CATHOLIC SCHOOL RESEARCH AT THE CROSSROADS

A DINNER PRESENTATION AT A CONFERENCE ON THE FUNTER OF CATHOLIC EDUCATION

CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA

ANDREW GREELEY
MAY 1997

1. A survey of major research on Catholic education.
2. Some comments on the policy questions raised by certain papers prepared for this conference.
3. A suggestion that future research might focus on "social capital" in Catholic schools.
4. Remarks on available data sets.

RESEARCH ON CATHOLIC SCHOOLS

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The first published evidence of what Catholic schools were like was in James Coleman’s The Adolescent Society. The Polish working class high school for young men in Chicago didn’t fit the stereotype either. It was in every way a splendid place, for reasons that Anthony Bryk would explaine thirty years later. Between The Adolescent Society and Catholic Schools and the Common Good a trajectory of research findings answered most of the questions about Catholic schools which existed thirty to forty years ago. I cannot think of a single one of them which was not good news for Catholic schools. I will summarize them briefly, usually without reference to details of the findings of particular studies by proposing a series of questions and the answers to them:

1. Are Catholic schools academically inferior? Are they strongholds on anti-intellectualism as Professor Donovan of Boston College once argued?

The answer to that to that question is a flat "no." By every imaginable measure Catholic schools are superior to their public counterparts, even when all appropriate background variables have been taken into account, even, in the case of the High School and Beyond study, previous academic scores.

2. Is the academic success of Catholic schools the result of selective recruiting or successful retention of better students?

Again the answer is the opposite of what those who ask the question usually suspect: in fact, the success of the Catholic schools is strongest among the disadvantaged students (those with academic, emotional, disciplinary, and familial, and who lack a home environment conducive to success). Moreover the success of the Catholic schools increases as these problems pile up on students. Finally, the contribution of Catholic Schools to disadvantaged students does not vary with race – it is present in white and brown and black (perhaps because the Catholic schools were designed, like Coleman’s working class polish school) to serve poor immigrants.

3. Is the success of the Catholic schools, especially with disadvantaged young people, the result of tight disciplinary control?

The answer again is no. Rather the Catholic schools, as Tony Bryk, has shown, are successful because they make greater academic demands, provide stronger community support, and give more personal attention to students – just what the promotional literature of Catholic schools promised, perhaps often with their fingers crossed hopefully. Coleman in fact argued that the Catholic schools are indeed the "Common Schools" in that they did for the disadvantaged what the public schools claim to do but in fact fail to do. He also argued that much of the success of these schools results from the "social capital" they have at their disposal, another way of saying the same thing that Bryk said, a subject to which I will return of a new direction for research on Catholic schools.

4. Are Catholic schools divisive? Do they produce men and women who are more likely to be prejudiced than those who go to public schools?

Again the answer is a flat no. Quite the contrary, those who attend Catholic schools are less prejudiced than Catholics who attend public schools and less prejudiced than all public school graduates. Moreover, they are also more likely to pro-feminist. All of these statements are true even when social class and educational achievement are held constant.

5) Is not the religious impact of Catholic schools less important in a time of turbulence and change such as these decades in the wake of the Second Vatican Council?

The answer, monotonous by now, again is no. Quite the contrary, the effects of Catholic education on adult religious behavior has been stronger in the post-councilor years than before, perhaps because they have the "social capital" of being plugged into the Catholic information network.

6) Are not the apparent effects of Catholic education on adult behavior the result of the parental religious background of those who attend Catholic schools?

The answer again is in the negative. In fact, Catholic schools have an impact independent of parental background even in a comparison between those who attended Catholic schools and those who did not, but would have if Catholic schools had been available. The evidence on how the Catholic schools have accomplished this religious impact is consonant with the findings about the schools’ academic impact – the real effect is less in the classroom than in the social network the schools create.

7. Is not "religious education" (formerly called CCD) an adequate substitute for the Catholic school?

I know of no evidence that "religious education" has any independent impact at all on subsequent adult behavior of those who participated in it. It may be necessary to support such programs, if only to assure the parents of those children who do not attend Catholic schools (often because the church refuses to build such schools) that the Church has not lost interest in them. The case for such programs has not been made, not with any data to back it up. I am not sure, given the argument that Catholic schools create powerful social networks which account for their impact, I am not sure that it will ever be possible to make the case.

8.Can the Church afford the money that it takes to maintain a subsidy for Catholic schools?

"Subsidy" is an inaccurate word. In fact, the proper word, as the Bishop Bill McManus, God be good to him, used to say, funding of Catholic schools is an investment. The extra contribution to Sunday collections of parents with children in Catholic schools on a national average picks up the cost of such schools and those who attended such schools are likely to be more generous in adult life. Catholic schools are indeed a capital investment, bingo with a purpose as my colleague Michael Hout remarks. The reason that there has been a three decade moratorium on Catholic school construction is that Catholic contributions (in terms of proportion of income and hence free of inflation) have fallen to half of what they were three decades ago, with the resultant loss of perhaps eight billion dollars in income per year. Spread this out over then years and the Church has lost eighty billion dollars that it would have if Catholics contributed as much today as they did in the early nineteen sixties and as Protestants do today. Moreover with this kind of money available, Catholic schools would not have to price themselves out of the market and could pay their teachers a living wage. The financial problems of the Church, as acutely as they affect Catholic schools, are not in fact something caused by Catholic schools or even by a decline in their appeal. Incidentally, Catholic school Catholics are more likely both when they are in high school and in college to volunteer for community service, strikingly more likely. This is true even when one excludes the "compulsory" volunteering which is required at many Catholic high schools – a phenomenon which perhaps only Catholicism could produce (and not unlike the forced confessions on the Thursday before First Friday of not so many years ago, a sacrilege which for all I know still continues).

9.Are Catholic schools "worth it?" Is the payoff commensurate with the costs? That is a value question, not a research question. It implies that the church might well spend the money for other and more worthy projects—projects which
the clerical elite will choose of course.

Such a question assumes that there exists a body of wisdom and a group of wise men who can determine where Catholic money goes and that the money expended by parents on Catholic schools will be available for whatever projects the wise men propose to support. Such an assumption is of course false. Close the Catholic school and the Sunday collections go down. Don’t open one and the Sunday collections are not comparable with parishes that have a Catholic school. The pertinent response to this question comes not from research findings but from consumer behavior – the willingness of many parents to pay for Catholic education whenever they can get it. They think the schools are "worth it."

No social research is perfect, there is always a possibility that later, more sophisticated, more insightful, more sensitive approaches may impose greater clarity, nuance, and refinement on a given project or a whole tradition of investigation – and it is the latter that is at issue here. But it is most unlikely that the basic trajectory of the scholarship I have described will be altered very much. There are answers to the crucial questions about Catholic schools which have existed since, let us say, 1950. In every instance the answers are favorable to Catholic schools, so favorable indeed that one wonders how the questions could have arisen in the first place. Their persistence and perhaps even their origins can perhaps be accounted for by the continuation of anti-Catholic bigotry in the educational establishment and Catholic self-hatred. It is worth observing, however, that the reviews of Catholic Schools and The Common Good, showed a decline in hostility to Catholic schools.

It is perhaps worthwhile to comment here that I have no institutional reason to be favorable to Catholic schools. I have never taught in one (save for catechism classes in my early years in the priesthood); I have never been affiliated with Catholic colleges or universities or diocesan school offices; none of my research has been funded by the Church. If I provide this favorable report on them, it is because the evidence constrains me to do so. One expects in the research business to offend those whose institutions have been found wanting in the research enterprise. One is surprised, however, when those who should be delighted by favorable findings want to reject them.

I disagree with your writing on Catholic schools, someone will say (perhaps even someone here present). Or what you describe is not true in my parish. The only answer to such comments is to respond I will not take your disagreement seriously until you produce high quality national sample data to prove me wrong and that, while your parish may be interesting, an anecdotal report about it is irrelevant to the research findings being reported. Only in a group which does not understand social research – and perhaps does not want to – would such comments even be raised. On the other hand, when someone says that what I have described is true in their parish, I am pleased, but not because events in a single parish add any certainty to research findings. After time, it seems to me, the fate of the research tradition I have described is not so much that the relevant consumers challenge it, but rather they simply ignore it. Catholic educators, perhaps for reasons of mass masochism, no longer deny the good news about their work. Rather they pretend that it doesn’t exist. At one point I thought that this was personal: they did not mind good news about Catholic schools so long as it was not from me. I now perceive that they do not want good news from anyone. They ignore not only my work, but the work of Coleman and his colleagues and Bryk and his colleagues too. As I search for an explanation of this odd behavior, I tend to conclude that it results from both self hatred and the intense identity crisis caused by the Second Vatican Council and the end of the theories of immigrant Catholicism (protect the faith of the immigrant).

In any case, serious, quality research on Catholic schools has produced no evidence to confirm the null hypotheses of failure and inferiority which have for so long been the conventional wisdom about Catholic schools. Beyond that this researcher sayeth not. If for extraneous reasons some wish to deny or ignore the findings, that is their business and their problem.

PAPERS FOR THE PRESENT PROJECT – POLICY IMPLICATIONS

It would be tactless of me in the context of a dinner address to single out for attack any of the papers submitted for this conference that I have read -- though I wish that Catholic school research would abandon the habit of accepting a satisfactory a thirty percent response rate.

Two of the papers I have had the opportunity to read, however, are important for policy reasons – those by Professor Riordan and Mr. Harris. Both contribute substantially to the enhancement of the research tradition I have been describing. Professor Riordan with remarkable persistence and resourcefulness has marshaled evidence from the various longitudinal studies to establish that the academic quality of Catholic high schools may well be continuing to grow, that minority attendance at these schools has increased, and that the correlation between social class and Catholic school attendance has increased, probably because of the increase in tuition. Mr. Harris insists that the money is available in the Catholic population to support the schools if there be the will to contribute it and collect it. I should note in passing that as someone who has had to struggle with the data sets that Professor Riordan has used I will certify that his efforts merit a dispensation from Purgatory.

Taken together these two excellent papers suggest that there is a risk that Catholic schools will increasing become elitist institutions, serving the affluent, including the affluent proportion of the minority population, unless there is a major change in the way the schools are financed. For some other denominations this might be acceptable. For Catholicism, I think we all will agree it is not acceptable. Some "liberal" Catholics will suggest that if the schools cannot serve a wider social class spectrum they should be closed – such "liberals" will jump at any reason for closing down Catholic schools. Equality of opportunity, however, is established only in a world of craziness by denying everyone a resource that is clearly valuable. A more sensible strategy would be to follow Joe Harris’s recommendations. One might for example consider the reopened Catholic school at Old St. Patrick’s Church in Chicago, one at which tuition is charged which covers costs and scholarship support is provided for students based on the ability of their families to pay. Enrollment at the school is multiracial and to a very considerable extent multi class.

There are – at a general level – two separate policy problems involved in the question of the high cost of Catholic education, two seemingly intractable problems.

The first is whether Catholic financial contributions can rise from the current 1% of income to the 2.2% of thirty years ago which is also the Protestant average today. The answer of the institutional church to the horrendous loss of income is to proclaim "stewardship," a typical response of the clerical elite based on the conviction if you throw a slogan at a problem it will go away – and you don’t even have to do evaluation research to see if the slogan works. The argument in favor of emphasizing "stewardship" is that Catholics have not been asked to contribute more money. If you believe that, you’ll believe that the Chicago Cubs are going to win the world series. It is self-serving nonsense that dispenses the clerical elite from facing the need of a drastic restructuring of the financing of the Church such that Catholics will no longer be the only lay people in America who have no say how their contributions are spent.

While the folks who prate about stewardship certainly aren’t interested in evaluation research to see if their slogans will work, their project will be evaluated anyhow by the biennial research of the Independent Sector. Incidentally, I would strongly suggest that Catholic educators lobby the Independent Sector to include a question about past attendance at Church schools. I challenge the stewardship mavens to predict how much contributions will go up in five years with their program and will bet them a hundred dollars that it won’t attain their goals. If they give me odds, I’ll bet that it won’t go up at all.

Even if Catholic contributions should go up to let us say 1.6% of income (where it was in 1974) and add four billion dollars a year to church revenue, the question would still remain whether there would be support in the Catholic community for diverting some of that unexpected wealth to Catholic schools. I suspect, in the absence of more data, that the internal sniping at Catholic schools for the last thirty years – sniping which on the basis of the data is horrendously unfair – would preclude that outcome. Nevertheless, I also believe that if the Catholic laity were granted a plebiscite on the issue of more investment (as opposed to "subsidy" ) the schools would win. Catholics, as you may have noticed, don’t vote.

I don’t know how these two problems are to be addressed. I suspect no one here tonight does either. But if this project can make a contribution towards a solution (other than the idiotic call for closing the schools), then your time will not be wasted. Professor Riordan and Mr. Harris have sharply defined your challenge.

FURTHER RESEACH:
SOCIAL CAPITAL

The notion of "social capital," introduced into contemporary social science in great part because of the efforts of the late James Coleman, has become very popular lately, not without good reason. Not only does it bridge the gap between economics and sociology (Coleman 1988, Greeley 1997 )it also provides a very useful tool for analyzing social structure. Social capital in brief is the extra resource for achieving certain goals available to members of relational network (social structure), precisely because of the existence of the network, resources that the actors would not have if they were not in the network. The resources, according to Coleman exist not in the individuals but in the network itself. In his seminal 1988 article on the subject, he cited Catholic schools as a classic example of the extra payoff in educational outcome which social capital makes possible, (social capital generated in part by the overlapping networks of membership in a church community and in a community of the parents of school children).

Coleman sees the social capital resources in the networks which are external to the school institution, Bryk sees parallel resources as internal to the school institution – greater personal interest in students and enhanced social support.

Since the basic questions about the right of Catholic schools to exist have been answered by the research tradition I have described, I propose that, should there be anyone here interested in further research on Catholic schools (a supposition which I do not consider self-evidently true), the origins and operation of social capital in those schools might profitably be explored, both to further human understanding of social capital and, perhaps, to facilitate the expansion of its resources in Catholic schools and in the rest of the Church. The results of such research might shift the weight of opinion in the Catholic community in the direction of the notion that Catholic schools are an enormously valuable resource.

Other research evidence has confirmed the expectation of Weber and Durkheim that there are stronger community ties (all over the world) among Catholics than there are among Protestants. The work of Bryk and Coleman specifies spectacularly one operation of those community ties. If one is to believe David Tracy, this community ethos is but an aspect of the larger phenomenon of the "sacramental" or "liturgical" imagination (or, if one wishes, the "analogical" imagination). I am not altogether sure how one might conceptualize sacramentality and liturgy as social capital. Perhaps the relationships of communal worship intensify yet more the resources available for joint action in a network.

The slow and painful process of research on the Catholic phenomenon has demonstrated that Catholicism has two enormously rich and fruitful assets that are uniquely available to it – stronger community ties (and orientations towards community) and more imaginative metaphorical resources, particularly as they are expressed in communal liturgy. My point is not that these resources (I might almost call them graces) are there and not being used, but that they are there and are operating, however imperfectly, to the benefit, however limited, of the Catholic heritage and people and also to the benefit of those who are not Catholic who attend Catholic schools. It would be folly, I think, not to learn more about how they work. However, in a church institution, concerned mostly about what the Catholic right-wing will say and what the papal nuncio will think, one does not expect much concern about such apparently complex and perhaps unintelligible phenomena. Moreover, one can not anticipate that the Catholic liberal elite, preoccupied as it is with the deficiencies of the church institution, to believe that there is any grace (or, if one wishes, Grace) left in the heritage, especially since this grace, like the spirit(or, if one wishes Spirit) operates softly, gently, and imperceptibly, like the wind.

AVAILABLE DATA

I had intended when thinking about this paper to urge those in the Catholic research business to acquaint themselves with potential resources provided by available data sets. Professor Riordan has elegantly made that point for me. While the gold in most of the data sets are not easy to mine, it is still valuable gold. Even richer veins of gold will be found, I believe, if Catholic educational leaders pressure the various data collection agencies to ask questions about church school attendance. I routinely try to do this at NORC where we are usually engaged in several massive longitudinal studies of young people. Coleman saw to it that such questions were asked in the High School and Beyond Project. No one bothered to do it in the NLSY study. Currently we are in process of producing data from the first wave of an adolescent health study of such matters as drinking, drugs, smoking, sex, eating and sleeping. I have seen preliminary data which I cannot quote about Catholic schools which are very interesting. CDs with the data will be available in the very near future, though the company that is producing the CDs has a history of making data access almost impossibly difficult. One needs administrators here in Washington who will lean on the relevant agencies and determined scholars like Professor Riordan to plow through the data sets.

I have always been disappointed that more has not been made of the three years from the General Social Survey at the turn of this decade in which questions were asked about religious school attendance. In fact, as far as I am aware, I am the only one who has analyzed these data. We hope to ask the same questions again at the end of this decade. One could address the issue Professor Riordan raises of whether there is a change in a broad spectrum of social, political, and religious attitudes among those who had attended Catholic schools. The advantage of the General Social Survey material is that it deals with adults and thus, following Rossi’s rule, measures the residual effect of Catholic school attendance. Certainly those who had gone to Catholic schools at the beginning of this decade were substantially more concerned about justice issues than those who had not. Unlike the other data sets I have mentioned, the General Social Survey home page makes it possible for a researcher to assemble a data set in about three minutes.

I have recently been working on belief in life after death in this country. It has gone up substantially among Catholics and Jews in this century – eighteen percentage points of Jews and sixteen percentage points for Catholics. This finding can be explained by generation in America: immigrants (especially those who were born before 1940) are much less likely to believe in life after death than second and third generation Americans. (For Catholics born before 1940, the increase from first to fourth generation in belief in life after death has gone up twenty five percentage points.)About a third of this generation change for Catholics can be accounted for by increased educational attainment, two fifths of that third by Catholic school attendance. Established to protect the faith of the immigrants, the Catholic schools seem in fact to have enhanced that faith as part of the acculturation of peasant immigrants into American urban society (the exact opposite of what the secularization theory said was supposed to happen as a result of immigration and urbanization). There is a lot more gold, I am convinced, to be lifted off the General Social Survey home page.

CONCLUSION

By way of summary, research on Catholic schools has produced more positive and supporting findings than anyone might have expected thirty five years ago and indeed more than many Catholics and even many Catholic educators are willing to admit today. Further research might well explore the communal and liturgical imaginations which currently function, however imperfectly, in the Church and in the schools and which apparently generate substantial social capital. Such research might facilitate the search for solutions to the difficult policy issues which the Catholic schools face, not as a result of their failure but of their success (complicated by the sharp decline in Catholic contributions). Finally there are data sets, laying around so to speak, that ingenious scholars might find useful in further work on Catholic schools.

I often regret that I ever became engaged in this area of scholarly investigation. It has been a waste of time. Doctrinaire slogans, conventional wisdom, shallow ideology, pessimism, and nonsense have dominated the discussion of Catholic education for so long that I have little hope that mere findings, no matter how solid, will be taken seriously. Certainly my own work and that of the research heritage I have described has had no impact at all.

One, nonetheless, tries.