Catholic Education and the Promise of School Choice

By Kevin Schmiesing

American education is in crisis. Many public schools, especially those serving students of challenging socio-economic backgrounds, fail to provide the training necessary to succeed in a modern, global economy. Meanwhile, Catholic schools, traditionally the bastions of excellent academic and moral formation, suffer from funding shortages and lack of mission clarity. While these problems have many dimensions and require reform on many fronts, historian and education policy analyst Kevin Schmiesing identifies the overarching challenge as reinvigorating parental initiative and responsibility in schooling. For policymakers, this means promoting measures that provide maximum financial and legal freedom to parents to choose the method and place of education most appropriate for their children. School choice, he argues, possesses the potential to transform and renew Catholic and public education alike.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Acton Institute
• Release date: Jul 2, 2012
• ISBN: 9781938948022

Kevin Schmiesing

Kevin Schmiesing lectures on Church history for Mount St. Mary’s Seminary and School of Theology in Cincinnati, Ohio, and serves as director of research at the Freedom and Virtue Institute. He served as a research fellow at the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty from 1999 to 2020. Schmiesing is cohost of the podcast Catholic History Trek on Spotify and YouTube and has contributed to Catholic World Report and Crisis magazine. He is the author of Merchants and Ministers and Within the Market Strife and editor of One and Indivisible, Catholicism and Historical Narrative, and TheSpirit Matters. He earned his bachelor’s degree from Franciscan University of Steubenville and a doctorate in United States history from the University of Pennsylvania. Schmiesing and his wife, Anne, have seven children and live near Dayton, Ohio.

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Catholic Education and the Promise of School Choice

Kevin E. Schmiesing

Christian Social Thought Series

Copyright © 2012 by Acton Institute

An imprint of the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion & Liberty

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CONTENTS

I. Introduction

II. Theology of Education

III. History of Catholic Education in the United States

IV. Contemporary Political and Juridical Situation of Catholic Schools

V. Catholic Schools and the Promise of School Choice

VI. School Choice and the Common Good

VII. Conclusion

Notes

References

About the Author

I

Introduction

The United States justifiably celebrates its pluralism. Peaceful cooperation among citizens from diverse ethnic, religious, and racial backgrounds has not always been realized, but it has been the rule rather than the exception. The mandate to find unity in diversity, captured in the nation’s motto, e pluribus unum, is predicated not on the premise that all peculiarities of creed or color must be washed away; instead, it insists that all such cultural and social differences must be respected. All that is required in return is agreement to the constitutional order that forms the basis of the country’s law: in short, agreement to respect others’ freedoms of speech, religion, and assembly in turn.

Part and parcel of this freedom is the right of parents to educate their children as they see fit. Like all rights, this one carries with it a duty: to prepare the child adequately for participation in society by being attentive to technical and life skills as well as moral formation.

Parental Rights in Education

Yet, this right has been imperfectly recognized for some time. Pursuing the goal of universal education, a worthy end in itself, nineteenth-century reformers gradually concentrated in city, state, and national governments the funding and control of what had been a predominantly non-governmental, disparate, and radically local regime of education. Immediately, the move toward unitary systems fueled conflict over a neuralgic point of America’s pluralist experiment: Protestant-Catholic relations. Controversy over schooling was one of the combustible ingredients leading to explosions of violence in cities such as Philadelphia and New York during the 1830s and 1840s.

A modus vivendi was reached when Catholics determined to build their own parochial system. The Supreme Court guaranteed the legality of the Catholic parochial system in its 1925 Pierce decision, and soon Catholics in the United States would build the largest private school system in the world. At its height in 1965, the system was comprised of 13,500 schools serving 5.6 million students across primary (4.5 million) and secondary levels.¹ Tens of millions of Catholics—laity, priests, and consecrated religious—have been trained in these schools; their significance for American Catholicism and American history more generally can hardly be overstated.

Meanwhile, battles over public school curricula continued, as constituencies of many varieties perceived that what they viewed as an appropriate education for their children was not served by a public system that inexorably drifted toward a lowest-common-denominator form of education. Some religious groups such as Lutherans and Dutch Reformed began or maintained their own schools, and parents seeking social status or demanding rigorous standards enrolled their children in private academies.

Thus, the pluralist ideal survived but in a deformed shape. The right of parents to direct their children’s education was recognized in theory, but in practice every citizen was compelled to pay for the government school system. The result was an arrangement unjust at its core. Parents devoted to a particular form of education for religious or other reasons might choose to sacrifice other goods to fund their children’s education outside of the government system. For wealthy families, the choice might come easily; for most, the decision was difficult. The incentive to participate in the government system was strong, and genuine freedom in education remained an elusive ideal.

A Flawed System

We have thus come to the present, a hybrid system of private schools increasingly off-limits to the working and even middle classes and state schools plagued by inefficiencies, inequities, and in some cases, abject failure. By no means does this generalization denigrate the good work that thousands of educators in both private and public systems do every day. Some religious schools strive ardently to keep open the prospect of a first-rate education for students of poor parents and challenging backgrounds. Some public schools provide outstanding academic and extracurricular opportunities for their students. Yet, too many students are, despite political rhetoric and flawed legislation, left behind.

Conscientious parents naturally assert their freedom whenever given the opportunity. School district choice among public systems is extremely popular. Private school spots available through vouchers in locales such as Milwaukee, Cleveland, and Washington, D.C., have been grasped as quickly as they