America’s Oldest School Model May Be Its Future

Every so often a nation becomes so intent on finding something new that it forgets to notice what has quietly worked all along.

The latest National Assessment of Educational Progress—the Nation’s Report Card—showed that millions of students have yet to recover from pandemic-era learning losses, and fewer than one-third of young Americans are proficient in reading or math.

But there’s a big silver lining in this cloud that almost no one is talking about.

For much of the 20th century, Catholic schools took the children of factory workers, dockworkers, and new immigrants—Italians, Irish, Poles, Puerto Ricans—and gave them an affordable education that launched them into the middle class and beyond. Catholic schools were, by almost any measure, one of the greatest engines of upward mobility in the nation’s history.

Then came the reckoning. Beginning in the 1960s, urban Catholic schools lost the religious vocations—the nuns and priests—that had staffed them and thus had to absorb rising labor costs even as demographics shifted beneath them. Thousands of schools closed. Many observers concluded that Catholic education’s most consequential chapter had ended.

They were wrong.