CATHOLIC SCHOOLS ARE THE HOPE FOR OUR FUTURE

As the new school year begins, I’ve been thinking about how important Catholic schools are to our nation’s future.

Here in Los Angeles, our Catholic schools are making a major contribution to the region’s social fabric and the common good. We serve 80,000 students, which makes us the third largest school system in California. Nearly 70 percent of our students are ethnic minorities. Over one-third come from families living below the poverty line.

What our students are achieving is really amazing. And this story is being repeated in Catholic schools all across our country.

With more than 2 million students nationwide, Catholic schools make up the nation’s largest private school system — and 15 percent of students in our schools are not Catholic.

I have hoped for a long time that our politicians and civic leaders would start paying more attention to Catholic schools in their search for solutions to our nation’s education problems. Because studies over the years keep concluding that Catholic schools provide better educational outcomes at a lower cost than public schools.

Nationally, we spend about $10,300 a year to educate one student in our public schools — compared to $7,000 per student in Catholic schools. And Catholic schools have higher graduation and college entrance rates and better SAT scores — especially among low-income and economically disadvantaged students. Nationally, Catholic high schools graduate 99 percent of their students; public schools graduate about 73 percent.

Despite these impressive results, Catholic schools remain “conspicuously absent in the national and regional dialogues about school reform,” according to a study released over the summer by Loyola Marymount University Los Angeles’s Center for Catholic Education.

The Loyola study focused on low-income students in our Archdiocesan schools served by our Catholic Education Foundation (CEF).

But the study’s findings should be more widely known.

These findings suggest that to address inner-city poverty and related social issues, perhaps the most important investment we can make is to give low-income families access to quality education for their children.

That’s just what CEF does. And that’s why I believe it is one of our Church’s most important social programs. In the last 24 years, the Foundation has provided 120,000 tuition awards totaling $108 million to our poorest families.

Loyola found that every CEF-supported student goes on to high school ...