Hence, the Catholic Education Research blog. The goal of this blog is to encourage thoughtful and lively debate about what research on Catholic education can do, should do, and must do to help Catholic schools in the United States and elsewhere survive now and in the future. What topics should be explored? What are the priorities? Who should the participants be? What kinds of methods are appropriate? Who is the audience for Catholic education research? What makes research on the issues, processes, priorities, and outcomes of Catholic schools different from those of other schools?
In short, why bother?
One reason comes immediately to mind.
The Catholic community has an obligation and an interest in supporting the spiritual, intellectual, emotional, and social development of Catholic youth. However, demographic trends, including an increasing number of Hispanic families seeking Catholic education, along with financial realities - the rising costs of Catholic education - combine in unusual ways to create both challenges and opportunities. Catholic schools have an important opportunity to serve Catholic immigrants and the mainstream population alike, but they are challenged to provide equal opportunities for members of different populations to gain access to Catholic schools. Research on the needs of students and their families and strategies for meeting those needs seems appropriate at this critical juncture in the history of Catholic schools in the United States.
Research into these topics, and not just discussion, is important because Catholic schools, like all schools, serve parents increasingly interested in the "value add" of the educational experiences their children have. Those parents are also increasingly holding educational institutions - Catholic or not - accountable for meeting the standards they promise. Families might be committed to Catholic education in principal and on the basis of their values, but if faced with the enticing alternatives of private and public schools that often offer more and different resources, the decision to send children to Catholic school becomes more complicated.
What the added value of Catholic education "looks like" might be a good place to start a research agenda. Such research might take many different forms. Possible broad starting points for research questions could include:
- What are the priorities of Catholic and non-Catholic families who send their students to Catholic schools?
- How is service learning enacted in Catholic schools, and what benefits does service learning have for students?
- Does the Catholic identity of a school contribute to students' moral development?
Of course, these topics have been explored in dissertations and in Catholic Education: A Journal of Research and Practice. But a structured dialogue about the research questions of interest to Catholic schools is still in its infancy.
In the posts in this blog, scheduled once a week, current research and possible research questions in the future will be explored in the hopes that the dialogue here can help the young field begin to toddle along to its next stage.
3 comments:
Bill - Thanks for starting the conversation. I think this is a terrific idea that could be a valuable resource for those of us interested in studying Catholic schools.
One additional resource for this conversation is Notre Dame's report on its Presidential Task Force on Catholic Schools.
My own research interests relate to the demographic trends you mentioned. Catholic schools in the US emerged in the 19th century to serve the needs of a growing Catholic immigrant community that wasn't entirely welcome in the established political, social, cultural, religious, or educational spheres. Today we're seeing a similar rejection of another large wave of Catholic immigrants, this time largely from Mexico and other Latin American countries.
Catholic schools played an important role for the Irish, Germans, Poles, Italians, Slovenians, Bohemians, Lithuanians and others who arrived 100 years ago - My interest in Catholic schools focuses on a question inspired by this history: what role might they play for the Mexicans who have been arriving over the past few decades?
For those interested in this question, there are some really interesting studies published by the Institute for Latino Studies at Notre Dame that focus on the state of Latino Chicago. One question we might consider in this forum - what role can Catholic schools play for today's immigrant communities?
Thanks Christian and Bill for your comments! I also hope that this blog will provide fertile ground for fruitful conversation and clarification of research ideas.
Another area of research critical to the survival of Catholic schools is their staffing as this relates to their financial/organizational viability. Indeed, many of us have witnessed the mass closings of Catholic schools in recent years, especially in urban settings.
As the Presidential Task Force on Catholic Schools report (referenced by Christian) emphasized, a foreboding set of challenges currently plague Catholic schools. Risking oversimplification, many of these challenges are due primarily to financial woes caused by the critical transition in staffing from predominantly vowed-religious to lay persons that occurred during the second half of the twentieth century.
My research interests are focused on teacher retention in Catholic schools, and the paradoxical finding that many of the same schools that are commonly thought of as having high teacher satisfaction, positive collegial interaction, and close-knit communities, tend to also have the highest rates of teacher attrition. Low salaries are often assumed to be the primary culprit. Because teacher turnover is detrimental to student learning and the culture of commitment in a school, it is clearly a serious problem.
As such, critical research questions ought to tackle the career choices of Catholic school teachers--their motivations for choosing Catholic schools, for staying in Catholic schools, and for leaving Catholic schools. This strain of research could also be compared to motivations for choosing Catholic schools among parents, students, and administrators.
In asking, "Why choose a Catholic school?" we also venture into related research strains, i.e., school choice, accountability (to parents and community), perceived academic excellence of Catholic schools, Catholic identity, provision of a living-wage for teachers, financial accessibility of Catholic schools to certain financially-challenged demographic groups, etc.
Certainly, Catholic schools stand out as unique for their oft cited higher incidence of intergenerational closure, dense social capital, collegiality, strong academic focus on core subjects, student engagement and teacher commitment, high teacher expectations, decentralized governance, communal organization, shared values and mission, strong student discipline, and propensity toward the common school effect (See Bryk et. al., 1993; Coleman et. al, 1982; Coleman & Hoffer, 1987; Hunt, et. al. 2004). While these are certainly reasons to celebrate, its refreshing to see so many addressing the crisis faced by Catholic schools head-on. Its exciting to be connected (through this blog) to others dedicated to investigating the many successes of Catholic schools over the years, as well as the many challenges. Glad to be a part of the conversation!
I'd like to echo Christian's statement, and I like two things that Bill talked about: the value add, and service learning.
Because Catholic schools are as diverse as the students who attend them, I think one of our greatest challenge is to provide a nuanced answer to the question of value add. I think it is important investigate what the comparative advantage of each type of Catholic school will be, for several types of student populations. I'd be interested in looking at this interaction effect between schools and student populations.
Second, I think service learning research holds real promise for building a Catholic identity in schools for two reasons: its clearly an effective intervention, and the science of studying it is not very advanced. I'm excited about the possibilities of really investigating this topic in the future.
I'm looking forward to this summer -
David
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