While public schools closed on fear and politics, Catholic schools opened on love and science
Washington Examiner
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You’re not supposed to quote the Bible in public schools these days, but America’s schools in recent years could have benefited from one of the good book’s most common phrases: “Be not afraid.”
In summer and fall 2020 and even into 2021, the Biden campaign and administration, hundreds of large public school systems, and the teachers unions set fear as their guiding star, or perhaps they deployed it as the main justification for their politically motivated positions.
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Large public school systems remained closed in the 2020-2021 school year, while Catholic schools generally opened in fall 2020 and remained open in person all year. The Catholic schools reopening made a big difference. The latest “Nation’s Report Card” — the National Assessment of Educational Progress — shows what we have predicted all along: Catholic school students have consistently overperformed public school systems since the lockdowns.
The report released last week showed that school closures in the 2020-2021 school year proved disastrous, academically and emotionally, for students and for parents. Not so for Catholic school students, who have outperformed public school students in math and reading in both fourth grade and eighth grade.
Catholic schools have still suffered — after all, they closed for three months at the beginning of the pandemic and had to operate under the shackles of social distancing and mask mandates. But their suffering is much less than that of the public schools. From 2019 to 2022, Catholic school fourth graders saw no downturn in math and reading scores. Catholic school eighth graders saw no decline in reading and a much smaller decline in math.
Some local politicians and health czars attacked the Catholic schools for opening, but the openers were right about the harms of remote learning and the safety of in-person schooling. Opening the schools during the pandemic did not significantly increase the threat of death or serious illness from COVID, and in fact seems to have resulted in better health all around.
These days, defenders of the teachers unions and the public schools will point to the uncertainty and the fear of those days. “In the summer of 2020,” they say, “we didn’t know how serious learning loss would be, and we didn’t know how COVID would affect children or spread in the classroom.”
That defense is bogus. First, the unions insisted on keeping schools closed months into 2021. Secondly, the science in summer 2020 already showed that children were exceptionally safe from COVID.
More damning, the schools and unions acknowledged that remote learning was an inferior product. Matt Meyer, president of the Berkeley Federation of Teachers, resisted reopening in February 2021 while sending his child to an in-person private school.
When the unions resisted reopening in spring 2021, when their safety arguments were running thin, they resorted to cries of “equity.” They pointed out that black and Hispanic students were less likely to show up for in-person schooling and would remain remote in greater numbers, thus giving these racial minorities an inferior education. Instead, the unions argued, everyone should get an inferior education.
In some places, the local government actually tried to close Catholic schools and other nonpublic schools, knowing that remote schooling would cause an exodus from the public schools to the places that actually opened.
Finally, these are teachers we are talking about. Educating people is their vocation. When some parents were too scared to send their children to school, teachers should have led the way.
Of course, many did. Thousands of Catholic schools opened on the first day in fall 2020. Why did Catholic schools open while public schools did not? It wasn’t about resources: Public schools have a lot more money to spend per pupil than do Catholic schools. The difference was mostly about anthropology.
If you understand what a school is for, and what people are for, you’re more likely to make the right educational decisions. America’s largest public school systems, unfortunately, didn’t understand either.
Catholic schools see their purpose as educating and forming children, not as employing teachers. More importantly, Catholic schools saw children as humans in full: hearts and minds, souls, and bodies.
For any future crises, policymakers ought to relearn this lesson.