Won’t Someone Stop This Tragedy?
Bloomberg’s education campaign is driving Gotham’s Catholic schools out of business.
Sol Stern
18 April 2006
Posted on 04/18/2006 1:01:27 PM PDT by neverdem
|
|
City Journal Won’t Someone Stop This Tragedy? Bloomberg’s education campaign is driving Gotham’s Catholic schools out of business. Sol Stern 18 April 2006 |
Something precious in the lives of many deserving New Yorkers is slowly dying in Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s glittering city. The New York Catholic Archdiocese recently announced that it would close 14 schools, following on last year’s announcement by the Archdiocese of Brooklyn that it would shutter 22 of its schools in Brooklyn and Queens. Located in some of Gotham’s neediest neighborhoods, these schools have served for over a century as a haven for low-income but striving families. Many of the predominantly minority children in those closed schools will now have to attend failing public schools.
The school closings result in part from the inexorable laws of competition. No, I don’t mean that the Catholic schools have fallen behind in the areas of academic achievement or classroom productivity. Quite the contrary. Catholic schools still deliver a far bigger bang for the education buck than the public schools. For example, in last year’s state reading and math tests for 4th and 8th graders, Catholic school students scored from 7 percent to 10 percent higher than their public school counterparts. And the Catholic high school graduation rate is nearly double that of the public high schools. Moreover, Catholic schools deliver these stellar results with per-pupil expenditures remaining about a fourth of the costs of the public schools.
In a truly competitive education world—one, that is, where taxpayer money followed children to their school of choice—the Catholic school sector would be thriving financially as well as academically, prodding the public schools to do better. But with no vouchers or tuition tax credits in place, the Catholic schools are finding it harder and harder to compete financially with an insatiable public school monopoly, ever more expansive under mayoral control. The city’s Department of Education budget now tops $17 billion, or about $15,000 per pupil. This spending growth has allowed Mayor Bloomberg to raise teacher’s salaries by 33 percent. The top public school salary of $93,000 is now double that of the highest paid Catholic schoolteacher. (When I first started writing about Catholic schools ten years ago the salary gap was a “mere” 60 percent.) To try to keep teachers from leaving for the public system, the Catholic schools have had to boost salaries, too, forcing up tuition and putting the squeeze on their low-income families. According to the Brooklyn Archdiocese, average tuition in its schools has risen from $1,659 in 1992 to $3,000 in 2004. This increase has already resulted in an outflow of thousands of low-income families to the public schools.
The Catholic schools could close this gap with more private philanthropic money. Mayor Rudy Giuliani understood this need, believing that a vital Catholic school sector was good for the city. Stymied on taxpayer-funded vouchers, he sponsored a private voucher program for the Catholic schools, bankrolled by a group of New York philanthropists. But our current billionaire mayor has never said a word in support of the Catholic schools and seems to want all the philanthropic money in town to go to his own public school empire. And he and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein have been hugely successful in that venture, raising over $300 million in private funds in just three years. That’s enough money to create an endowment that would forestall all the Catholic school closings, and then some.
Catholic schools are now also at a competitive disadvantage in receiving private philanthropy. Giving to Catholic schools (and many heroic New Yorkers still do give) has always been a matter of individual conscience. Donors don’t usually get their names in the paper for their generosity. They aren’t invited to the mayor’s social events, like the luncheon that the New York Times described as a gathering of “fashionistas, artists, wealthy businessmen or . . . their wealthy wives,” who have “turned public education into a darling cause of the corporate-philanthropic-society set.” As one giddy philanthropist explained to the Times reporter, “There is a club of people in New York that support just about everything—the museums, the libraries. Now, because Michael has such a good name and is so reputable, they are able to transfer that club into the school system.”
Aside from invitations to the mayor’s best parties, members of the “club” get other perks too. They can associate their names with the administration’s highly publicized reform initiatives. For example, billionaire Eli Broad and other philanthropists won public kudos from the mayor for financing the initial planning for his massive reorganization and centralization of the school system. Now, three years later other club members are enjoying equal credit for financing the reorganization of the reorganization and for the new decentralization. Bloomberg’s philanthropists can finance the creation of lots of new small high schools and for money even get a voice in what those schools teach. They can contribute to the Leadership Academy, the most expensive principal-training institute in education history, despite its lack of any track record of success.
The one thing Mayor Bloomberg can’t give the members of his philanthropic club is any assurance that their money will have a significant educational impact. As I pointed out in City Journal (“City’s Pupils Get More Hype than Hope,” Winter 2006), one finds hardly a shred of evidence that all the additional billions in taxpayer funds and the $300 million in private donations have lifted the academic performance of the city’s students.
I wouldn’t dare tell any of the philanthropists where to put their money. Still, as successful business people, they should be able to figure out where their millions could make a real difference, and where a need exists based on hunger, not on appetite.
Mayor Overrules 2 Aides Seeking Food Stamp Shift (Bloomberg does something right for a change.)
Dozens stuck on Roosevelt Island Trams Rescue cable car is in the process of removing passengers now on ABC TV.
FReepmail me if you want on or off my New York ping list.
Quite the contrary. Catholic schools still deliver a far bigger bang for the education buck than the public schools.
Catholic -- and all other private schools -- can "cherry pick." You got a kid with a severe or even moderate disability, then you best look someplace else. You got a kid with severe or even moderate emotional problems, then Catholic school isn't for you.
$15,000 a student, good lord. and we're giving them another 5.6 billion?
Remember, that government money always comes with "strings attached" ie adopting gay non-discrimination, etc. The Catholic Church, as always, wants to take MY taxpayer money without any strings attached.
The Catholic Church = Big government wannabes in many cases.
F--k school choice. PRIVATIZE EDUCATION!
F--k school choice. PRIVATIZE EDUCATION!
Won't work in NYC.
Just because your local parochial school teaches in English, doesn't mean that many will not adopt "bilingual education."
Muslims will choose madrassas, Jews will choose Yeshivas, the secular rich will choose nonsectarian private schools like Dalton and Fieldston.
The Catholic Church has just lost their semi-monopoly on private education in the outer boroughs. The lower middle to middle class Catholics who supported such schools left the city decades ago.
And I got paid nothing (in cash) for homeschooling my kids. I don't think we paid half of that for homeschooling three kids for their curriculum for 12 years of school.
"...but I don't see how Bloomberg has done anything illegal."
Are you a lawyer?
I ask because, in my experience, only lawyers and Democrats can look at a situation that is immoral and/or unjust and say, "But it's not illegal."
My opinions may be colored by the fact that I am a single man who is PO'd that I have to send tax dollars to schools nobody in their right mind would allow their children to attend. I can't think of one area I have lived in (New York, Illinois, Florida, Washington, NJ) where the public schools were mediocre at best, even in wealthy areas.
More than twenty years ago, I read an article in New York magazine in which it was said that the paperclip budget of the NYPS exceeeded the total administratice cost of the archdiocese central office. The public schools suffer greatly from overmanagement. Even paying teachers $100,000 does not mean that the money goes to teach English and math. the classroom. After all, each class of 30 sixth graders brings $450,000 into the school system.
Scarsdale apparently has pretty good public schools.
Also, some of the elite public schools in NYC rival or surpass most private schools.
But let's be frank here. Public schools in NYC have always served two purposes. They educate those who are highly motivated (but without money) to take leadership positions in their fields and they serve as the first step of integrating new immigrants into American society.
Oh yeah, and don't get me started on how many Nobel Prize winners there are just between Bronx Science and Stuyvesant.
My paternal grandfather attended the Jersey City public schools. According to him, only the Jewish kids actually studied. My grandfather's stay at PS whatever was noteworthy only for the fact that he beat up the principal! (Completely justified IMHO, but I will save that story for another time).
The elite schools change their face according to the immigrant population. Now, there are a lot of Asians and Indians, etc. However, another school has popped up out in Brooklyn in the Russian community that has pretty strict standards and there are one or two in Chinatown.
My feeling is not to screw around with this stuff. NYC has been educating kids for a long time. Keep trying to make the system better, but don't take the thing apart.
There is probably no other city in the country that gets more full academic scholarships than NYC.
Would you say such a silly thing about Catholic hospitals in non-Catholic areas? Charity is Charity.
The trouble with Catholic systems like the schools and hospitals is that they weren't designed for paid staff. Dedicated and willingly poor nuns and monks handled the work. Now the few nuns left, rather than recruiting more teaching and nursing nuns, generally complain that the Catholic teachers aren't unionized and well-paid.
Of Course, Priests molesting children has nothing to do with it.
"Converting the sinner" and "instructing the ignorant," however, are Spiritual Works of Mercy -- in a Christian context. "Instructing the ignorant" doesn't mean teaching them to read and to master subjects like mathematics and geography, it means educating them with the explicit intent of passing along the timeless truths of Christian doctrine.
So there is absolutely no need to spend a moment of my time or a dollar of my money on any non-Catholic who wants to take advantage of the opportunities offered by Catholic schools in education regarding secular subjects -- while openly rejecting any religious aspect of a Catholic education.
Yes. It seems that a majority of public school resources are going to help the "special needs" students in all their diversity, while the others are neglected. My daughter, who is independent, bright and well-behaved, deserves just as much attention as a student with a learning disability or a behavioral problem. She attends a Catholic school which has very strict standards of behavior.
This is why the issue of school choice is so critical: so that parents can match the school to their child's needs.
Though American Catholic schools tend to focus only on vocational training and the bare minimum of ethical behavior, that's a reason for improvement, not abolition.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.