A matter of parental rights and basic justice, The Anchor, January 27, 2012

Next week is Catholic Schools Week throughout the Church in the United States, which is a time to focus on the importance of Catholic schools in the life and mission of the Church. It’s also an opportunity for society as a whole to recognize the enormous impact Catholic schools have had in the development of our country. Catholic schools have been the engine of assimilation and advancement for tens of millions of children of immigrants, forming them not only to love our nation but to serve it with virtue and dedication. Especially in overcrowded metropolises where public schools have historically struggled, Catholic schools, connected to communities of faith, neighborhoods and larger nexuses of support and accountability, were able to foster a culture of learning that spurred even kids from the most difficult of familial circumstances to excel, rise from poverty and become leaders in all segments of society.

Catholic schools were able to do that not because they patented secret ways of superior pedagogy, but primarily because of the selfless dedication of religious Sisters, teaching Brothers and communities whose vocations were focused on giving children not just instruction, but education, not just information but formation, seeking to raise children to become men and women capable in turn of fulfilling their vocation to serve God, this nation, and those in need. Catholic schools made the American dream achievable for millions and this is why Catholic Schools Week should be celebrated not just by the Church but by the whole country.

Casting a shadow over the celebration of Catholic schools, however, is the fact that in several places Catholic schools are in crisis, a reality that for the reasons above should concern not merely Catholics but all those who love our country and have high hopes for its future. The economic and demographic realities faced by Catholic schools are forcing many of them to close. Even with continued academic excellence and per-pupil costs one-third of those in nearby public schools, many Catholic schools just do not have the number of tuition-paying students to stay in the black, despite Catholic school teachers’ working for a fraction of what their public school colleagues receive and despite routinely deferring technological upgrades and building maintenance. Many Catholic families in a challenging economy can no longer afford a Catholic education in addition to all their other bills. This is leading many good Catholic schools to close.

On January 6, a Blue Ribbon Commission of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia recommended closing or merging 44 of 146 elementary schools and four of 17 high schools in order to try to put Catholic education on a firmer financial footing for the future. The Archdiocese of Philadelphia’s network of Catholic schools was once the greatest in the nation, at its peak educating 271,000 students, with several schools educating more than 4,000 students each. As the Blue Ribbon Commission reported detailed, however, more than a quarter of the schools educating the 68,000 present students are deep in the red, even though the parishes with which they are associated are giving an average subsidy of $320,000 a year.

In response to denunciations of the Blue Ribbon Commission for recommending school reductions, Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput forthrightly challenged critics to recognize the economic realities and to redirect their anger to where it can and ought to make a difference: “The resource challenges we face in 2012 are much harsher than 40 or 50 years ago when many of us attended Catholic school,” he wrote after the closures were announced. “No family can run on nostalgia and red ink. Every parent knows this from experience. And so it is with the Church.” But then he urged them to acknowledge one of the reasons why many Catholic schools are failing economically and hold the proper parties accountable: “Some Catholics — too many — seem to find it easier to criticize their own leaders than to face the fact that they’re discriminated against every day of the year. They pay once for public schools; then they pay again for the Catholic schools they rightly hold in such esteem. Something’s wrong with that equation. … Catholics should hold public leaders — beginning with our elected officials in Harrisburg — to an equally demanding standard.”

He was referring to the recent failure of the Pennsylvania legislature to pass a school vouchers bill. In September, the Keystone State Senate approved a bill authorizing school vouchers, but after intense lobbying by the public school teacher unions, the House of Representatives killed it in December. “It’s useful to wonder how many of our schools might have been saved if, over the last decade, Catholics had fought for vouchers as loudly and vigorously as they now grieve about school closings,” Archbishop Chaput continued. “School choice may not answer every financial challenge in Catholic education; but vouchers would make a decisive difference. They’d help our schools enormously. To put it simply: Vouchers are a matter of parental rights and basic justice.”

Chaput couldn’t have framed the matter in clearer or stronger terms. Taxing parents to pay for the education of children and then not allowing any of that money to be allocated to their kids’ actual education in a private setting, Catholic or otherwise, is wrong and discriminatory, a violation of parents rights and a fundamental injustice. School vouchers have been shown to be enormously successful in Washington, D.C., Milwaukee and Cleveland in helping kids, especially from underperforming public school districts, attend and excel in private schools. It’s part of a larger movement of programs, including tax credits for businesses and families, that give parents the economic possibility to have a real choice in selecting the best education for their children.

The way vouchers work is that instead of all local revenues and state subsidies going to the public school district for every child in a geographical area — regardless of whether the student attends public school, goes to private school or is home schooled — a portion of that money is given to the family in the form of a voucher that can be used to attend a private school, a parochial school, or, in some cases, a school in a nearby city or town. With vouchers, the public school districts still receive some funding for every kid in the district, including a lesser amount for those they’re not educating, but economically-challenged families also receive the possibility to choose where their kids go to school.

A school voucher system not only helps keep public school districts competitive — a healthy phenomenon that we’re already seeing with the increase of publicly-funded charter schools — but also works for the long-term financial good of public schools themselves. The more Catholic schools close due to financial pressure from parents who can’t afford to pay twice for the education of their children, the more students out of necessity have to attend public schools. Better for public schools to retain roughly half of the average $14,000 per pupil subsidy for students they don’t educate than to see Catholic schools close and public schools now have to spend the entire subsidy to educate those children, not to mention in some places to have to build new schools to accommodate that huge infusion of students.

Here in Massachusetts, the discrimination against those who want to send their children to Catholic schools — whom, we should note, are not merely Catholic parents — is far more severe due to the Anti-Aid Amendment to the Massachusetts Constitution passed by the virulently xenophobic, anti-Catholic Know-Nothings on Beacon Hill back in 1855. This provision not only forbids any aid whatsoever from going to non-public schools, but also forbids citizens from petitioning the legislature for any form of private school funding. The only ways to overturn this is through amending the Massachusetts’ Constitution or through getting the provision overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, both of which are time-consuming and complicated.

An easier path forward that could help to achieve much of the same outcome would be through tax credit programs, like those that now exist in Arizona, Florida and Pennsylvania. These allow corporations or individuals to receive a dollar-for-dollar reduction in the amount of taxes they would owe for every dollar, up to a given limit, they put into scholarship programs at private schools. There are also programs in Illinois, Iowa, and Minnesota that give similar, but limited, state tax credits to families for education-related expenses for their children.

The need for such programs in Massachusetts to help Catholic schools is acute. They are not merely a matter of justice, but of simple civic prudence, recognizing how important Catholic schools continue to be in helping whole generations of students, especially recent immigrants and those in inner cities, aspire to and achieve the excellence that our country needs to secure its future.