For every charter school recently opened in Harlem, two Catholic schools have had to close because of financial trouble, observes Sol Stern in City Journal.  Its a pattern that is mirrored across New York City.  Since inner-city Catholic schools have historically provided lifesaving educational choices for minorities and the poor, he writes, the result has been a net loss of good schools for Gotham.

Sterns piece profiles Harlems St. Aloysius School, a pre-K through eighth-grade Catholic school, which has essentially charterized itself to survive.  The schools board last year broke away from the New York archdiocese and reconstituted itself as an independent Catholic school.  St. Aloysius is now something like a charter school within the city’s Catholic education sector, Stern writes. 

St. Aloysius easily bests neighborhood schools on standardized tests despite a refusal to make testing and test prep a centerpiece of its classroom practice.    It also more than matches the results posted by the Harlem Childrens Zone Promise Academy, featured prominently in Waiting for Superman.   And St. Aloysius gets these results for about $9000 per pupil per yearless than half of the cost of New Yorks neighborhood schools and the roughly $13,000 that charter schools get from the city.    Stern says several factors may explain the schools success, including extended learning time and separating boys and girls beginning in the sixth grade.

It doesn’t take long, though, for a visitor to discover St. Aloysius’s most powerful asset: the rich content of its classroom instruction. St. Aloysius exemplifies the old-fashioned notion that school is a place where children learn about our civilization’s shared knowledge and values and where teachers remain the undisputed authorities in the classroom, imparting that knowledge and those values through a coherent grade-by-grade curriculum. This traditional approach has stood the test of time and is still proving itself today in many inner-city Catholic schools, in the “no excuses” charter schools operated by the Knowledge Is Power Program , in schools that have adopted E. D. Hirsch’s Core Knowledge curriculum, and, to some extent, even in run-of-the-mill Massachusetts public schools that adhere to that state’s back-to-basics curriculum reforms.

 Such schools, Stern writes, represent an inescapable moral challenge to the education-philanthropy community. 

It is painfully obvious that without a rescue effort, the number of Catholic schools in neighborhoods like Harlem will continue to shrink. The money certainly exists to mount such a rescue; for years, this glittering city has been awash in private philanthropic and foundation funds—hundreds of millions and perhaps billions of dollars—spent on an assortment of education-reform schemes, including charter schools, the creation of small public high schools, and bonuses for teachers and administrators.

 When a school that creates such effective classrooms for disadvantaged children, and that also builds character and personal responsibility in its students, still has to worry about where next year’s dollars will come from he concludes there remains a fundamental imbalance in these charitable efforts.

Preach!

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