During the past few years, scores of impoverished inner-city schools have shut their doors. On the surface, that could be a blessing. After all, one of the major problems with American education is that bad schools seem to live forever.
But, alas, I’m not writing about those schools–the persistently failing public schools that, under No Child Left Behind, are supposed to be ”restructured” out of existence, or at least subjected to an extreme makeover. No, the ones leaving children standing outside their locked doors are generally places of deep learning, community institutions that have effectively served the children of the poor for generations. They are Catholic parochial schools–and their closure is nothing but a tragedy.
The trend is unmistakable. The Archdiocese of Detroit closed 21 schools last year (and more are likely to shut next year). The New York and Brooklyn archdioceses shut down 36 schools over the past two years. In 2005, the Chicago archdiocese ended operations in 18 schools. And the tally in Boston? Twenty-one schools over four years. The longer-term trends are even bleaker: Several big cities, such as Chicago, serve less than a third of the students today than they did 40 years ago.
The closures have little to do with the quality of education that these schools provide. Two decades of studies have shown them to be effective, especially for poor and minority children. Rather, broader demographic trends are to blame. Simply put, the schools’ pipeline of affordable teachers has run dry. Once upon a time, most Catholic-school instructors were members of religious orders, requiring little or no cash compensation; now there are more nuns over age 90 than under 50 in the U.S., and only five percent of the schools’ teachers come from religious orders. Lay teachers must be paid a decent wage, pushing Catholic-school
