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Nicole Stelle Garnett joins Brian Anderson to discuss the importance of Catholic schools, their struggle to compete with charter schools, and what the Supreme Court’s recent Espinoza decision will mean for private-school choice—the subjects of her story, “Why We Still Need Catholic Schools,” in City Journal’s new summer issue.
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In retrospect, what social scientist have found, that Catholic schools in inner-city neighborhoods have beneficial effects on social cohesion as well as crime rates, should not have been a surprise. In other words, every time a Catholic school closes in the inner city, the neighborhood goes downhill.
Interestingly, while charter schools can offer much of the same academic benefits as Catholic schools, they don’t have that neighborhood uplifting effect! There’s something about the religious ethos of the Catholic schools that secular schools can’t duplicate.