In the Detroit area ,Catholic teachers get paid a lot less . The quality of teachers debate goes to Public Schools.
I went to a Catholic High School 1977-1981 in a small town in Nebraska. My graduating class had less than 60 kids. The public school had a class of over 400. I actually took a couple of courses that weren’t available, at my school, at the public school since they weren’t available at my school. The actual class sizes were about the same.
Year after year, we had higher rates of graduation, lower rates of drop outs, lower teen pregnancy, higher SAT’s. The racial/socio-economic backgrounds were identical in both schools i.e. All White, all middle class. Our school took anyone who applied. The only difference was witch school you went too. I am trying to find out what ‘magic’ element made the difference between the two schools.
Thank you all for your responses and please keep them coming. As an aside, I don’t feel there was any moral difference; we had just as much sex, drugs and rock and roll as our public school buddies. Boy, did we have the anti-abortion thing shoved up our asses though.
I just can’t help but think that any anti-abortion thing is going to work better if you stick it elsewhere.
According to the whispered gossip of the time, it didn’t make much difference where you stuck it.
What makes you think more pay equals better teachers?
I can believe that Catholic schools do indeed do better than public schools. After all, students and their families don’t get to pick whichever public school they attend. They’re obligated to attend the public school that’s assigned to their district. Catholic schools, on the other hand, have to compete with other private schools. It hardly seems implausible to me that the need to vie for students would force them to be aim high and be more competitive.
This is admittedly conjecture, not empirical data. Still, it seems like a plausible outcome.
I think the real difference is that most pupils (at any privte school) actually want to be there. The public schools HAVE to take a lot of kids who either:
- are not interested in learning
0r - actively disrupt the classroom
Having a lot of disruptive, angry kids in a class can really screw things up.
Any school that parents choose to send their kids to and choose to pay for will tend to have better scores because the parents are at least somewhat involved, and they care.
Where I live, in some public schools the parents are not involved at all. You can see the difference.
When I lived in a neighborhood where most of the parents regarded the elementary school as something to get their kids out of their hair during a few hours of the day, I sent my kids to a private school. At the public school, not a lot of learning was going on. With my youngest I was lucky enough to live in a neighborhood where most parents were very involved, and the school was a lot better. And, because the school was better, housing values in the neighborhood went up.
If you look at the results–what percentage go on to higher education, what percentage qualify for scholarships based on achievement, who gets higher scores on SATs–all the private schools in my area, and I assume most areas, consistently outperform the public schools.
Interestingly, faith based schools (mostly Roman Catholic, Church of England, Jewish and Muslim, although Greek Orthodox and Sikh schools also exist) in the UK outperform community ones at all stages in a child’s education.
Here, the issue doesn’t seem to be down to self-selection, as faith based schools in the UK are for all intents the same as other state schools, apart from being partly funded by a religious group, and have slightly more emphasis on religious aspects.
Anecdotally, I think a lot of the difference comes from discipline. My Catholic primary and secondary schools were both extremely strict (for instance, teachers used to wait for us arriving off the bus at the entrance, inspecting boys hair to make sure you didn’t have hair gel, and measuring girls skirts to make sure they were the proper length), much to the amusement of some of my friends who didn’t attend similar schools. The upshot, though, was that troublemakers were quickly identified, and crushed.
What are the expulsion rates like at Catholic/private schools?
Thanks,
Rob
I went to public schools, which were pretty good, then attended a Jesuit university. The university had a really big percentage of kids who had attended Catholic high schools. Most of the kids on my floor on the dorm had done so. They were no smarter than the rest of us, but I was struck with how much better they were prepared for the workload. They had vastly superior study skills/habits.
Heh. I don’t know about crushed, but the fact that administrators didn’t take any crap, period, was definitely important. They weren’t going to baby you every minute, but any wrong-doing was very quickly stamped on just about any Catholic school. You do not mess with the nuns.
When I attended Catholic schools expulsion was almost never necessary. Generally the disciplinary pattern went like this:
-
The administration would come down on you hard until you settled down.
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The administration would come down on you hard until you begged to be allowed to transfer to another school.
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The administration would come down on you hard and tell you at the end of the year that you should make other plans for next year.
There were always a few kids who changed schools over the summer.
The freshman class at my school started out with about 150 people. After one year, we were down to about 120, and I think we had slightly less than 100 graduate. But our school was stricter than most.
handwriting?
i’ve found that handwriting is a give-away of a catholic school student.
Is there a difference in Catholic education between the different orders? For example, comparing schools run by Jesuit priests to schools run by a different order? I’m not quite sure how to word the question so it makes sense, so work with me. 
Robin
It’s interesting to note that the general rule that private schools outperform public schools is also the case in Ireland, where the overwhelming majority of public schools are Catholic. I think the private (fee-paying) schools are somewhat less likely to be Catholic, but I can’t find actual figures. Anyway, it demonstrates pretty clearly that the issue is being a private school rather than being a Catholic school per se.
I think the biggest factor is how much the parents support the school. Who has the ultimate influence over dropout rates or teen pregnancy or drug use or the value of academic excellence–parents or teachers?
If you have active, involved parents who have bought in to their school and who support it, both in person and financially, you have a great school. Doesn’t matter what brand or religion–the parents make the difference. Many Catholic schools have the benefit of a great network of parental support; some public schools lack this. So you can’t just pick a school based on brand, you have to actually do your homework, visit the school, meet the teachers, talk to other parents.
Anecdotally, I went to an excellent Catholic elementary school that was one of the best in the city–outranked only by a laboratory school run by the local university. But my high school was a complete disaster–I’d have been better off studying on my own for 4 years…which is pretty much what I did. My children attend the excellent local public schools because when I investigated our Catholic school, I found it had more in common with my high school than my elementary school.
As mentioned, faith based state schools in the UK outperform non-faith based state schools at all stages in a child’s education. Of course, private schools outperform state school. Whilst it’s true that being private is an indicator for success, in the UK, in the state sector, faith based schools seem to perform the best.
(Of course, “faith based” isn’t limited to Catholic schools, and I’ve used private to encompass private and public schools in the UK.)
Well, anyone who went to a non-Jesuit school will tell you that the Jesuits are the worst (and the Jesuits will say that they’re the best), but that’s mostly just tribalism and rivalry, and I’ve never seen any general statistics on it. I do know that my Benedictine high school outperformed all of the other Catholic schools in the city (including the Jesuit one) on a wide range of objective criteria, but that probably says more about that individual school than about the orders in general.