LESSONS FROM AMERICA'S BEST RUN SCHOOLS

...Washington’s public schools seem to bend over backwards to make sure that students who disrupt the learning environment for everyone else can continue to do so...

...PAROCHIAL MYTHS Let’s take a closer look at the objections raised by apologists for public schools whenever the subject of parochial schools comes up...

...The handicapped also are not strangers to the parochial schools...

...They can expel unruly students...

...But those public school supporters who invariably reply, “We have to take everybod$’ would be well advised to take a closer look at their own backyards...

...The study’s most important finding was that Catholic schools demand far more of their students-and they get more...

...John Moylen, De Matha’s principal, comments that “few people at 15 or 17 know absolutely what they want to do for the rest of their lives...

...even sociologists apparently have been reluctant to venture into the hallways of parochial schools...

...The third group in the hierarchy is the most important of all: the students...

...Students aren’t wandering aimlessly in the hallways...

...The Archdiocese of Washington has a grand total of ten administrators for approximately 28,278 pupils, a figure that does not include the 11,500 students in high schools run by separate Catholic religious groups...

...Teachers also feel that the administration will back them up on important matters...

...cdtblic schools expel their problems Among the dozens of teachers and administrators I interviewed, the belief was nearly universal that even students who were troublemakers in public school aren’t a problem once they’re exposed to the Catholic school environment...

...However, to help compensate for that, parochial schools usually give teachers an opportunity to supplement their incomes through a variety of ways: teaching extra classes, coaching, or serving as a part-time counselor...

...Catholic high schools, which generally are run by a religious order separate from the archdiocese, have a principal or dean, sometimes an assistant, and a board of directors...

...They’re run by the Catholic Church...

...Even the latter is hardly a daunting amount, since a high school student can pay for his entire tuition if he works just 12 hours a week at a minimum-wage job...

...This not only undercuts the authority of the principal, but reduces whatever loyalty the newly hided teacher might feel...

...A miracle...

...Especially in the parochial elementary schools, there is also the assumption, or at least acceptance of the fact, that most of their lay teachers will not make education a lifelong career...

...But if one applies a more conventional yardstick-common sense-any other result would be illogical...

...As for kids who drop out after summer vacation, that statistic isn’t kept...

...As Monsignor Spiers, who keeps statistics for the Washington archdiocese, observes, “Parochial schools have become the poor man’s academy...

...The prevailing ethic is that parents will work with teachers and respond when called about a disciplinary infraction involving their son or daughter...

...What isn’t true is that parochial schools are irrelevant to the current plight of our public schools...

...For example, at De Matha, a well-regarded, all-male high school in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, only those scoring below a sixth-grade level are turned away...

...Particulaily at the elementary level, parents are encouraged to coach, tutor, and supervise field trips...

...They should be imitated...

...For elementary schools in the Washington area, tuition seldom exceeds $700...

...They can lean on parents for voluntary contributions and help in ensuring that homework gets done...

...Another difference between the school systems lies in how teachers are actually hired...

...while their achievement gap with whites actually widened between the tenth and 12th grades in public school, it narrowed considerably in parochial schools...

...Learning those lessons won’t require another blue-ribbon commission, more federal funds, or any more sociological studies...

...Most of the remaining 39 percent expelled only one student...

...The pastor nods his head and the principal fires the teacher...

...Actually, I found just the opposite to be true...

...One might expect that parochial school teachers grumble a lot about these terms of employment...

...At Washington’s Sacred Heart School, Sister Loretta Finnerty told me, “We hardly ever screen a kid out because of academics...

...They’d also learn that when it comes to reversing the rising tide of mediocrity in public education-to use just one well-worn metaphor bandied about lately-parochial schools shouldn’t be ignored...

...As it happens, such schools already exist, many of them in the toughest neighborhoods of urban America...

...In short, Catholic schools have nothing in common with their public counterparts-in fact, they’re a model to be avoided...

...they are also expected to participate in school activities and have frequent contact with teachers and administrators...

...Aside from communicating to the students that initiative is rewarded, the practice makes the parochial school teacher available (far more often) to interact informally with the student...

...Then there are the parochial school teachers...

...In the high school, only the principal has responsiblity for these decisions...

...Administrators would oversee an efficient, streamlined bureaucracy...

...The system’s capacity for not having potentially embarrassing statistics is also revealed in the District’s official drop-out rate of 1.5 percent...

...All it requires is that public school officials and politicians start paying some attention to the schools that are already working-and realize that who happens to run them is the last thing we should be worrying about...

...There has been heated debate over the study, much of it over the proper use of such sociological devices as least-square regression analyses and standard deviations...

...In parochial high schools, tenure is the exception...

...Most students are also black...

...The parochial schools have a very basic rule dbout administrators: avoid them whenever possible...

...The first is that you must be a champion of school prayer and tuition tax credits...

...This compares with an average of $23,000 for Washington’s public school teachers, who are among the highest paid in the country...

...Here in Washington, about 1,500 of the school system’s 2,000 handicapped children attend regular public schools...

...it also encourages parents to take a far more active role in their children’s education...

...far more common are year-to-year contracts that must be annually renewed...

...The purpose of admissions testing, she says, is to “have some way to place them in a grade, because what grade they were in the public school usually isn’t reliable...

...For minority students, the results were even more heartening...

...There are no appeals upward through three layers of bureaucracy to give the student and his parents a chance to overrule the teacher’s decision by reconstructing the incident in the most favorable light...

...Those who’ve spent time in parochial schools, either as students or observers, know there’s some truth to these impressions...

...Such volunteer activity does more than reduce costs...

...Gabriel’s, in a workingclass black neighborhood, is 92 percent nonCatholic...

...LESSONS FROM AMERICA'S BEST RUN SCHOOLS BY DANIELLE L. SCHULTZ The sorry plight of America’s public schools is suddenly making the headlines, with politicians of every ideological stripe offering their various cure-alls-hefty pay hikes for teachers, merit pay, stiffer academic standards, tuition tax credits, more computers...

...To taxpayers, parochial schools offer yet another advantage: they’re much cheaper...

...It’s quite common that long before this stage, administrators will decide the teacher really isn’t that bad, since the whole process can easily take more than a year...

...Catholic schools believe in an academic foundation...

...The nuns in the Washington Archdiocese make about $5,600 a year, but their housing is provided free by the parish...

...In the Archdiocese of Washington, total costs (including all subsidies from the church) for the 1981-82 school year was $717 per elementary school child...

...In Washington’s public schools, teachers get tenure after just three years...

...And with all these applicants, who do Catholic schools often hire...

...Most important, these schools would provide the kind of education that would allow children to overcome the consequences of being victimized by broken homes, racial prejudice, and poverty...

...Along with less job security, the pay is lower...

...those statistics aren’t kept...

...That’s it...

...parochial schools don’t have the money to offer a smorgasbord of electives like Sports Journalism and Modern Bachelor Living...

...In the typical Catholic elementary school, the principal tells the pastor that he or she is going to fire someone...

...For example, few Catholic schools have open campuses, which means the students must be able to account for their whereabouts at all times...

...Nationally, the bulk of the nation’s three million parochial school students are still Catholic, but a steadily increasing number of non-Catholic parents, especially those in the inner city, are turning to these schools in a desperate search for educational quality...

...Still, there’s no good reason that public schools can’t reduce the number of administrators...

...Likewise, public schools could easily emulate parochial schools by giving teachers more autonomy and greater authority to discipline students...

...At De Matha, the first unexcused absence earns three Saturday detentions...

...in fact, one administrator says that moderately handicapped students are often referred to them by the Washington public schools because of the quieter atmosphere...

...Conducted by a team of sociologists led by the University of Chicago’s James Coleman, the study adjusted for the different backgrounds of students and concluded that a child who attended a typical parochial school scored higher on achievement tests than he or she would have while attending a public high school...

...But a more important reason is that parochial schools subscribe to the notion that a general education best prepares students for life...

...The parochial school’s indifference to this credential is one of its distinguishing characteristics...

...A study headed by Father Timothy O’Brien of Marquette University of 63 elementary parochial schools found that 61 percent of the schools expelled no students during the 1979 school year...

...The most exhaustive examination, released in 1982, tracked students in 893 public and 212 private high schools...

...By junior year at De Matha, some students have completed the basics of calculus...

...You weren’t constantly attending meetings, filling out forms, or meting out discipline, nor was the public address system constantly intruding with announcements about assemblies, vaccination shots, or upcoming sports events...

...There is no limit to the number of absences a student can accumulate before credit is lost, though Janis Cromer, director of communications for the superintendent, explains that “after about ten absences in an advisory [nine weeks] a teacher’s red alert bells would go off...

...Since most high schools are run by independent religious orders who don’t receive a subsidy from the archdiocese, parents are also pressed into service as fund raisers, raising money through raffles, picnics, and that most traditional of all Catholic school activities, the chocolate bar drive...

...There is] a distinct difference between qualified and certified...

...if a teacher disciplines a student for misbehavior in the classroom, parochial administrators almost always back the decision...

...for high schools, the figure is about $2,000...

...This was accomplished, Coleman found, with teachers who were paid substantially less than those in public schools and in classrooms that, on average, had more students...

...I look askance at people who have their degree in education...

...In fact, in Washington, the parochial schools are more racially integrated than public ones...

...The public schools here also never officially expel anyone...

...The frequent turnover creates an influx of new blood, fresh ideas, and a willingness to take risks that someone concerned about a lifetime career would be reluctant to take...

...As for high school students, parochial school costs are roughly half those of the public high school...

...The contrast is even greater when it comes to firing teachers...

...cdtholic school tedchers are nuns who m k for practkdly nothing In Washington, as in the rest of the country, only 25 percent of the teachers in archdiocese schools are nuns...

...Almost as many national commissions have weighed in on the subject as the Democratic party had presidential candidates this year courting the endorsement of the National Education Association...

...This approach is particularly well suited for elementary school teachers, where the job doesn’t require scholarly expertise so much as it does tremendous reservoirs of energy to deal with small children...

...Though the principal can make a recommendation, the central office makes the final hiring decision, often picking the least experienced-and hence cheapest-candidate...

...If that sounds absurdly low, it’s because Washington counts only students who register at the beginning of a school year and then don’t finish...

...Finally, there’s the role of the parents...

...Monsignor Francis Barrett, executive director of the National Catholic Education Association, observes that most principals would rather have a teacher who knows his subject...

...In the Catholic system, principals are directly responsible for selecting new teachers...

...They can get nuns to teach at outrageously low salaries...

...This is in great contrast to the public schools, where teaching is treated as a lifetime occupation-and teachers often seem more preoccupied with “burn-out” and complaining about low pay than with their lesson plans...

...The study also discovered that more children with academic and discipline problems were transferred from the public schools to the Catholic schools than the other way around...

...Two unexcused absences and you’re out the door...

...I’ll be frank with you:’ said one administrator, who didn’t want to be named...

...There’s no reason they can’t begin to hire teachers according to how well they know their subjects rather than whether they possess the right paper credentials...

...Students would be well-behaved, alert, and hard-working...

...Those who take the time to visit parochial schools will discover how they’ve managed to avoid many of the problems our public schools have succumbed to...

...And, as anyone who has visited a Catholic school lately will attest, the curriculum of parochial schools-which usually includes sex education as well as English literature-is anything but parochial these days...

...Show the slightest hint of enthusiasm for parochial schools in the company of most people who consider themselves friends of public education and you’ll usually get two immediate reactions...

...Some Catholic school principals are a little sheepish about admitting that teachers leave for other jobs or to raise their own children, but in many respects this approach is one of the parochial schools’ strengths...

...Compare this to public schools, where an administrator must document his case against an incompetent teacher with the same attention to legal detail and procedural niceties that would torment all but the most obsessive of probate lawyers...

...Most of the principals I spoke with, for example, say they almost never have to advertise in the newspaper when an opening occurs because the 40 to 50 applicants they get are more than they really have time to screen...

...Teachers who the public schools woul$-~’etv en consider because they don’t have the requisite degree in education...

...That explains why parents are so fiercely loyal to these schools despite the hardships many must endure to enroll their children...

...Despite pay scales that are, nationally, about $5,000 less than those for public school teachers, parochial schools seem to have little difficulty attracting applicants...

...Elementary schools, for example, operate through a simple administrative structure: teachers report directly to the principal, and the principal reports to the pastor of the parish...

...Parochial schools, in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere, hold a great number of lessons worth regarding in our efforts to revive our flagging system of public education...

...But as to how many of these sanctions were for repeat offenses, school district officials say they don’t know...

...One of those parents is Ruby Bridges, who as a six-yearold braved the violent threats of white racists in 1960 to become the first black to enroll in New Orleans’s then-segregated public school system...

...That’s usually not the case in the public schools, where a principal must prepare a budget justification that in turn is sent to the office of central administration where it’s analyzed, scrutinized, evaluated, rewritten, and subjected to all the other indignities to which such bureaucratic forms are usually heir...

...No curriculum supervisors, no union arbitrators, no strings of assistant supervisors and their assistants...

...But there’s a good explanation for all these traits: these schools aren’t run by the local school board and administered by cadres of education bureaucrats...

...The maximum sanction is a “major suspension” of up to ten days, and last year there were 1,130 such suspensions...

...One parish school in Anacostia, one of Washington’s poorest neighborhoods, has a student body that’s 72 percent non-Catholic...

...Experience seems to bear this out...

...When I asked teachers why they were willing to settle for a lower wage, they continually cited the feeling that in Catholic schools you could really teach...

...Similar patterns are found elsewhere...

...Students “mouthing off” to a teacher are assured of a trip to the principal and those who repeat such behavior visit the principal accompanied by their parents...

...The remaining 500-the most severely handicapped-are contracted out to about 20 private groups...

...At De Matha, for example, 80 percent of the teachers carry an extra class...

...That’s a ratio of approximately one administrator to every 2,828 students...

...Guholicschools take only the cream of the crop It’s an exaggeration to say parochial schools will admit everyone, but it isn’t much of one...

...One would hope so...

...the specific skills can come later...

...in parochial schools, the students receive a much different kind of education...

...Achievement and excellence at all levels would be rewarded...

...During the 1960s parochial schools drew on members of Catholic religious orders such as the Dominicans and Franciscans for 75 percent of their teachers...

...One reason for the stress on academic subjects is practical...

...Just the opposite is true...

...Danielle L. Schultz is a Washington, D.C., writer...

...Washington’s public schools have 421 administrative and supervisory personnel (not including principals or in-school administrators) for 91,509 students, a ratio of one administrator to every 217 students...

...PEDAGOGICAL PILGRlMlS So Catholic schools provide as good-if not better-education, even though nationally they pay teachers less, have more students per class, and offer a much more limited curriculum...

...And parochial schools enjoy something public schools obviously never can: parents who are so concerned about their child’s education that they’re willing to shell out their hard-earned cash to pay for it...

...Of course, there will be warnings to the teacher and discussions up to this point, but when it’s time to make the move, it can be made immediately...

...Walk into these other schools and the first thing you notice is how clean they are...

...As for the severely and multiply handicapped, most Catholic schools are just too small to meet their special needs...

...even if it means a slightly higher dropout rate, the interests of those children who desire to learn should come first, not second...

...Washington’s public school system costs around $3,000 per year for an elementary school child...

...Barrett observes, “Certificates are a farce...

...Yet for all the controversy, most of us would agree on what a good school should look like...

...Theoretically, this can be accomplished in about ten minutes...

...Working conditions for parochial teachers also differ in some important ways...

...cdtholic schools are just for cdtholics Here in Washington, the majority of parochial school students aren’t even Catholic...

...No doubt you’ll be even more skeptical when I tell you that these schools operate on about one-quarter the money per pupil as most of the other schools in Washington...

...Though the threat of expulsion is employed far more often than the reality, students know that it’s a possibility not to be trifled with...

...not brand-new clean, as many of the buildings are quite old, but free of graffiti and of junk in the halls...

...Then the superintendant must review the previous decisions in similar cases and factor in general political considerations to determine whether firing the teacher is worth all the effort...

...Coleman found, for example, that students in parochial schools are 50 percent more likely to have more than one hour of homework a night...

...Perhaps the most enduring stereotype is that parochial schools are filled with authoritarian nuns and priests who induce large amounts of guilt on matters ranging from sex to politics...

...But there the similarity ends...

...But the studies that do exist suggest that students in parochial schools do just as well-if not better-than those in public schools...

...The second is that Catholic schools are, well, different...

...In a Catholic high school, it’s difficult to graduate with less than four years’ worth of English, three of math, and two of science...

...Today, 75 percent are lay teachers and many of them aren’t even Catholic...

...And only 34 percent of public school students are enrolled in an academic program, compared to 70 percent in parochial schools...

...Catholic schools certainly are different, and some of their traits obviously can’t be duplicated in the public schools...

...Whether you consult sociological studies or visit parochial classrooms, one thing is particularly striking: parochial school students are as diverse as those in the public schools...

...Anyone willing to sit six months learning about the proper use of audiovisual equipment ought to have his head examined...

...They can take the cream of the crop...

...The secret of the Catholic school’s success lies in its approach to the major players in the educational hierarchy-the administrators, the teachers, the students, and the parents...

...Just two or three disruptive students can ruin the educational atmosphere for everyone in the class...

...There are no guards, no chains on the doors, no cigarette smoke coming out of the bathrooms...

...Skeptical...

...O’Brien’s study, for example, found that a third of the children in his sample came from single-parent families, and 15 percent came from families who lived below the poverty line...

...Catholic school admissions tests are nowhere near as rigorous as one might think...

...I’ve visited many right here in Washington, D.C., a city whose public schools may have been what the National Commission on Excellence had in mind when it likened our public education system to an act of war by a foreign power...

...Compared to public education, a Catholic one looks very cheap indeed...

...Unlike principals in public schools, those in parochial elementary schools will often substitute for ill or absent teachers, thereby helping to reduce costs...

...Start at the top of the organizational pyramid with the administrators...

...catholicschoolsproerideaninferioreducdtion There are few studies that directly compare the achievement of students in Catholic and public schools...

...All those administrators, remember, have to have something to do...

...De Matha, with 930 male students, expels about four or five per year...

...For parents, the education Catholic schools provide clearly is their most important trait...

...they’re attentively sitting at their desks as enthusiastic teachers give their lessons...

...One of the largest contractors, with 84 students, is the Kennedy Institute, which has close ties to-who else?-the Catholic Church...

...One priest with whom I spoke had expelled only one student in 25 years (for striking a teacher...

...Upset about the poor education her three children were receiving in the schools she’d worked so hard to integrate, Bridges placed them in parochial schools...

...Teachers would be satisfied, competent, and dedicated...

...If anything, applicants with an education degree might be well advised to omit that fact when they’re applying for a parochial school job...

...So what does all this add up to...

...After compiling the evidence, the principal must then consult with the attorney for the school board, who will review the file to make sure documentation is sufficient to stand up to arbitration hearings and possible court challenges...

...Public schools don’t need to grant tenure to nearly everyone, or reward teachers according to seniority rather than merit...

...No more than the copying machine that Brother Dominic uses in those Xerox commercials...

...The exact number of non-Catholics is 51 percent...

...The next important link in the organizational chain is the principal...

...The major reason parents gave for sending their children to these inner-city parochial schools was not religion but the quality of education...

...Lay teachers in the elementary school typically earn about $14,000 a year, while high school teachers average around $20,000...

...Parents would actively participate as volunteers in school activities...