Chapter 11: Courageous, Comprehensive, and Collaborative: The Renewal of Catholic Education in the Twenty-First Century

Catholic education is experiencing a serious crisis. The legacy of Catholic schools in this country is being threatened by school and church closings, unsustainable systemic organization, financial difficulties, and church scandals, to name a few reasons. In this chapter, we present the findings from a recent nationally representative study of inner-city Catholic elementary schools, with a focus on students, staffing, and structure. We found that students in these schools are representative of the communities from which they come; they tend to be children of color from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, not the children of the urban elite. We found that these schools face significant staffing challenges, with a revolving door of young teachers and aging administrators from a dwindling pool of potential successors. In regard to structure, we found that the schools that have thrived even in the midst of severe financial constraints were those that created new and innovative structures to provide for the diverse needs of children and their families. If the magnificent legacy of urban Catholic schools is to be sustained, current practices in Catholic education need to change on the school level as well as systemically within and across dioceses. The revitalization of inner-city Catholic schools requires being rooted in the tradition, an honest consideration of the “signs of the times,” and substantive changes in practice. The renewal of Catholic schools demands a courageous willingness to adapt current practices to the needs of the Church in the twenty-first century, a more comprehensive approach to “educating the whole child,” and greater collaboration to coordinate ecclesial and civic resources within and across schools and dioceses.