Catholic Parochial Schools Research Articles

The Impact of Pacific Lutheran on Collective Bargaining at Catholic Colleges and Universities

In 1979, the Supreme Court found that teachers at a Catholic parochial school were exempt from the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) because of First Amendment religious infringement risks. Subsequently, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has faced controversy over its efforts to delineate an appropriate test for the religious exemption in the higher education context. This uncertainty over the NLRB’s test has resulted in time-consuming litigation and hampered faculty’s ability to organize at schools where Board jurisdiction would not present a significant risk of First Amendment infringement. This paper argues that the Board’s recent decision in Pacific Lutheran University will bring much-needed stability in this area of the law because the new religious exemption test is carefully crafted to protect both constitutional and statutory interests. More faculty will be able to exercise their right to organize, and this wider experience with collective bargaining within Catholic colleges universities will reveal how speculative the constitutional entanglement risks actually are under the NLRA.

Parent–child communication about abstinence and safer sex in parochial school families

ABSTRACTFamilial values, attitudes, and other social characteristics can influence adolescent decision-making. These beliefs and those set forward by religious doctrine contribute to delays in sexual debut. Using both qualitative (N = 52) and quantitative (N = 140) methods and framed by the theory of planned behavior, this study examined parent–child HIV sexual risk communication (PCHSRC) among parents of children attending Catholic parochial schools. Significant correlations were found between PCHSRC, normative and control beliefs, and intentions. Predictors of PCHSRC included control beliefs, age of child, and race. Predictive barriers included behavioral and control beliefs, family normative beliefs, and being Hispanic. Being Catholic was not a significant predictor of PCHSRC beliefs or behaviors. Members of religious conservative groups have unique PCHSRC and prevention needs; interventions focused on HIV risk reduction behaviors must target knowledge, increase parental comfort, and provide guidance on timing of communication.

Developing a Moral Compass: Experiences, Dialogues, and Reflections in Parochial Schools

This qualitative study explored moral experiences from a phenomenological perspective using personal interviews and oral history narratives gathered from adult participants. The research focused on former parochial school students’ perspectives of their moral experiences as children in Catholic parochial schools of the 1950s and 1960s. Data collection utilized interviews. The purpose of the study is to seek a deep understanding and describe moral experiences, from adult perspectives, in developing virtue-oriented behavior. Participants were adult volunteers, age fifty-five to seventy-five years old, who had attended Catholic parochial schools. Emergent themes were aggregated from the personal interviews. The results of the study denote that participants’ perceptions supported literature on some of the concepts of an educative experience and other learning theories. All participants expressed that their moral experiences, whether negative or positive, were influential in the development of virtue-oriented behavior. The most common theme derived from narrative transcripts of the interviews was how participants felt their moral teachings from the nuns and priests became fundamental to their lives. An unexpected result was the feeling of thankfulness or gratitude that participants felt for their moral education and to the parents and religious teachers, though they articulated many moral challenges in their recollections.

When the Sisters Said Farewell: The Transition of Leadership in Catholic Elementary Schools by Michael P. Caruso (review)

Reviewed by: When the Sisters Said Farewell: The Transition of Leadership in Catholic Elementary Schools by Michael P. Caruso Roseanne McDougall SHCJ When the Sisters Said Farewell: The Transition of Leadership in Catholic Elementary Schools. By Michael P. Caruso S.J. Lanham, MD: R&L Education, 2012. 170170 pp. $24.95. As a short study, this delightful, substantive book traces the nineteenth-century roots of Catholic education in the United States and demonstrates how both the influx of nearly eight million Catholic immigrants and the Nativist movement directed against them created the momentum for the establishment of Catholic schools, particularly in cities such as New York, Philadelphia, and other urban centers. While the main points of this book correspond to major historical developments, the author illustrates these points with carefully researched individual case stories. For example, the reasons for controversy over Catholics' required reading of the King James version of the Bible in Philadelphia in the 1840s are explained. In turn, the cases are described in such clarity combined with simplicity that one gets the sense of almost having been there. Through Caruso's narration, the reader learns why the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore in 1884 both mandated the establishment of a Catholic school in every parish where feasible and also strongly urged parents to send their children to these schools. Having established the historical context for the Catholic parochial school system, the book then focuses on (1) the search for a most precious resource, qualified teaching and administrative personnel (the sisters), (2) the implications of Vatican II for those same personnel and thereby for the schools, and (3) the consequent transition to lay teaching and administrative personnel, with the hope of maintaining the schools as vibrant centers of Catholic life into the future. While the focus of the book is on the schools, the author comments early on that "The sisters reached out not only to Catholics but to all people of goodwill; for many Americans they were the face of Catholicism in the United States." Drawing upon correspondence between the Archdiocese of Los Angeles and the Sisters of St. Louis in Ireland, Caruso delineates the sometimes intricate process of negotiation which led to the mutual decision that a given religious congregation of sisters would teach in a particular parish. Thus, the book sheds light on relatively little-known internal aspects of the staffing of the schools. Further, while many would have assumed that the sisters were academically prepared to teach, Caruso delineates the struggle for professional teacher education, and highlights the mentoring process whereby a more experienced sister was assigned to provide direction in teaching for younger sisters. He points to the ingenuity of the sisters who, in addition to completing degrees, spent additional time in collaborating through the mentoring process. In what may be a seminal insight, Caruso also describes some strong similarities between the setting of the novitiate where the sisters received their religious training on the one hand, and the school where the sisters provided education to children on the other. Hence, the discipline and habits (no pun intended) in which the sisters were themselves formed had implications for the sometimes memorable style they later exercised in the classroom and school. The concluding chapters of the book offer the author's insights towards the legacy of the schools, including possible roles the sisters might continue to play. The book is well-researched and contains two appendices, one of letters and another with titles of pertinent documents. It will have genuine appeal for anyone associated with Catholic elementary schools in the United States due to the rich variety of perspectives it offers. Roseanne McDougall SHCJ La Salle University Copyright © 2013 American Catholic Historical Society

State Constitutions and Challenges to Nonpublic School Transportation Programs

In Everson v. Board of Education,1 the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a New Jersey program under which a township reimbursed parents, including those sending their children to local Catholic parochial schools, for the cost of transportation on public buses, finding it constitutional under the First Amendment's Establishment Clause. Twenty-four years later, the Idaho Supreme Court addressed a challenge to a similar school transportation program in its state; however, notwithstanding the Supreme Court's previous decision in Everson, the court declared it unconstitutional. The different result occurred because the Idaho high court found that the program, although permissible under the federal Constitution, violated the provision of its own state constitution, which explicitly prohibits state aid to sectarian schools, concluding that “the framers of our constitution intended to more positively enunciate the separation between church and state than did the framers of the United States Constitution.”2 Because the court based its decision on state constitutional grounds, it was shielded from review by the Supreme Court.

Joseph Vincent Brady

Joseph Vincent Brady

Conversation with Joseph V. Brady

Conversation with Joseph V. Brady

Influence of male teachers on elementary school children's stereotyping of teacher competence

Children from two elementary schools, one with thirty-three percent male teachers and the other with no male teachers, were asked to attribute a series of descriptive statements regarding teacher competence to a hypothetical male or female teacher pictured in a cartoon drawing. Students with male teachers were found to make significantly more non-stereotyping attributions than students with no male teachers (F (1,183)=15.07,p<.001). Multivariate analysis (MANOVA) was carried out on nine competency subscales and for a general competence composite score with school and subject gender as factors. No significant differences between schools were found but significant effects of sex and of a sex by school interaction were found. A discriminant analysis uncovered two canonical variables that discriminate among the four groups: female treatment, male treatment, female control, male control. The first function, number of female selections overall, discriminated the females from the males. The second canonical discrimination function, attribution of mismanagement, revealed that the responses of boys and girls are not the same from school to school. Control school children made negative attributions in the mismanagement subscale to opposite sex teachers, while treatment children made negative attributions to same sex teachers. In the assignment of mismanagement items, the presence of male teachers significantly influenced responses which ran counter to theories of sex-role identification, including projection by elementary school age children of negative qualities to the opposite sex. An analysis of descriptive data indicates that boys with male as well as female teachers made the most egalitarian attributions to male and female teachers. Data suggest that the inclusion of men as members of the elementary school faculty could be most beneficial to boys. The presence of male teachers was not found to influence boys' interest in becoming teachers. Interest in teaching was found to differ significantly by sex (X2=24.036, df=1,183, p<.001) but not by school. Neither control school nor treatment school boys wanted to become teachers, while girls overall reported significant interest in teaching careers. Limits in generalizability of the study due to differences in the two schools, a college laboratory school and a Catholic parochial school, are discussed. Similar patterns in responses of girls from the two schools and of boys from the control school suggest that parental and curricular differences of the two schools cannot of themselves account for significant differences.

Religious Symbols and the WISC-R Performance of Roman Catholic Parochial School Students

ABSTRACT Forty-two subjects were randomly selected and assigned to one of two examiners and to one of three test conditions. Subjects in the first group were tested as a moderately proportioned gold cross was worn, and the subjects in the second group were tested as a similarly proportioned gold Star of David was worn. No religious symbols were worn as the third group was tested. A series of one-way ANOVAs and Scheffe posttests revealed that performance on the Arithmetic, Digit Span, Picture Completion, and Block Design subtests varied as a function of the presence and type of symbol that was worn

Inter-Faith and Inter-Nationality Attitudinal Variations among Youth toward Self, Family and the Collective

Two groups of American high school students, the first drawn from Catholic parochial schools and the second from public schools in the same community, are compared with regard to their attitudes to self, family, community, and nation. A third group, Israeli public high schoolers, is employed as an external standard of evaluation. Some intra-American differences were found, but their number and magnitude were much less significant than the inter-nationality differences. It is suggested that American youth culture, with its emphasis on the self and its anticollectivity orientation, is the most potent determinant of attitudes among seventeen-year-olds and that it embraces at least those segments of American youth belonging to the "majority culture." The impact of the religious factor on the lives of Americans may be intimately related to the life cycle.

Divergent Thinking, Cultural Differences, and Bilingualism

Summary Mexican-American, black and Anglo fourth grade children (N = 183) from Catholic parochial schools in Houston, Texas, were tested with the Unusual Uses Test and the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test. The Anglo Ss scored higher than the blacks and Mexican-Americans on the Peabody test. Mexican-American and black males scored higher than Anglo males on both fluency and flexibility as measured by the Unusual Uses Test. Black males scored higher on fluency than any of the other subgroups. On the other hand, Anglo females scored higher on fluency and flexibility than the other females. Furthermore, Anglo females scored higher on flexibility than any of the other subgroups. Black females obtained the highest flexibility/fluency ratio. The results of the male Ss supported the hypothesis that children of minority groups and children who are “balanced” bilinguals tend to do better on the Unusual Uses Test. The female results, however, did not support this hypothesis and could not be explained by the study.

Open-Mindedness and Indiscrimination Antireligious Orientation

Allport and Ross's Religious Orientation Scale has been widely criticized for lack of conceptual clarity. The present research employs the scoring technique devised by Ralph Hood which allows for the identification and measurement of four, rather than three categories of Religious Orientation. The new fourth category is labeled indiscriminate antireligious orientation. Data were collected from adolescents (and their parents) attending Catholic parochial and Sunday schools in various parts of the United States. Using the Rokeach Dogmatism Scale, analysis showed the indiscriminately antireligious to be the most open-minded of the four categories of religious orientation, and to be significantly more open-minded than the extrinsics and the indiscriminately proreligious. Caution is urged in interpreting Hood's procedure for scoring the religious Orientation Scale, and questions are raised concerning the validity of the scale when used with Catholic subjects.

Economic competition and political competition: Comments and corrections

When public expenditures for local services are determined by a referendum process, it is impossible to tell a priori whether increasing the proportion of nonusers increases or decreases the voting equilibrium [1,2]. For a given tax price and income nonusers have a lower demand than users for local services, but the tax price of local services to users is lowered by the presence of nonusers. Stigler [3] therefore asks an empirically interesting question when he seeks to ascertain the influence of Catholic parochial school parents on expenditures per public school pupil. This reply shows that Stigler's use of arithmetic averages for state-wide data probably biases his regression coefficients, and that an alternative specification provides a more powerful test of Stigler's model. Following Stigler let us assume that the demand function for expenditures per public school child is Cobb-Douglas and that all families within a given political jurisdiction pay the same taxes. Letting si denote the proportion of voting families who use the public schools in district i, Ti taxes per family desired by an "average" user, yi the income of an "average"user, and P the cost per "quality" unit of education (assumed constant across observations), Stigler shows that

Sex, Grade Level, and Religious-Educational Environment as Factors in Peer Conformity

Abstract The Ss were 200 children, five of each sex from each of grades 2 through 11, randomly selected from a Catholic parochial school population and a public school population. They were tested with the use of the Crutchfield conformity design. Ten Ss were excluded from the data analysis. The results of the data analysis, by a 2 × 2 × 5 analysis of variance design, showed a significant difference as a function of grade level but no other significant F ratio. The findings were discussed relative to the theoretical explanation offered by Hoving et al. (11) for different conformity curves when different levels of task ambiguity are presented.

PURDUE PEGBOARD SCORES FOR NORMAL GRAMMAR SCHOOL CHILDREN.

Costa, et al. (1963) have demonstrated the usefulness of the peg placement scores of the Purdue Pegboard as a screening test for cerebral damage in adults. Perceptual motor dysfunction produced by cerebral lesions usually results in performance decrement which is independent of educational background and which is frequently of latetalizing significance. In order to aid in the test's evaluation as a screening procedure for brain damage in children, preliminary norms were established on a sample of 183 normal children attending a Catholic parochial grammar school in New York City. The peg placement section of the test was administered as prescribed in the test manual (SRA, 1948) . One 30-sec. trial was given for each condition. There were no demonstrable differences in performance as a function of sex in 77 female and 8 3 male right-handed children. Norms for males and females combinecl are presented in the table. It seems reasonable to pool scores of all children over 10 as scores change little above this age.

The Politics of Catholic Parochial Schools: An Historical and Comparative Analysis

T HE DEFEAT OF RECENT attempts to secure legislation providing Federal aid to public education has raised once again the question of the role of private religious schools (primarily Catholic parochial schools) in the American educational system. The issue has emerged with especial sharpness because Catholic opposition to legislation which did not, at the same time, provide loans or grants to parochial schools played a substantial role in the defeat of the Kennedy administration's recommendations. And it seems quite unlikely, other things remaining equal, that any legislation providing for substantial Federal aid to public education will be enacted unless the issue is resolved.1 But the problems involved can not be discussed intelligently, nor the right questions asked, unless these are placed in a proper context, for the problems have both a comparative and an historical dimension.

The Development of Conscience: A Comparison of Upper-Middle Class Academically Gifted Children Attending Catholic and Jewish Parochial Schools

The Development of Conscience: A Comparison of Upper-Middle Class Academically Gifted Children Attending Catholic and Jewish Parochial Schools

The Development of Conscience: A Comparison of Students in Catholic Parochial Schools and in Public Schools

This report is one of a series of studies on the development of conscience in the area of moral judgment, comparing children attending Catholic parochial schools and children attending public schools., Previously, public school children of average intelligence in two socioeconomic classes (upper middle class and working class) were compared (5). A group of subjects attending public and Catholic and Jewish parochial schools were also studied to compare responses by socioeconomic class and by levels of intelligence (2). A further report in this series will compare the differences between children attending Jewish and Catholic parochial schools (4); and finally there will be a report comparing American preschoolers from upper middleclass and working-class background with studies by Piaget and Harrower of Swiss and English children (3). Comparing the populations studied in public and Catholic and Jewish parochial schools by intelligence level and socioeconomic class (2), it was found that:

THE DEVELOPMENT OF CONSCIENCE: A COMPARISON OF STUDENTS IN CATHOLIC PAROCHIAL SCHOOLS AND IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS

This report is one of a series of studies on the development of conscience in the area of moral judgment, comparing children attending Catholic parochial schools and children attending public schools., Previously, public school children of average intelligence in two socioeconomic classes (upper middle class and working class) were compared (5). A group of subjects attending public and Catholic and Jewish parochial schools were also studied to compare responses by socioeconomic class and by levels of intelligence (2). A further report in this series will compare the differences between children attending Jewish and Catholic parochial schools (4); and finally there will be a report comparing American preschoolers from upper middleclass and working-class background with studies by Piaget and Harrower of Swiss and English children (3). Comparing the populations studied in public and Catholic and Jewish parochial schools by intelligence level and socioeconomic class (2), it was found that:

Organized Religion

During the past year it has been possible to analyze the returns secured by the 1926 Census of Religious Bodies. These data show the magnitude of the church enterprise in this country. They indicate that 55 per cent of the people are listed on the membership rolls of the churches and that membership since 1906 has been increasing at almost exactly the same rate as the population. During the past decade, enrolment in Sunday schools has made a comparatively slow growth, while that of Roman Catholic parochial schools has been increasing relatively rapidly. The financial data collected by the government indicate that churches have recently experienced a period of great material prosperity.