The Kids Are Not Alright

I sometimes wonder how my life would have been different had I not gone to Catholic schools. No this is not just me waxing sentimental, a friend of mine recently showed me an article extolling the virtues of the American Catholic school system for turning out students with higher test scores, while spending considerably less per student than the Public School System. As a 13-year veteran of the Catholic school system, it is not at all surprising to me that the average student from an American Catholic school scores higher on their SAT's and/or ACT's than an average student in the same grade at a Public School- the question is whether or not this is due to the curriculum and structure of Catholic education versus Public education, or some other lurking variable.

Speaking from my own experience, I lean towards the latter answer. The size of my class between Kindergarten and my Senior year of High School generally fluctuated between 12 to 14 students. Among those, there were a few braniacs (including yours truly), a large "middle class," if you will, and a few who consistently struggled- just as I have heard that it is in Public Schools. The difference, however, is at the bottom. While some students in my class struggled mightily, their parents obviously cared enough about their education to send them to a Catholic school that they had to pay good money for. While these students may or may not have cared about their own education, their parents weren't about to throw the money they paid to send them to Catholic Schools down the drain. Therein lies the difference. Unfortunately for our society and our public school system, too many disadvantaged children enrolled in Public Schools have parents who are utterly apathetic about what kind of education their children get, or worse, feel threatened and demean children who strive to succeed where they may have failed. With no real motivation to put an effort towards their own education besides personal ambition, which is almost never matured fully enough in a grade school child to have much of an effect, these kids often fall behind their classmates in elementary school where study habits are developed, and never catch up- beginning a tragic trek to, at best, mediocrity and, at worst, crime, for a child once embedded with all the potential of an Albert Einstein, a Yo-Yo Ma, or a Barack Obama.

If there is a lesson to be learned from Catholic Schools' higher test scores than Public Schools', it is that children who have someone that cares about them tend to do better than children who do not. The students in my class at Holy Cross Catholic Academy in Amarillo, Texas, did not get higher average scores on the SAT than students at nearby Caprock High because we went to Mass every week and they didn't, or because we had to wear uniforms and they didn't, or even because we were 1 of 12 while they were 1 of 1200- we got higher average scores because our average wasn't brought down by kids who were never given a reason to try and thus never did. Until poverty is fixed in this country, education never will be.