Parochial school enrollment has plummeted in the past decade

The tuition charged by private schools—which in the 2010–11 academic year, the most recent year for which such data is available, averaged about $11,000 annually—renders them out of reach for most Americans. Just 10 percent of school-aged children in the United States attend a private school. That number has been largely the same for decades. What has changed is the demographic makeup of that 10 percent—and that’s in part because of the loss of many Catholic schools, which have historically sought to enroll lower-income families by keeping tuition low and providing financial aid. What’s more, as Maria Ferguson, who oversees George Washington University’s pro-public-education Center on Education Policy, pointed out, many Catholic schools are prohibited from turning students away, meaning there’s “no creaming off the best and most affluent students.” Between 1968 and 2013, as the number of Catholic schools declined, the proportion of middle-class children enrolled in private elementary schools dropped by nearly half while that of their more affluent counterparts remained steady, the Education Next report found. “The private-school pool is more predictably affluent (and likely whiter) because private schools are usually more expensive than Catholic schools and tend to serve higher-income families,” Ferguson said in an email. “As families of color become more affluent, that trend will likely change as they too pursue other non-public educational options for their children.”

Parochial education has been shown to have long-term positive effects on kids’ outcomes. The right-leaning Thomas B. Fordham Institute, for example, has found that students in Catholic schools exhibit more self-control (keeping their tempers in check, respecting others’ property, accepting their classmates’ ideas, and handling peer pressure, to name a few) than their counterparts in other types of schools. And students at Catholic schools tend to outscore their peers in other learning environments on standardized tests; on the nation’s educational assessment, for instance, the reading scores for eighth-graders at Catholic schools were 7.2 percent higher than the average. Research also shows that exposure to students from different backgrounds—including different incomes—has inherent educational benefits, and that one’s schooling can have a profound impact on his or her worldview. These implications are especially noteworthy at a time when the country’s political and social divides continue to widen .