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.
