Republican lawmakers in Tennessee have finally gotten honest with their constituents and officially abandoned their lack luster push to legalize school vouchers in the State.
In response, a network of struggling Roman Catholic schools in Memphis has announced dramatic plans to keep its campuses open and serving students—converting all the schools into public charter schools.
This is not the first time this strategy has been deployed to keep urban Catholic K-12 campuses open.
And as enrollment in Catholic schools continues to plunge nationwide—a trend in part driven by competition from charter schools—such conversions may become more commonplace.
Financial instability is at the root of the Catholic Diocese of Memphis' decision to close the schools.
The Memphis Jubilee Catholic Schools Network, which served mostly low-income students free of tuition, relied on donations to run. Without the hope of getting public money through state-funded school vouchers, the Diocese has decided to shutter the schools at the end of next school year.
Parents were informed by the Diocese that an independent group was planning to open a charter network in place of the Jubilee schools where current students could "maintain continuity in education with a strong foundation already in place."
That group, newly-formed and led by the president of a local Catholic university, notified the Shelby County school district last week it plans to submit applications to open charter schools in each of the Jubilee network school buildings for the 2019-20 school year.
Should the school district approve all of the applications, the new group would become the largest charter network in the city.
If the Jubilee network schools make the switch to charters, they will join a small but growing club of Catholic schools in cities such as Indianapolis, Miami, and Washington that have opted to shed their religious identities to remain open.
A 2014 report from EdChoice (formally called the Friedman Foundation), found that switching sectors dramatically increased enrollment and resources for schools.
Local dioceses, which often continue to own the buildings and rent them to the newly converted charter schools, can use the rent money to help the parishes.
This strategy could do much for the plight facing Catholic education nationally.
Catholic school enrollment has plummeted from 5.2 million during its heyday in the 1960s to about 1.9 million today. And how many of that number of Catholic school students are actually Catholic is perhaps among the best kept secrets since no reliable statistics have ever been made available.
A mixture of changing demographics, rising tuition costs, and increased competition from charter schools—some of which, with their strict codes of conduct and uniforms, appear very similar to parochial schools—have hit urban Catholic schools especially hard.
But the National Catholic Education Association (NCEA) and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) have remained adamantine in their resistance to the charter school strategy.
In the meantime, an enormous amount of human and financial resource continues to be allocated to a system which is facing rapid extinction.
According to some, Pope Francis has called for a “paradigm shift” in the way the Church accompanies people who are struggling in their faith and moral lives.
Perhaps, the NCEA and USCCB need to consider conversion to charter schools as a “paradigm shift” in the Catholic education and formation of its children, the future generations of the Church.
Such adaptations and changes are difficult to make for those in authority and those who are personally invested in the old models of Catholic parochial education.
They should be mindful of this wise advice and caution and remember the words of every institution that has died and is presently on its way to the graveyard: “But we’ve always done it this way!”
As long as the NCEA and USCCB continue to support the “dinosaur” of the traditional Catholic parochial school system, the Catholic education and formation of children will continue to be put in jeopardy.
Let us all remember what happened to the dinosaur!
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