Urban Catholic Schools Research Articles

Can Decentralized School Systems Pursue Common Ends? An Analysis of Urban Catholic School and System Leaders’ Perceptions of Reform

There has been little research examining how decentralized Catholic diocesan systems have worked toward their stated system-wide goal of keeping urban Catholic schools sustainable. Through a new qualitative analysis of interviews with Catholic school and system leaders, we demonstrate in this article how leaders agreed about the issues preventing urban Catholic elementary schools from becoming operationally sustainable but disagreed about potential solutions to this problem. Our findings indicate these leaders believed decentralized systems constrained their ability to pursue coherent system-wide reforms. We connect these findings to broader calls for decentralization in large urban systems attempting to pursue educational equity initiatives.

A Call to Serve: Novice Urban Catholic School Teachers' Sense of Purpose in Life, Compassion, Faith, and Justice

A Call to Serve: Novice Urban Catholic School Teachers' Sense of Purpose in Life, Compassion, Faith, and Justice

Black Male Teacher-Coaches’ Utilization of Black Counterpublics: The Black Family, Liberatory Fantasy, and Resisting the Ontological Limitation of Blackness

Drawing from a conceptual framework grounded in Black critical theories, this qualitative case study explored the youth knowledge that two Black Male social studies teacher-coaches serving in urban Catholic high schools acquired through Black counterpublics to reconceptualize the ontological limitation of Black existence. Findings demonstrated that it was within civic spaces generated within the Black family and community that participants acquired the socio-cultural knowledge to see through antiBlack forms of White projection.

What Principals Look for When Hiring New Teachers

ABSTRACT This qualitative study reports on principals’ perceptions regarding the teacher characteristics deemed most important for hiring effective teachers. Data for the study come from semi-structured interviews with principals working in urban public, Catholic, and Jewish schools. Results reveal a tendency among principals in all three sectors to focus on both professional skills and personal characteristics as critical components in teacher hiring. However, the analysis reveals that sector affiliation may play an important role in explaining many cross sector variations. More informed hiring practices by principals could potentially affect teacher quality, a critical area for student-learning outcomes.

Observant participant: carnal sociology and researcher identity in religious educational spaces

ABSTRACTThe ethnographer’s embodied action during research is a complex of habit, belief, social and institutional positioning, and intention. This article examines what urban anthropologist Wacqaunt calls ‘carnal sociology’ and considers its implications for ethnographers of religious educational spaces. Contemporary ethnographers of education have renewed their interest in religious educational spaces—religious schools, houses of worship, public festivals. In conducting research in the field of religious education, ethnographers often cross familiar and unfamiliar boundaries, engaging in forms of participant observation and practice beyond their own religious categories: we research in religious spaces and with religious communities different from our own commitments. Drawing on interactional data from a multi-year ethnography of an urban Catholic school and parish in Philadelphia (USA), I consider how my own embodied participation in the religious rituals of the school and parish led to a reflexivity on practice, and initiated institutional and youth-driven social positioning in response.

Literacy Rituals in the Community and the Classroom

This article examines literacy rituals as a form of culturally relevant pedagogy and argues that ritual reading practice may offer some students a culturally resonant engagement with school that draws on community relationships. Using data from a year-long classroom and community literacy ethnography of an urban Catholic school and parish, the author outlines how Greg, a Vietnamese-American student and member of an immigrant community, engaged with literacy rituals in his religious practice as a Catholic and how his teacher drew on literacy rituals in her classroom practice. The article concludes by suggesting teachers consider a wider range of what counts as community knowledge and draw on the ritual literacy practices of children, their families, and their religious associations, many of which are core parts of their immigrant identities.

The Interactional Production of Race and Religious Identity in an Urban Catholic School

This paper describes how students in an urban Catholic school draw on racial and religious categories to construct classroom-specific identities during coursework. When students engage with each other in classroom discussions, they use broadly circulating, institutional, and event-level categories to position one another, and in doing so articulate who may speak and participate in class talk. This paper draws from interactional ethnographic data, showing how Vietnamese American and African American students used different religious and racial categories to delimit the interactional floor during class time and in the process exclude speakers.

“This Is Your Worth”: Is the Catholic School Advantage in Urban Catholic Schools’ College Culture Disappearing in a Neoliberal Era?

This ethnographic study of an urban Catholic high school examines its college culture, particular in regard to the Catholic School Advantage (CSA). We collected and critically analyzed multiple forms of data (archival, interviews, observations) at St. Peters High School (SPH) and its adjoining parish. We found a caring and holistic approach to teaching that is integral to the CSA. However, in regard to the college-going habitus, we found that neoliberal values had largely displaced earlier Catholic social values that related to the CSA. Thus, the college-going habitus was dominated by neoliberal economic values (including the worth of individual students and SPH) but largely silent about the social, academic, or spiritual values of students or institutions of higher education. We conclude that such a college-going habitus is likely not only to result in students’ high rate of college enrollment but also to jeopardize their ability to remain enrolled until they graduate.

Interactional order, moral order: Classroom interactions and the institutional production of identities

Scholars examining the interplay of the global and local in literacy practice have relied on a variety of tools to understand the implications of larger-scaled histories in moment-by-moment classroom action. Drawing on data from a multi-year ethnography of an urban Catholic school in Philadelphia, this article examines how the categorization of literacy practices by students and teachers during classroom-level interactions reveals different layered histories and contradictions of urban schooling. Following Heller’s linguistic anthropology of schooling (1995, 2007), I focus on how teachers and students construct what constitutes knowledge during classroom reading events and demonstrate how various interactions and literacy practices are linked to moral orders that can only be understood with regards to the transforming genealogy of urban Catholic schools.

Creating a Homeplace: Young Latinas Constructing Feminista Identities in the Context of a Single-Sex Catholic School

Utilizing phenomenology and a Chicana feminist epistemological lens (Delgado Bernal, 1998), this study explores the experiences of three Latinas at an all-girl urban Catholic high school and examines how the context of an all Latina learning environment helped the girls construct strong border identities (Anzaldúa, 1987) as they negotiated conflicting notions of gender in their homes and communities, while making difficult decisions about college. Findings reveal that attempts to introduce gender issues into the curriculum by Latina teachers and other school agents provided opportunities for a critical examination of traditional female roles and helped create a “homeplace” (Pastor, McCormick & Fine, 1996) where the girls came together to question and critique oppressive positionalities and develop counter narratives (Yosso, 2005) and alternative identities.

Effectiveness of a Parent-Child Home Numeracy Intervention on Urban Catholic School First Grade Students

Effectiveness of a Parent-Child Home Numeracy Intervention on Urban Catholic School First Grade Students

The Relationship of a Systemic Student Support Intervention to Academic Achievement in Urban Catholic Schools

Much of the achievement gap between rich and poor students can be attributed to out-of-school factors, yet few schools have a comprehensive, coordinated system for addressing students’ nonacademic needs. Within a group of Catholic schools located in one city, this study examines academic achievement on the Stanford Achievement Test battery in mathematics, reading, and language among 2nd through 8th grade students participating in such an intervention, and compares the results with those of similar nonparticipating students in nearby cities. Using hierarchical longitudinal growth modeling and adjusting for demographic characteristics, this study found that students in intervention schools outperformed the comparison group on average in 6th grade mathematics. Intervention students also experienced significantly higher rates of growth in achievement than the comparison group in all three subjects. The results suggest that systemic service provision models have the potential to help urban Catholic schools meet their mission of educating the whole child and serving the poorest families.

Preparation for Meaningful Work and Life: Urban High School Youth's Reflections on Work-Based Learning 1 Year Post-Graduation.

The challenges confronted by low-income high school students throughout school and across the transition to higher education and employment are well-documented in the US and many other nations. Adopting a positive youth development perspective (Lerner et al., 2005), this study reports findings from interviews with 18 low-income, racially and ethnically diverse graduates of an urban Catholic high school in the US. The interviews were designed to shed light on the post-high school experiences of urban high school graduates and to understand how students construct meaning about the value of school and work-based learning (WBL) in their preparation for meaningful work and life. The interviews highlight the perceived value of the academic and non-cognitive preparation students experienced through high school and WBL in relation to the challenges they encountered along the pathway to post-high school success and decent work. Overall, the findings suggest the potential of WBL for low-income youth in facilitating access to resources that build academic and psychological/non-cognitive assets, while also illustrating the role of structural and contextual factors in shaping post-high school transitions and access to meaningful work and life opportunities.

School Science Capacity: A Study of Four Urban Catholic Grade Schools

School Science Capacity: A Study of Four Urban Catholic Grade Schools

Performance and Apprehension of the Mass in an Urban Catholic School

This article examines students’ literacy practices during Mass and other Catholic religious services in a multilingual, multiethnic urban Catholic school in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It discusses three dimensions of their literacy practice: (a) how parents, teachers, and priests draw on the tradition of Catholic schooling and ritual to structure what constitutes literacy during Mass; (b) how students use body posture and performative orientations to the text of the liturgy to engage in these structured practices; and (c) how students strategically use these performative literacy practices for advantage and social positioning. These results invite complicating what literacy practices are valued in contemporary urban Catholic school and how opportunities to draw on these literacy practices are unequally distributed among students for unequal gain.

Clarifying the Public-Private Line: Legal and Policy Guidance for Catholic-affiliated Charter Schools

In the past fifty years, the share of students enrolled in U.S. Catholic schools has declined from approximately 12% to 3%. In reaction, many urban Catholic schools have closed and subsequently reopened as public charter schools in order to receive governmental funding and to increase enrollment. As public schools, these Catholic-affiliated charter schools now face a complex set of legal and practical challenges. This article presents empirical research on Catholic-affiliated charter schools, and the legal issues facing them as well as the wider category of religiously-affiliated charter schools. The authors conclude by answering a number of questions that Catholic school leaders are likely to pose about this emerging trend in Catholic education.

Critical Theory and Catholic Social Teaching: A Research Framework for Catholic Schools

In this article, the authors share findings from an ethnographic study drawn from an evaluation of an after-school program directed by a Catholic diocese to meet the educational needs of children attending urban Catholic schools. The authors used critical research methods within the context of Catholic social teaching (CST) as a theoretical framework for the data presented in this article. Two themes emerged during this data collection and analysis. The first theme, student interactions, describes the helpful ways that students engaged with each other during the after-school program, and also the manner in which students exhibited a need for greater supports. The second theme, staff-student and staff-families interactions, explains how staff members connected with students in the after-school program, and their families and experiences. The focus on relationships emerged as an explicit connection to the CST themes of care, solidarity, and community within the after-school program sites. These findings have implications for researchers and educators working in Catholic and/or urban schools, or their respective after-school programs.

Moving Beyond the College-Preparatory High School Model to a College-Going Culture in Urban Catholic High Schools

This Focus Section Article is brought to you for free with open access by the School of Education at Digital Commons at Loyola Marymount Universityand Loyola Law School. It has been accepted for publication in Catholic Education: A Journal of Inquiry and Practice by the journal's editorial boardand has been published on the web by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons at Loyola Marymount University and Loyola Law School. Formore information about Digital Commons, please contactdigitalcommons@lmu.edu. To contact the editorial board of Catholic Education: A Journalof Inquiry and Practice, please emailCatholicEdJournal@lmu.edu.

Choosing teaching as a career in urban public Catholic and Jewish schools by graduates of elite colleges

Recruitment, preparation, and retention of graduates of elite colleges is considered an innovative approach to improve teacher quality and promote change in the neediest schools. While the debate over the effectiveness of such programs is heavily focused on programs like Teach For America, this paper considers three teacher preparation programs located at elite colleges that combine alternative and traditional teacher preparation. This article argues that teachers who were trained at elite colleges and who chose teaching in urban public, urban Catholic, and Jewish schools tend to (a) conceptualize teaching around broad issues related to social justice, educational change, and community revitalization, arguing they joined teaching to improve society, and (b) seek leadership positions in their respective school sectors. These findings carry substantial policy implications in the areas of teacher recruitment, preparation, retention, and teacher quality.

What Keeps Teachers in and What Drives Them Out: How Urban Public, Urban Catholic, and Jewish Day Schools Affect Beginning Teachers’ Careers

BackgroundTeacher quality plays a key role in student learning outcomes. Yet, data suggest that elite college graduates who enter teaching are less likely to stay in schools serving low-income and minority students compared to other teachers. Thus, many educators and policy makers agree that in order to equalize the playing field, recruitment, preparation, and retention of high quality teachers should become a high priority.Objective/FocusThis paper focuses on how beginning teachers’ passion, commitments, and knowledge to teach in urban public, Catholic, and Jewish schools interact with specific school conditions to shape their career choices. The study's longitudinal dimension underscores the gradual shift that teachers make away from their preparation programs, highlighting how their professional growth becomes intimately associated with the conditions in their schools.Population/SettingThis longitudinal study included 30 randomly selected beginning teachers who graduated from three mission-driven teacher education programs located at elite colleges: UTEP at the University of Chicago, ACE at the University of Notre Dame, and DeLeT at Brandeis University.Research DesignWe employed a comparative, longitudinal case-based study of 30 teachers from three programs. Teachers were interviewed during their second and fourth year in teaching.FindingsThis study demonstrates the ways in which professional cultures in schools may positively or negatively affect teachers in different school contexts. It illustrates the considerable impact school leaders have on the lives and career commitments of teachers. Finally, it confirms the positive impact that preparing teachers to teach in context (Context Specific Teacher Education) may have on teachers’ career commitments.ConclusionsIn order to support teachers’ initial commitments to their schools and students, schools need to take a proactive approach. We emphasize the primary role of school conditions and argue that teacher preparation takes a back seat after several years in terms of its impact on teacher career choices. The findings still suggest that preparation can have some effect on teachers’ preparedness to 1. teach in culturally diverse environments and/or 2. adapt to challenging demands in hard-to-staff schools. We believe that over the years, preparation and school conditions get tightly interwoven with each other. Yet, the comparative design of this research enables us to point out that when teachers were not adequately prepared to teach in particular schools they were more likely to move from their schools in search for more hospitable conditions.