From Supreme Court justices to pop stars, from civil rights advocates to the leader of the largest public-school system in the nation, New York City’s Catholic schools have a long history of educating a diverse group of students — many of whom have grown into pillars of the black and Hispanic communities.
A new report warns that, due to declining enrollment and a “crisis” of school closures, that tradition is now at risk.
While there are multiple causes for the decline in Catholic school enrollment – including upwardly mobile immigrant populations moving to suburban communities, changing attitudes among Catholics regarding public schooling, fewer clergy and members of religious communities to staff schools, increased Catholic school operation costs, and an increase in tuition-free alternatives such as the growth of tuition-free public charter schools – a major factor in the decline has been lower- and middle-income households increasingly unable to afford tuition.
In New York, an array of private scholarship foundations has sprung up to try to tackle that last factor: The fact that low-income and working-class families often struggle to afford tuition at private and parochial schools.
Those efforts are documented in a separate report, also published recently by the Invest in Education Foundation. Over the past two decades, these private, non-religious philanthropic organizations have funded $290 in scholarships. That hasn’t been enough to stop the enrollment decline.
But more importantly, it hasn’t kept up with the demand from families who may otherwise have chosen private schools for their children.
Despite the growth in the number of scholarship programs in New York, the widespread demand for the educational opportunities they provide is well beyond their limited resources, demonstrating a need for even more scholarships to benefit students. New York leaders would be wise to create greater incentives for individuals and businesses to make charitable donations for K-12 scholarships to benefit the state’s low- and middle-income student populations.
A tax credit program, which allows individuals or companies to lower their tax bills when they donate to scholarship funds, could help the existing philanthropy go further, allowing more low-income and middle-class families to access private school choice.
The push for such a program in New York has picked up some political momentum, but has repeatedly died in the state Legislature.
The goal of publicly supported private school choice programs is not to preserve a specific type of institution — Catholic school or otherwise. It’s to help close the gap between the schooling options families want, and those that are within their means.
Step Up For Students, which publishes this blog, is a nonprofit that helps administer tax credit scholarships in Florida.
