The archdiocese of Baltimore has announced plans to build the first new Catholic school in the city in more than 50 years. After a period of private fundraising, they are making it public as they raise the last of the $18.5 million needed to build the school.
Both the archdiocese and the state of Maryland deserve praise for this development.
The archdiocese is purposely placing a school in the area affected by the riots sparked by the death of Freddie Gray in 2015. With $18.5 million, they could have expanded another school in a tonier part of town or bought interactive whiteboards or tablets for students, but they didn’t. They committed to a neighborhood that needs help.
This extends a great tradition of Catholic schooling in Baltimore. In 1828, Mother Mary Lange and the Oblate Sisters of Providence opened the Saint Frances School for Colored Girls, the first parochial school specifically for African-American children in the United States. It has moved locations and eventually went co-ed in the 1970s, but a Catholic school under that name has been serving the African-American community in Baltimore for 190 years.
Catholics are called to stand with those at the margins. As Fr. Greg Boyle SJ, founder of Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles, puts it, “to create a community of kinship such that God, in fact, might recognize it,” to “imagine with God a circle of compassion with nobody standing outside that circle.” Too many children in Baltimore have been standing outside of that circle. It’s great to see Catholic schools pushing it out to include them.
The state of Maryland deserves praise as well. As the Baltimore Sun reported, a state board worked with the archdiocese to transfer the property, formerly a public elementary school. In too many cities, school districts, and local politicians fight hammer and tongs against any transfer of school buildings to charter or private schools, even if these buildings are sitting empty. Maryland didn’t do that.
In the same Baltimore Sun story, a spokesman for the archdiocese credits the state’s school voucher program, BOOST, for stabilizing enrollment in Baltimore Catholic schools and helping make this new school possible. BOOST provides scholarships for students who qualify for the federal free and reduced-price lunch program (in 2017-18 this was a household income of around $45,000 for a family of four). According to EdChoice’s ABCs of School Choice, vouchers ranged from $1,000 to $4,400, with the average scholarship amount sitting at $2,294. In the 2017-18 school year, 2,659 students took advantage of this program.
For decades now, Catholic schools, and particularly urban Catholic schools, have been struggling with a financial model left over from the days when priests and members of religious orders provided most of the staff and cultural norms allowed for classrooms with 40 or more children. As neighborhood demographics change and tithing Catholics move away, parishes and schools struggle to keep money flowing in. Tuition is too expensive, fundraising is uncertain, and schools close. Private school choice programs help stem the tide.
The closure of urban Catholic schools has had serious negative knock-on effects. In their 2014 book Lost Classroom, Lost Community, Notre Dame professors Margaret Brinig and Nicole Stelle Garnett documented that Catholic schools were statistically significantly associated with decreases in crime in the police beats in which they were located. By looking at patterns of closed Catholic schools, they found that closing Catholic schools increased crime and disorder and decreased social cohesion. Baltimore doesn’t need another empty building or another driver of crime and disorder.
A thriving Catholic school can do a lot of good, and not just for the community around it. Research has continually shown a Catholic school benefit in student achievement, particularly for low-income and African-American students, going back to the work of legendary sociologist James Coleman. More recently, economists Joseph Altonji, Todd Elder, and Christopher Taber estimated that while Catholic high schools might not improve test scores, they do increase the probability of graduating high school and attending college. In an area where college-going rates are shamefully low, this school can work to help more students achieve the American Dream.
The last several decades have been rough for both the city of Baltimore and Catholic schooling writ large. With announcements like the one that the archdiocese made, it’s hard not to feel like both are trending in a better direction.
Michael McShane (@MQ_McShane) is director of national research at EdChoice.
