Catholic Schools

Long a major force in American education, new Roman Catholic elementary and secondary schools continue to open in such geographically diverse locations as Atlanta, Minneapolis, and Orlando. At the same time, schools in such places as the Diocese of Brooklyn, the only all-urban diocese in the United States and home to some of the oldest Catholic schools in the nation, continue to close. As a result, the Catholic schools' share of the nonpublic school population has declined from 53% of all students during the 1991–1992 school year to 46.2% of the total during the 2006–2007 year. Yet, even in light of this steady decline, Catholic schools remain the largest nonpublic school “systems” in the United States. In [Page 147]reality, however, Catholic schools are not so much a system as a loosely linked collection of independent schools. Even as the number of Catholic schools and their market share of the population has declined over the past 40 years, these schools continue to offer an array of options for children from a variety of socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds.

Amid a growing tide of anti-Catholic sentiment, American Catholic bishops, at the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore in 1884, issued a declaration that had a dramatic impact on the face of education in the United States. In an effort to combat anti-Catholic prejudice, the bishops decreed that within the next two years, a parish school should be built near every church and maintained in perpetuity. The council further ordered all Catholic parents to send their children to the parish school, unless adequate religious training was provided in their schools or elsewhere, or unless alternative schooling was approved by the bishop.

Following the council's dictate, Catholic education embarked on a period of remarkable growth as the rapidly increasing Catholic immigrant population was augmented by a seemingly endless supply of priests, brothers, and nuns to staff the schools. This growth is reflected in the fact that the group of 200 American Catholic schools that existed in 1860 grew to more than 1,300 in the 1870s. By the turn of the 20th century, there were almost 5,000 Catholic schools in the United States.

In the midst of their growth spurt, Catholic and other nonpublic schools received a major boost from the decision in Pierce v. Society of Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary (1925). In Pierce, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down as unconstitutional a statute from Oregon that would have required parents to satisfy the requirements of the state's compulsory education law by sending their children to public schools, on the basis that the statute deprived the operators of the schools of their right to due process. The Pierce Court further reasoned that while states may oversee such important features as health, safety, and teacher qualifications relating to the operation of nonpublic schools, they could not do so to an extent greater than they did for public schools. The Court also ruled that the law was unconstitutional because it “unreasonably interfere [d] with the liberty of parents and guardians to direct the upbringing and education of children under their control” (268 U.S. 510 at 534–535). Pierce thus served as kind of Magna Carta that protected the right of nonpublic schools to serve the needs of children.

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