The Catholic School / Voucher Connection

On Wednesday I spent a couple of hours over at the Fordham Institute sitting on a panel discussion about vouchers and charters schools. You can watch the video on C-SPAN here. (Couldn’t figure out how to embed it directly.) My role was to be the “pro-charter school, anti-vouchers” guy. Other panelists include former Ohio schools superintendent Susan Zelman (of the Zelman Supreme Court case), Gerard Robinson, president of the Black Alliance for Educational Options, and John Kirtley of the Florida School Choice Fund. It was an interesting and worthwhile discussion, although it ended up being unusually focused on Catholic schools. As the event progressed the questions started to come in variants of “Mr. Carey, why do you want to aid in the destruction of these vital pillars of the community?” So, a couple of points I wish I had had a chance to make in more detail.

First, I have no qualms with Catholic schools. My father attended one all the way through 12th grade, as did my uncle, my other uncle, my other uncle, and my aunt. Dad studied hard, won an academic scholarship to Pitt, went on to get a Ph.D., etc., etc. Classic American dream. But if he had been born in Pittsburgh in 2001, instead of 1941, he probably wouldn’t have attended Catholic school. Why? Because Pittsburgh in the 1940s was full of Irish immigrants who looked to the church for guidance and sent their sons and daughters to seminaries and convents where they became priests and brothers and nuns who served as teachers in the Catholic schools where the Irish sent all their other sons and daughters as a matter of course. The world has changed a lot since then, and not because of vouchers and charter schools or the lack thereof.

Second, I’m always struck by how church / state separation issues are framed in terms of the need to protect the state from the church, when in fact the main benefit seems more to be protecting the church from the state. I’m not a religiously observant person. But a lot of people are, and I imagine that serious religious instruction for children is an integral part of their faith–instruction that’s untainted by deference to the wishes of the government or majority culture. And that’s as it should be. So I don’t understand why Catholic school supporters are so quick to look for an infusion of taxpayer dollars through vouchers to keep their schools afloat. Public money is never without consequence. Sometimes it’s directly regulatory, but even without visible strings there will always be subtle but powerfully accumulating pressure to conduct oneself in a way that doesn’t offend the secular authorities who pay the bills. In the long run that will degrade the rich religious pluralism that has so defined the American idea.