Study: Charters Hastened Catholic School Decline. Will ESAs Slow the Process?

The 2023–24 school year offered some encouragement for Catholic schools in the United States, with 20 new K–12 institutions opening around the country.

Set against 55 closures or consolidations that also took place — the lowest number in years, according to a report from the National Catholic Education Association — total student enrollment managed to hold steady from the previous year. Just stopping the bleeding is considered a good omen in a sector that has lost more than 3.5 million pupils, or two-thirds of its headcount, since the 1960s.

The sustained drop in demand for Catholic education reflects a combination of broad changes in American society, including the Church’s gradual decline in membership and the migration of many of its congregants away from major cities, where diocesan schools have historically found eager customers. But new research implicates a much more recent variable: the swift rise of charter schooling since the 1990s.

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In a study released in August , a team of academics from Boston College’s Catholic Education Research Initiative demonstrated a clear link between the opening of new charter schools and substantial declines in enrollment at nearby Catholic schools. Between 1998 and 2020, an average of 3.5 percent of students left their Catholic school within two years of a charter opening nearby, according to the paper’s authors. As the number of families transfering to charters grew, the Catholic establishments became significantly more likely to close.

The findings provide the first national overview of a competition that has changed the complexion of school choice over the last quarter-century. Though the parochial footprint was shrinking long before charters arrived on the scene, the sector’s advocates awakened quickly to the danger of losing market share to a novel alternative with plenty of political and philanthropic support behind it.

Boston College Professor Shaun Dougherty, the paper’s lead author, said that the tenuous fiscal position of many Catholic parishes made declining enrollments a serious threat to their ability to survive.

“It seems like the margins of these schools are pretty thin,” Dougherty said. “In general, budgetary management is a challenge for a lot of parish schools, but the loss of income is catastrophic in many instances.”

But if the research paints a clear picture of the last few decades, it will be an uncertain guide to the next few. After years of unchecked spread, charter growth began to slow through the end of the 2010s as political opposition to school choice mounted in Democratic-leaning states and cities. Meanwhile, a stampede of red states has rushed to enact statewide systems of school vouchers or education savings accounts, which provide families money to spend on the private school of their choice — including religious options.

Nicole Stelle Garnett, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame, said that it would take decisive action on the part of Catholic schools to alter their long-running downward trajectory. So many campuses have been shuttered over the heyday of charter growth that dioceses can’t simply flip a switch and restore the capacity they enjoyed during the Clinton administration, when school voucher programs were still a far-off possibility.

“If we’d gotten this much of private school choice in 1999, instead of 25 years later, we might have a lot more kids in Catholic schools today,” Garnett said. “So the question is what will happen now: Will they come back? Will the Church take advantage of these resources to reopen schools?”

Reaction to abuse scandals

Doughterty’s study is one of the first to examine the national sweep of the Catholic education sector across the country, with data collected from over 10,000 Catholic and 15,000 charter schools. After mapping the distances between the two school types, he and his co-authors calculated the effect on Catholic institutions of a charter school opening for the first time within a five-mile radius.

Quickly after being exposed to charter competition, Catholic schools lost about 10 students, or more than 3 percent of their total enrollment. Those departures increased with time and helped drive the unwinding of some Catholic options. For each successive year in operation, the existence of a charter raised the chance that a K–8 Catholic school would close by between 1 and 3.5 percentage points.

Departures were not driven by competitive pressure alone, however. At the same time that charter growth was exploding in major cities, the Catholic Church was implicated in a decades-long scandal involving the sexual abuse of minors. Schools in dioceses throughout the U.S. saw years of decreasing applications , while costly settlements depleted funds that might have cushioned the blow from disenrollments.

A separate paper , released last year by Bates College economist Kyle Coombs, found strong evidence of a link between abuse cases, Catholic school closures, and charter school openings. Gathering news accounts of over 3,000 such scandals between 1980 and 2010, Coombs discovered that within six years of sexual abuse being reported in news media, Catholic schools in the area where the event took place lost an average of 75 students and were hit by an uptick in closures.

Over the same period, Coombs discovered, charter schools — but not traditional public or non-Catholic private schools — gained an average of 50 students, strongly indicating that families who previously favored Catholic education might also prefer the charter experience.

Coombs said that both his study and the one circulated by Boston College were uncovering parts of the same story: At the same time that families were being pulled away from their traditional preferences for parochial schools, they were also being pushed out by accounts of misconduct.

“In these instances, it takes a little while, but it’s not shocking that when one school closes, another one opens,” Coombs said. “And of course it’s not shocking that the most prevalent type of school to open is the type that is the fastest-growing in the United States.”

Further, he found that in areas with Catholic schools, new charters were considerably more likely to open in places where a scandal had been reported than in places where they had not. That trend suggests that charters were being strategic in expanding to areas where students might suddenly be up for grabs.

Coombs said it was likely that charter operators had taken notice of the ongoing migration away from urban Catholic schools.

“When the scandals occur, that’s something that can lead to a drop in Catholic school enrollments,” he said. “And charter schools, if they are looking for places where there’s need, would see that.”

‘A totally new world now’

Notably, Dougherty and his colleagues found, the tie between charter growth and Catholic school decline is stronger in some areas than others.

In the 10 jurisdictions that offered some form of voucher or tuition reimbursement program to families, such as Indiana, Maine, and Washington, D.C., the impact of new charters on Catholic school enrollments and closure rates was smaller than in those without any form of private school choice. The difference is likely a sign that parents’ decisions are motivated, at least partially, by their finances.

Dougherty said that, notwithstanding the “strong attachments” many families felt to their local Catholic school, the availability of a no-cost alternative could prove decisive.

“The potential savings to a family of switching from an urban Catholic school to an urban charter could be substantial, even if they were only paying a few thousand dollars per year in tuition,” Dougherty said. “Getting a few thousand dollars back seems like a fairly large benefit.”

Yet the existence of universal, high-dollar systems of private school choice, such as the education savings accounts that have been approved in a dozen states over the last few years, could level the playing field considerably. Dougherty observed that, depending on the state, the value of an ESA would likely go farther to cover costs at a Catholic institution — the sector has historically offered healthy discounts — than at other independent schools.

The Church has been increasingly willing to embrace new K–12 models, albeit at a pace one might expect of a 2,000-year-old entity. During the headiest days of the school choice era, some dioceses allowed schools to be reopened as charter schools with an emphasis on character education. In New York City and Cleveland, 11 Catholic programs have been administered privately by a charter-like management organization known as Partnership Schools (this school year, responsibility for day-to-day operations in the New York schools reverted to the local archdiocese).

Garnett said she was heartened by the apparently positive impact of voucher-type programs on Catholic school retention, especially given how paltry those schemes were until 2020. Many were granted only to certain subgroups, such as students with special needs or those attending failing schools, and they were not always user-friendly, she added.

Before the advent of universal ESA systems, “the amounts given to families were less, the number of families who could participate was smaller, so the fact that there was any effect is telling,” Garnett said. “But we’re in a totally new world now.”