Amid the Pandemic, Progress in Catholic Schools

Enrollment and student achievement are rising, thanks in part to parents

By Kathleen Porter-Magee. She is superintendent of Partnership Schools, a management organization that runs 11 Catholic schools in New York City and Cleveland, and an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Excerpts:

"In March 2020, Catholic schools were among the first to close as Covid hit. In the fall of 2020, after we had learned more about curbing superspreader events and as it became clear that children were the least vulnerable to the virus, more than 92% of Catholic schools across the country re-opened for in-person learning, compared with 43% of traditional public schools and 34% of charters."

"if all U.S. Catholic schools were a state, their 1.6 million students would rank first in the nation across the NAEP reading and math tests for fourth and eighth graders.

Catholic-school students now boast the nation’s highest scale scores on all four NAEP tests. The average score among fourth-graders in Catholic schools was 233, 17 points higher than the national public-school average, or about 1½ grade levels ahead. In eighth-grade reading, the average score for Catholic school students was 279, 20 points higher than the national public-school average, or about two grade levels ahead.

When disaggregated by race, Catholic schools showed significant gains since 2019. In particular, achievement among black students enrolled in Catholic schools increased by 10 points (about an extra year’s worth of learning), while black students in public schools lost 5 points and black students in charter schools lost 8 points. Similarly, on the eighth-grade reading test, Hispanic students in Catholic schools gained 7 points while Hispanic students in public schools lost 1 point and Hispanic students in charter schools lost 2 points."

"As public-school enrollment plummeted, Catholic-school enrollment rose by about 4% between 2020-21 and 2021-22"

"Those trying to undercut the Catholic-school success story dismiss the results as merely the high performance of elite private schools. But K-8 Catholic schools are the only private elementary schools in America that serve the urban poor at scale. The average annual tuition for a K-8 Catholic school is $5,300—about one-third what states spend per child on public schools.

At Partnership Schools, we serve under-resourced communities in 11 Catholic schools. Enrollment surged over the past two years, growing by 40% in our Cleveland schools and 18% in our New York City ones. In New York, our share of low-income students grew from 65% to 79% since 2020. In Cleveland, almost all our students are low-income, and the average annual income of their families is $18,000."