catholic schooling by practicing CST. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

The Upper Room: A University-Archdiocesan Partnership to Develop Leaders for Catholic Schools

In Renewing Our Commitment to Catholic Elementary and Secondary Schools in the Third Millennium, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB; 2005) calls on Catholic colleges and universities to work with diocesan educational leaders to prepare leaders for Catholic schools. In response, the Creighton University Education Department and the Archdiocese of Omaha’s Catholic Schools Office formed a task force that held a series of meetings in the “Upper Room” on Creighton’s campus to create a framework for leadership in Catholic schools and develop a preparation program that fulfills the framework. This article describes the task force process, framework development, and the Catholic School Leadership graduate certificate that resulted. The article concludes with observations related to the Omaha experience and thoughts about what comes next.

Understanding the Teacher Professional Development Facilitators and Barriers to Serve a Diverse Student Population

In recent years there has been a growing interest in serving the needs of diverse learners. Many schooldistricts in response to this growing interest have launched special in-service programs to educate andtrain teachers on culturally sensitive teaching approaches for serving diverse learners. Many of theseprofessional development programs have implemented one-shot workshops that attempt to transformthe school-environment and teacher practices. Although, such efforts have consistently yielded little tono impact on transformation of the school environment and teacher practices they continue to be thepreferred teacher professional development model. Nothing has been so frustrating and wasteful as thethousand of conducted one-shot workshops that have led to no significant change in teacher practices(Fullan, 1991). Consequently, on the Southside of Chicago 10 Catholic elementary school principalsformed the Council 10-A consortium. The council was established to address and share ideas thatwould add to the quality of Catholic school education in the 21st century. The council identified diversityas one major issue confronting the delivery of high quality catholic education. The council reported thatthe one-shot teacher in-service workshops were not enough to create long-term change in the school environmentand/or teacher practices. Therefore, the Catholic Schools 10-A Council enlisted theassistance of a partnership with the School of Education at Saint Xavier University to develop adiversity project that would address systems and teacher change over a three-year period. Thepurpose of this article is to reflect on the teacher professional development facilitators and barrierseffecting ten private schools with respect to serving a diverse student population.

Changes in funding and governance of Catholic elementary education in the United States

Catholic elementary education in the US is undergoing a radical transformation in terms of its mechanisms of financial support and governance structures. This article explores the dynamics, dating back to the 1950s, that have precipitated these changes, provides a description of the new funding and governance models, and provides a limited assessment of these models gleaned from anecdotal accounts and the limited research that exists on them. Each novel model represents an adaptive response to the challenge of operating a Catholic elementary school within a system that precludes significant governmental assistance to Catholic schools.

Catholic Schooling and Disaffiliation from Catholicism

Using event history analysis of 849 adults raised Catholic, this research note examines effects of attending Catholic elementary school and high school on the likelihood one remains Catholic. Attending Catholic high school for at least three years significantly reduces the likelihood that one disaffiliates from Catholicism, reducing both the likelihood that one converts to another faith and the likelihood that one chooses to have no religion at all. Additional analyses show that Catholic high school has no significant effect on adult Mass attendance when considering respondents who are currently Catholic. But when analyses include all respondents raised Catholic, Catholic high school produces a positive effect on attendance. This may help explain seemingly conflicting findings in the literature on Catholic schooling and religious commitment.

The Accessibility of American Catholic Secondary Schools to the Various Socioeconomic Classes of Catholic Families

The purpose of this study was to discern which socioeconomic classes are represented in Catholic high school populations across the United States. In addition, the study sought to discover the motivations of those families whose children were currently enrolled in American Catholic high schools. Also explored were the reasons why Catholic families who have sent their child or children to Catholic elementary schools were electing not to continue Catholic education at the secondary level. Because financial aid availability has risen along with tuition (Tracy, 2001), this investigation included the extent to which such financial aid was considered by Catholic families, as well as the perceptions of Catholic families as to its availability at the secondary level. As tuition rates rise at a higher level than the cost of living and averages wage increases, this study additionally examined the extent to which the assertion (Baker & Riordan, 1998, 1999; Riordan, 2000) that American Catholic high schools were becoming more elitist is true. The Catholic Church’s statements as to the accessibility of Catholic education to all social classes provided a framework throughout the investigation.

Methodological considerations in child-centered research about social difference and children experiencing difficulties at school

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the ethical and methodological significance for children and university researchers to participate together in data collection and research interpretation. We examine this process in the context of a three-year study with the aim of understanding how children become identified as having difficulties in a diverse, semi-urban minority French-speaking Catholic elementary school in Ontario (Canada). First, we review the literature on child informed consent. Then, we describe the setting and the process of how children in this study became informed participants. We describe how the children became active in exercising their discretionary consent to be observed during the data collection process, then how they progressively became engaged in observing their social context in terms of their own sense-making of the research project. We discuss how the children gave a new direction to the original project proposed by the university research team investigating on identification and special needs children. Lastly, we revisit the ways in which we addressed the various subject positions that became possible for us and for the children as co-researchers within the social relations of the classroom-based research team in a French minority language school. It became apparent throughout the research that informing consent was more than an act on the part of researchers to explain and thus establish a research framework in which collecting data from children would take place. Rather, we found that our research with children involved children's active participation as co-researchers informing the project from its design to its data analysis.

The Lack of Consensus Among Catholics for Establishing New Elementary Schools

For a century Catholic schools have formed the basis for a strong system of acculturation into Catholic identity and values. Catholic schools provided a low-cost basic education and served as a common school for all social classes of Catholics. This system has weakened considerably in the last decades. Between 1970 and 2000 there was a net loss of 3,595 Catholic schools in the United States, a 29.9% decline. In addition, the nature of these schools seems to be changing as the percentage of total Catholic school enrollment made up by non-Catholics has increased ten-fold in 30 years. Many Catholic Schools seem to have pursued increased academic excellence at the expense of religious acculturation. This paper examines diocesan data to determine the extent to which Catholics still consider Catholic elementary schools to be important. Findings include survey data on school importance from 55,000 diocesan Catholics. I addition, parishioner survey results are presented from two suburban parishes, each of which is considering establishing a parochial elementary school. If new elementary schools are going to be established, a way must be found for Catholics to arrive at a consensus on this issue.