This might be the future of Catholic education: charter scools where religion is allowed.  Paul Moses has a great bit of refleciton/reporting on this at Commonweal’s blog.  He’s ambivalent about this at best, pointing out that Catholic schools are often able to resist fads much better than their public counterparts.  He’s not sold on charter schools yet, and is worried that this latest incarnation will hurt Catholic schools even more, rather than save them.  For me, I’m sad to see Catholic schools go (I taught in a Brooklyn Catholic school for three years) but I’m pretty sure this is the only chance we’ve got; either this, or the Cristo Rey model or the NativityMiguel schools, both Jesuit and both pretty fantastic.  Anyways, here’s Paul:

I would add that there is much the mayor and other public officials can do if they really want to save Catholic schools. For example, during Bloomberg’s mayoralty, public schools have stopped Catholic high schools from recruiting applicants at high-school information nights held in middle schools.  On the state level, Governor David Paterson recently pulled back from a plan to cut a program that provided $55 million a year to nonpublic schools to compensate for complying with state mandates to record and report attendance. But although money was budgeted in previous years, it was often not paid out. The public education bureaucracy can be quite hostile to Catholic and other nonpublic schools.

Bishop DiMarzio noted that Catholic Charities provides extensive community service, and said that the charter schools would fall within that tradition of service.  Others, such as the authors of a study by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, also have suggested  turning  some  inner-city Catholic schools into charter schools.

The problem is that this may hasten the demise of even more urban Catholic schools. And, contrary to what Mayor Bloomberg says, the charter schools are far from a proven success. One of the great strengths of the Catholic school system is that it has resisted the fads that sweep through public education. And if it should turn out a few years down the line that charter schools were just one more false hope, what  will the alternative be if the Catholic schools have closed?