Word: catholicism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Enrollment in Catholic schools peaked in the 1960s, when more than 5 million students attended nearly 13,500 parochial schools. Since then, both enrollment and the number of schools have dropped by more than half. Why? For starters, the number of priests, nuns and brothers able to teach for free...
None of this is occurring in a vacuum, says Samuel Casey Carter, a senior fellow at the nonprofit Center for Education Reform. "For more than 30 years, the Catholic Church has been supporting the public-school system, educating children that many said were uneducable," Carter says. "When these schools are...
Some dioceses are - to use education reformers' favorite action verb - innovating. Last year, in a controversial and mostly untested move, seven Catholic schools in Washington converted to charter schools. In Miami, eight schools have followed the same route. In Wichita, Kans., which still has a strong Catholic community, parishioners are...
In Memphis, Tenn., the diocese appealed to local donors and philanthropists to the tune of tens of millions of dollars over the past decade, which allowed for the reopening of eight schools that had been shuttered. Yet such appeals to the wealthy have been blunted by the economic downturn, which...
So if money isn't reliable, maybe it's the system that needs to be overhauled, which brings us back to young John Eriksen's original point. Leaders have to divorce themselves from the church's old practices. "One of the big dirty phrases in Catholic education is 'It's...