NEW YORK CATHOLIC SCHOOL PLIGHT DEPICTS EDUCATIONAL DIFFERENCES

REPRINTED FROM THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

New York City is in danger of losing one of its more valuable resources. The 140 inner-city schools of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York, which educate 50,000 disadvantaged youngsters a year, many of them non-Catholic, face closure unless the Archdiocese is successful in its recently announced campaign to raise $100 million for them. Wholesale closings of inner-city Catholic schools have already taken place in Chicago, Pittsburgh and Detroit, and are threatened in other cities that can ill afford to lose them.

The Catholics and non-Catholics who will be asked for contributions toward the $100 million needed to save New York's Catholic schools may well reply, "Why bother? We have a public school system that I already support with my tax dollars. Why should I give to a private school system that serves the same kids in the same neighborhood?" Fair question. Why not let New York's public schools do the job for which they receive an annual budget of $6 billion?

The answer lies in the difference in the educational results the two systems obtain. The public system does well with the top 25 percent of its students. Magnet schools like the Bronx School of Science are every bit as good as the best high schools in the country. They have low drop-out rates and a fine record of sending graduates to competitive colleges and universities. But the inner city "zoned" high schools the schools to which average and below average kids are assigned are an entirely different story.

In many of these schools only one-quarter of entering students graduate on time, and many of those who do graduate read and write far below grade level. Those who do not graduate run a high risk of being marginalized, unable to compete in today's complex workplace. Time and again, leading New York corporations have agreed to provide jobs for all qualified graduates of given inner-city high schools, only to find a majority of those graduates unable to perform simple entry level jobs.

In contrast, 95 percent of the students entering the Archdiocese's high schools graduate on schedule, and four out of five of those graduates go on to post-secondary education. Those who find these comparative results difficult to accept often claim that the basis for comparison is unfair that the Catholic students come from intact homes, with parents sufficiently interested in education to pay the modest tuition required. But a massive nation-wide study published by the Brookings Institute last spring, which factored out differences in family and economic backgrounds, showed that over the course of a four-year high school career, students in the Catholic schools gain more than one full year in academic achievement over similar students in public schools.

Last fall, the Rand Corporation published a study of New York inner-city high schools, primarily public and Catholic, and its findings echoed those of Brookings. The study compared children from single parent poverty-level families in Catholic high schools with their peers in zone public high schools, and the difference in results are equally impressive. Only one-sixth of the students entering the zoned public high schools in the Rand study, clearly the most talented students, took the SATs in their senior year. That top one-sixth earned an average combined score of 632 points out of a possible 1600. Three-quarters of comparable students in the Catholic high schools took the SATs. They earned a combined score of 804. While the Catholic school students' average score may not be impressive in itself, the dramatic difference in the proportion of the classes taking the tests clearly demonstrates the academic superiority of one inner-city school system over the other.

What makes the differences even more startling is that the Catholic school system is so much less expensive that the public system. The public schools serve about 900,000 students from pre-kindergarten through high school, at a cost of $6,700 per student, about twice the cost per student in the Catholic schools. There are many reasons for the cost difference, and one of them is, as defenders of the public system point out, that Catholic school teachers get smaller salaries than their public counterparts. But another, less often mentioned, is that the public system supports more than 7,000 bureaucrats in its headquarters and Community School Districts; the Catholic system employs fewer than 35 people in its central office.

Among the most fundamental explanations of the achievements of the Archdiocesan system is that it is based on educational choice. The principal has chosen to be at his or her school, and has chosen the school's educational program and faculty. Each teacher has chosen to work at that particular school. Each student has chosen to study there. Everyone involved in the enterprise has "bought into" it, has become involved by choice. In the zoned inner-city school, the principal is assigned to the school, the curriculum is determined in detail by the central bureaucracy, the teachers are assigned and finally the students are required by law to attend. Nobody has "bought into" such a school nobody has made a choice. Every aspect of the school is dictated from above. The New York City school system is like the Soviet economy, where everything is also dictated from above, and both are failures.

If Catholic schools close, all of their students will be returned to the public school system. They will add costs that the city cannot afford to meet. The work force able to function in today's world and available to the City's employers will shrink even further. A yardstick by which to measure the job being done by the public schools will be lost. And most important, many kids will lose their only opportunity to learn their way out of poverty and into the American dream.

Peter M. Flanigan, a managing director of Dillon, Read & Co. is chairman of the Student/Sponsor Partnership, a director of the "I Have A Dream" Foundation and chairman of the advisory board of the Center for Educational Innovation.