Parish Inclusion: A Response from the Field

This thesis reports on a case study of three Catholic schools in the Archdiocese of Melbourne, Australia. It also provides an exploration of the contemporary Catholic school as it seeks to participate in the educational mission of the Church. Catholic schools are no longer institutions for the converted. Today their purposes are challenged by a contemporary demographic which finds little formal relationship with the institutional Church. Yet these schools still hold a strong enough attraction for parents to select them as their school of choice for their children. At a time when enrolments have never been higher, identification with the institutional Church in its various forms has never been lower, a reality which is equally true of teachers in Catholic schools. This situation seems to pose a challenge to the authenticity of the Catholic school, in terms of the consonance or otherwise between purpose and action, between the school mission statement and the ways in which the Catholic school lives this out.

Enrolments in Catholic elementary schools in the United States have fallen precipitously since their peak in the mid-1960s. This paper investigates the factors behind this decline by forming a dataset of enrolments in all U.S. Catholic elementary schools from 1970 to 2020 and regressing these on a set of variables that affect enrolment. While demographic and economic factors play an important role in this decline, religious factors such as the number of ‘nuns’ teaching at Catholic schools and religious disaffiliation also play a significant role. The results suggest that religious factors still have an important influence over school choice today.

The extent to which increasing students' ability to choose between schools can impact their educational outcomes continues to generate significant research interest. I take advantage of the unique context in the province of Ontario, where two publicly funded school systems operate in parallel. I find a small positive impact of school choice on student applications to university. However, most of the impact is in terms of ‘cross-effects’; the most robust finding is that the more Catholic high schools accessible from a neighbourhood, the better the public high schools perform. This is suggestive that one mechanism through which choice affects school outcomes is through competition between public and Catholic school boards.

It is primarily the emergence of new state policies promoting market mechanisms in the field of education that has encouraged research on education markets (Maroy, 2006). In the 1980s, conservative American and British governments, drawing on theories of public choice (Chubb & Moe, 1998), encouraged reforms aimed at reducing the alleged inefficiency and ineffectiveness of the bureaucratic management of schools by increasing their autonomy as well as parental choice (Ball, 1993; Bosetti, 2005; Glennerster, 1991; Uchitelle, 1993). Similar reforms have also been implemented in various European countries for over 20 years (Mons, 2007), often in relation with a decennia-long co-existence of public and state-granted schools. These private schools are most often Catholic or protestant schools operating within a national educational system receiving state grants. The countries of the European Union can be divided into three groups according to the relationship private education has with the public authorities (Eurydice, 20001). In Greece and the UK, private schools receive no public funding. However, this absence of funding does not prevent the state from exercising control over private education institutions. In the UK, most denominational and other schools owned by churches or trustees are considered to form part of the public sector education. In the second group of countries (France, Italy, and Portugal), different types of contracts exist which create a link between private schools and public authorities. Depending on the type of contract, the school receives grants of a more or less significant amount and is freer to a greater or lesser extent with regard to conditions (of teaching, teacher recruitment, etc.) imposed by public authorities. Finally, within the last group, which comprises the majority of countries, grant-aided private schools appear to have much in common with public sector schools. In Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Spain, Ireland, Luxembourg, Austria, Finland, and Sweden, private education is grant aided, either partially or fully, but operates under more or less the same conditions as public sector education. In The Netherlands, financial equality between public and grant-aided private institutions is a constitutional right. The size of these public and non-public school sectors varies strongly between these European societies for specific historic reasons, and non-public schools disappeared in some of these societies as a consequence of the communist regime. [Article's first paragraph]

School choice has been an issue in the education systems where parents are given the autonomy to select schools for their children. Previous research suggests that parental decisions are affected by demographic, financial, and value-related factors. This study investigated variables including: demographic and socio-economic background, motivation, quality of school curriculum, quality of school life, and classroom environment as factors contributing to secondary students’ choice of schools for their own children. The sample comprised 8,265 secondary students from 70 Catholic schools in New South Wales, Australia. Analysis of variance and logistic regression were used to identify contributing factors of school choice. Findings suggested that students’ expectations of schools, quality of school curriculum, quality of school life, and the classroom environments they experienced all contributed to their intention to send their own children to the same schools, after controlling for their background differences. On the other hand, students’ intentions were not affected by their gender, socio-economic backgrounds, or country of birth.