Catholic Schools Succeed Where Public Schools Fail. Why?

Recently released results on the National Assessment for Educational Progress, administered in most states, showed that Catholic school students scored much higher than students in the public schools.

“On the 2024 NAEP eighth-grade reading test, Catholic-school students scored 20 points higher than public school students,” reports Lance Izumi, senior director of the Center for Education at the Pacific Research Institute, and author of the 2024 PRI book The Great Classroom Collapse: Teachers, Students, and Parents Expose the Collapse of Learning in America’s Schools. “On the eighth-grade math test, Catholic-school eighth graders scored 21 points higher than their public-school peers.”

Izumi also notes in a new article at PRI:

• in Catholic schools and regular public schools with similar proportions of low-income students, Catholic-school students, on average, scored two grade levels above their public-school counterparts.
• Black students at Catholic schools, on average, were nearly one-and-a-half grade levels aheadof Black students in traditional public schools.
• Hispanic Catholic-school students significantly outscore Hispanic public-school students, they also outscored the category of all public-school students.

“If all Black students performed at the level of Black Catholic-school students, the racial achievement gap in reading between Black public-school students and the category of all public-school students would be eliminated completely and would be reduced by two-thirds in math.

“It is often claimed that private schools perform better than public schools because they cherry-pick students,” Izumi told the Globe. “However, one of the key results on the NAEP is how much better Black and Hispanic students attending Catholic schools perform compared to Black and Hispanic students in public schools. So in an apple-to-apple comparison of demographic groups, Catholic school students do achieve at higher levels than their similar peers in the public schools. So one can conclude that Catholic schools are simply doing a better job of educating our children.”

Izumi’s article continues:

Overwhelming research shows that instruction based on phonics, where students sound out letters and put the sounds together to make words, is the most effective way to teach reading.  It is therefore unsurprising then that most Catholic schools emphasize phonics.

Stephen Marositz, who served as a top education official at the New York Archdiocese, has said, “The ‘return to phonics’ is a foreign concept for us because it never left.”  Archdiocesan standards, he noted, have consistently mandated phonics instruction.

“These NAEP results also underscore the importance of how basic subjects are taught. Catholic schools are much more likely to emphasize research-proven traditional teaching methods like phonics rather than the failed progressive methods often used in the public schools. As opposed to public schools, Catholic schools, as private schools, have to respond to the demand of their consumers and have to provide an effective education for children. The public schools, which often have a near monopoly on providing education, have little incentive to offer effective instruction or improve their performance. This difference emphasizes the need for school-choice mechanisms so parents can choose the best education possible for their children.”

Remember when public schools responded to the demand of their consumers and provided an effective education for all children?

Izumi also addresses the Catholic grading system:

Catholic schools often have more rigorous grading and academic standards than many public schools.

For example, the successful Cristo Rey network of urban Catholic high schools, uses a strict grading scale where 90 to 100 points equals an A, 80 to 89 equals a B, 70 to 79 is a C, and anything from 69 and below is an F.

Contrast that scale with the progressive equity grading craze in public schools, where, for example, the San Francisco school district proposed that anything above an 80 would be an A and anything above a 41 would be a C.

Most of us grew up with the “strict” grading scale where 90 and above was an A, and anything below 69 was a D or F grade.

Izumi says “with the inclusion of a federal school-choice scholarship program in the recently enacted ‘One Big Beautiful Bill,’ plus the surge in states implementing school-choice programs such as education savings accounts for parents to use for expenses such as private school tuition, more families will be able to access higher performing Catholic schools than ever before.  That is a development that gives hope to our children and for America’s future.”