Earlier this week, the New York Times reported that Mayer Bloomberg and the Brooklyn Diocese are negotiating on a plan to convert a handful of Brooklyn parochial schools into publicly funded charter schools.
Last year, I wrote about the Archdiocese of Washington's controversial struggle to "save" seven of its inner-city parochial schools by converting them into charter schools. The Washington archdiocese sought to retain the staff, curriculum and basic moral values of the parochial schools in the conversion process. Let's hope that the Brooklyn Diocese will negotiate with the city to achieve a similar result. The Times story notes that one key stumbling block is the city's sex ed curriculum: Church officials do not want lessons that contradict Catholic teaching on sexuality morality and contraception taught in any schools it leases to the city.
While the city and the Brooklyn Diocese continue to work out the details of the plan, education reform expert, Diane Ravitch proposes in the New York Daily News that Caroline Kennedy, who has raised over $200 million for the NYC's public schools, marshal her formidable fund raising talents to come to the aid of the collapsing Catholic system. Sounds like a good plan to me.
What Ravitch doesn't say in her Daily News commentary, but researchers have noted in the Winter 2009 issue of Education Next, an important education reform publication, is that the moderately-priced Catholic parochial system has provided much-needed competition for the public school system. Not only do the parochial schools provide an oasis for inner-city students, their educational outcomes (graduation rates, testing results) provide an essential point of comparison with the public system. The Education Next article looks at some fascinating attempts "to measure systematically the causal impact of [private-public] competition by looking at variation across countries." If you read the article, you may well conclude that if the parochial model loses further ground, the likely result will be a rapid decline in our overall educational outcomes.
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