Making the Case of Successful Schools

By JOHN WOODS

It would be rather hard to escape the fact that Catholic schools, especially on the elementary level, have faced a tough road in recent years. Even in the Archdiocese of New York, where Cardinal Egan and school officials have made Herculean efforts to keep schools open by raising funds and stretching resources as far as possible, six schools are scheduled to close their doors in June for the last time, with another four schools to merge into two by the time the fall term begins.

The reasons given for school closings usually revolve around two areas that often go hand in hand: escalating costs and lower enrollments. From the standpoint of families who send their kids to Catholic schools, the choice can boil down to balancing tuition against other realities of household finance such as mortgages and taxes, and rapidly rising food and gas bills.

Despite the financial obstacles, many parents—in the archdiocese and beyond its borders—continue to enroll their children in Catholic schools because they believe in the top-flight academic education offered in an environment enriched by religious faith and values.

Last week, I attended a fund-raising dinner in the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan sponsored by a group seeking to address the concerns of parents and others who want to keep their kids in parochial and other private schools without breaking the family budget in the process. TEACH NYS, as the nonprofit organization is known, is a coalition of Catholic, Jewish and independent school leaders "committed to tackling the tuition crisis facing our communities," according to its own promotional materials.

In short, TEACH NYS seeks to relieve the burden on tuition-paying parents by making the case for increased government funding for nonpublic schools. In New York state, some 500,000 of the 3.3-million school children statewide, or about 15 percent of the total, attend nonpublic schools. Despite the high numbers, the nonpublic schools receive less than 1 percent of the state education budget.

The honorees at the dinner, Cardinal Egan and Rabbi Tzvi Hersh Weinreb, executive vice president of the Orthodox Union, spoke passionately about the importance of religious schools and other forms of nonpublic education and about the need for elected representatives to take up the cause in Albany and elsewhere.

"We have every right to use our money for our kids. That's what we want our political leaders to say to the great State of New York," Cardinal Egan said in response to one of the questions posed by the moderator of the discussion, Richard M. Joel, president of Yeshiva University.

In expanding on the need for successful schools, both private and public, the cardinal cited statistics with which he has grown very familiar in his eight years as Archbishop of New York. Serving a student body 65 percent of whose families are living below the poverty line, the inner-city Catholic high schools in the archdiocese graduate 98 percent of their students in four years and 95 percent of those graduates move on to college.

If government truly wanted to do its best to ensure a good education for all, the cardinal reasoned, it would foster systems with a proven track record like that. And that is precisely the point that TEACH NYS is trying to make.