According to the National Catholic Education Association (NCEA), a professional membership organization that provides leadership, direction, and service to the teaching mission of the Church, enrollment in Catholic schools continues to decline at an alarming rate.
Since 2000, more than 2,000 Catholic schools around the country have shut their doors, and enrollment has dropped by 621,583 students, to just over 2 million today.
There are a host of factors which have contributed to these disturbing statistics. But ask any Catholic School Superintendent or Pastor of a parochial school and they will tell you that the most significant of these is the cost associated with an increase of lay teachers and staff members who have replaced Religious Sisters who at one time had been the mainstay of Catholic education.
In addition to these staggering personnel costs, Catholic schools are facing still another threat in the growing trend of charter schools which have become increasingly competitive in attracting students to their tuition-free classrooms. Charter schools have become attractive alternatives to Catholic schools in their pedagogical and academic approaches as well as their insistence upon parental involvement in the educational and personal development of their students.
"Catholic schools cannot compete with charter schools that look like them, and have a longer school day, and school uniforms—and which are free," said Abraham M. Lackman, a scholar-in-residence at the Albany Law School, in Albany, N.Y., and the author of a forthcoming paper on the shift of students from Catholic schools to charter schools. As political support for charters grows and their enrollment expands, the number of Catholic schools will fall, he predicted, and "we have to decide whether that's good public policy or not." This is devastating news for Catholic education, but the financial impact upon the public sector is no less troubling.
In New York State alone, some 18,000 students have left Catholic schools to enroll in charter schools. The result: students once educated by the Church at with no drain upon public coffers now cost the public sector an estimated $320 million a year. A Cato Institute study places the annual national cost of students in religious schools transfering to charter schools at $1.8 billion.
Supporters of school choice and the vast majority of Catholic school officials believe that Catholic schools will benefit from the growth of private-school-voucher programs, which have become more popular in recent years and particularly touted by the newly-elected President.
At present, tuition-voucher programs mostly have been limited to low-income and special-needs students. However, some states have begun to establish voucher programs aimed at middle-class families.
However, such voucher programs are in reality a two-edged sword for Catholic education.
On the one hand, vouchers have the potential to help Catholic schools by providing some relief for the high cost of tuition. Although some Catholic school officials believe that, if state vouchers are too meager in subsidizing a significant portion of tuition costs, more families might be likely to turn to the free alternative to regular public schools—charter schools.
On the other hand, with vouchers comes the potential for government involvement and regulation of Catholic and other religious-based educational institutions. Some Catholic officials warn that Catholic schools should not count on vouchers coming the rescue. Relying on state voucher policies places the future of Catholic schools in the hands of state bureaucrats, a dreadful possibility indeed.
One fact is clear. Catholic education is in peril at this moment in time and no solution to the crisis appears to be on the near or distant horizon.
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