Catholic school survives by going SWPL

The goal of Catholic schools is to serve poor people, but there’s no profit in that. St. Stephen of Hungary on the Upper East Side changed its model to be more like elite private schools, offering French for 3-year-olds, violin for fourth and fifth graders, and iPads for sixth to eighth graders. Now the school is attracting white parents, and there are fewer NAMs:

Three years ago, 46 percent of the students received free or reduced lunch, in keeping with the Catholic Church’s mission of tending to the poorest; this year the number is down to 17 percent.

Enrollment of African-American students has dropped 15 percent; for Hispanic students, it has dropped 33 percent. And the school, which runs through the eighth grade, is noticeably whiter in its lower grades.

Comments

[Rob]

NAMs are only made desirable by lavishing lots of federal money to come with them. The government PAYS big bucks to take them.

The market prefers high investment White and Asia families. When the market dictates whom shall be educated, it's the White and Asian families who put the priority on it, pay for it, and care about the school.

[Laguna Beach Fogey]

Cue the ,violins.

[Camlost]

And I'm sure that those African American students who move to St Stephen start to excel academically when you take them out of the "underfunded" majority black public schools that were holding back their educational achievement.

[JP]

A Catholic school that changes its "focus" in order to attract "half Jewish, half Protestant" people like Richard Sher is doomed as a Catholic school. Ultimately it will "rebrand" itself out of being Catholic at all. The question is, can it survive as a cut-rate essentially non-religious school? From what I can tell a lot of the SWPL parents like the high tuition -- it keeps out the riffraff and allows them to preen about their children attending a "highly selective" school.

[Turambar]

Cant wait to read the Times commenters on this one!

[Forbes]

Yeah, take a peek at the dilettante "Katherine Peck, the entrepreneurial 33-year-old at the heart of St. Stephen’s revitalization, the parents also got a principal schooled in progressive teaching. Classrooms are no longer teacher-focused, with students at desks, but student-centered, with children at tables." This Columbia Teacher's College student-centered approach turns primary education on its head. Apparently teachers have nothing to offer students...

[Florida resident]

I tried yesterday to watch (in pieces) the show by Juan Williams (fromer NPR guy; according to Wikipedia, he is African-American television personality, born in Panama in 1954) on Fox News, about reforming American schools.

He gave not a hint, that something may depend on the students at the "input" of the system. No, "let us reform the system, and everything will be hunky-dory."

Compare to Robert Weissberg's book
"Bad Students, not Bad Schools",

http://www.amazon.com/Bad-Students-Not-Schools/dp/141281345X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1345482257&sr

With greetings to HalfSigma,
Respectfully, F.r.

[Florida resident]

Here is the statistics about the students of Mooresville High School, North Carolina, that was considered by said Juan Williams
in his 2012 / 08 / 19 (Sunday) show:

http://www.greatschools.org/cgi-bin/nc/other/1372#toc

OK, two of my kids graduated from High School here in Florida, with approximately the same statistics of students. It was OK experience for them.

Your F.r.

[Peter]

"A Catholic school that changes its "focus" in order to attract "half Jewish, half Protestant" people like Richard Sher is doomed as a Catholic school. Ultimately it will "rebrand" itself out of being Catholic at all. The question is, can it survive as a cut-rate essentially non-religious school?"

I don't see why not. Non-sectarian private schools have gotten so expensive that there could well be strong market demand for one that charges more reasonable rates even if it's ostensibly religious. In addition, I have heard that most Catholic schools are not at all doctrinaire when it comes to religion.

[Half Canadian]

Are they making this change because they have less money, due to the lawsuits over sex abuse by clergy? They're changing their focus so they can get higher paying clientele?

Unless you want the instructors, and janitors, and builders, etc., to work for free, these things need money.

[Twain]

"Unless you want the instructors, and janitors, and builders, etc., to work for free, these things need money."

Why not just get rid of the infrastructure and teach the kids in the homes of the children?

" In addition, I have heard that most Catholic schools are not at all doctrinaire when it comes to religion."

Don't they take weekly donations from parishioners and give some of this money to Catholic schools that teach mostly non-Catholic black kids who couldn't care less about religion?

It's truly sick.

[Jeff]

Catholic schools do not exist to serve poor people. They exist to serve Catholic people.