Catholic schools being left behind

The News Virginian
Published: April 17, 2008

A thumbs-up, thumbs-down assessment of newsmakers here and beyond:
Concealed by the rock-star hysteria enveloping Pope Benedict XVI during his visit to the United States is at least one trend with local implications. Since 1990, more than 1,300 Roman Catholic schools nationwide have closed, displacing 300,000 students, according to a recent report by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation. Among the lost schools is Guardian Angel in Staunton, shuttered last fall by the Catholic Diocese of Richmond after failing to meet enrollment goals. The Fordham study focuses on urban parochial schools, but as Guardian Angel parents know all too well, the freefall of Catholic primary and secondary education is felt everywhere in the U.S. Overstating the impact is difficult. “At the very time when all of us are struggling with how to create good schools in the inner city, we have good schools in the inner city that are closing down,” Fordham’s Michael J. Petrilli told Education Week. The same is true in small towns and rural regions such as our own. For generations, Catholic schools have been leaders in American education, posting stellar test scores, producing well-prepared students and accomplishing it all at a rate of efficiency superior to their counterparts in both the public and private school sectors. The problem, of course, is money. The ranks of Catholics have been dwindling for decades and that has rippled into parochial schools. The Richmond Diocese invested $2 million in Guardian Angel, but by the time of the closing, enrollment had shrunk to less than 100. The Church never has wavered in its commitment to education, but a dearth of students and money cannot be ignored. Easy answers to this problem do not exist. For reasons mostly beyond their control, Catholic schools are being left behind, and it is American education, which already has endured a pounding, that suffers.
So now it is more than looming recession, spiraling fuel costs and simmering tensions in Iran that bring to mind Jimmy Carter, and, of course, this cannot be good. Perhaps having discovered a batch of Billy Beer in the basement back in Plains and feeling the stale brew’s ill effects, America’s 39th president earlier this week took to snuggling with the good old boys from Hamas. Carter sealed it all with a kiss, two actually, one peck on each cheek of Hamas leader Nasser al-Shaer, not that there’s anything wrong with that, except for the niggling fact that Hamas is a terrorist organization with an affinity for dispatching to crowded discotheques small children with bombs strapped to their backs. Many people find such conduct objectionable, including, presumably, U.S. soldiers combating the version of Hamas known as al-Qaida in Iraq. So impressive was our peanut scion ex-prez’s Mideast foray that even fellow Democrats began tugging at Carter’s Ghutrah, urging him to give his Hamas chums the slip. Carter explains his dalliance, which included laying a wreath at the grave of Yasser Arafat, as an effort to cultivate understanding of Hamas’ frustration over Israel’s so-called failure to live up to peace accords. This, he reasons, might help enhance communication between Hamas and its sworn enemies, starting with Israel and ending with the rest of the world. Somehow, the Israelis, not to mention officials in Carter’s own country, did not see it that way. The meddler-in-chief’s concentration would be better devoted to applying hammer to nail on a Habitat for Humanity project somewhere, and avoiding in the meantime the temptation to imbibe vintage ’70’s ale found in the basement of his old Georgia home.
Scurrying to burnish a legacy starved for luster, President Bush has made another in a series of left turns which parallel in number if not practicality those made by NASCAR drivers. From the sunny comfort of the Rose Garden, the president declared a willingness to sign on to a binding international agreement to reduce long-term climate pollutants, with the significant proviso that other countries, such as China, make the commitment, too. This was not sufficient for environmentalist and Democrats on the hill, who want mandatory emissions cuts rather than a halt in the growth of greenhouse gases as called for by Bush. The problems in all of this are many. For starters, the certainty of global warming, contrary to the assertions of many of leftward persuasion, is in dispute, as evidenced by the global chill of our most recent winter. Some scientists now have shifted their Armageddon forecasts to the idea of a coming Ice Age, unearthing in the process of apocalyptic relic from the 1970s. If Earth is, in fact, getting warmer, it might not be man’s doing, but the product of sundry other, natural causes, not the least among them the cyclical nature of things. Meanwhile, there is the pressing need for energy, which America’s abundance of coal — with its tendency to spew the dread carbon dioxide — provides ready solutions. We do not pretend to know answers that only science can provide, but we cannot help but notice science has not reached unanimity on the subject either. Liberals, who espouse a virulent opposition to absolutism, relish it when the topic is the environment. That’s the group the president aims, and again fails, to placate. He should have recognized long ago that so long as reason and restraint are elements of the process, appeasement of the left on the subject of the environment is absolutely impossible.