Word: urbaneness
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Catholic schools in the U.S. has closed its doors this decade. To non-Catholics, this may not appear to be something worth worrying about. But parochial schools are one of the largest (if not the largest) alternatives to the American public-education system, and their steady decline inordinately affects urban low-income minorities who would otherwise be left at the mercy of public schools that have proven incapable of educating them. (See pictures of the Pope...
...foundations, converting to charter schools, and taking control away from pastors and putting it in the hands of lay experts - these are just some of the ways dioceses (essentially a church district) are hoping to stem the school-closure tide, which has reached worrisome proportions in America's urban areas, where close to half of all parochial schools are located...
...Catholic schools came from religious orders; by 1967, the figure was 58%; today, it is 4%. This shift has meant that schools have had to raise tuition in order to pay more lay teachers. Meanwhile, increasingly middle-class Irish and Italian families started moving to the suburbs, leaving urban Catholic schools to cater to a majority of lower-income blacks and Hispanics. Less money coming into the church has led to even higher tuition, fewer students who can afford to attend the schools and the potential for even more closures. (Watch an audio slide show about a cloister of young...
...school system, educating children that many said were uneducable," Carter says. "When these schools are closing at [a rate of] 100 to 200 a year, no matter how small they are, that ends up putting a massive burden on an already burdened public-school infrastructure." As he sees it, urban Catholic-school closures dump students back into a system that is ill-prepared to educate them, a system that in many large U.S. cities awards diplomas to only half its high school students...
...some ways, the Catholic-school problem mirrors that of charter schools, a sector that is essentially competing for many of the same urban students. And Catholic schools have their own charterlike success stories, the most notable being Cristo Rey, a network of 24 schools focused on "breaking the sin of poverty." These schools have a unique program that requires students to work one day a week with a corporate sponsor in order to subsidize their tuition, which is kept as low as possible as a result of the labor...