The Effect of Catholic Schooling on Math and Reading Development in Kindergarten Through Fifth Grade

Abstract

Prior research estimating the effect of Catholic schooling has focused on high school, where evidence suggests a positive effect of Catholic versus public schooling. In this article, we estimate the effect of attending a Catholic elementary school rather than a public school on the math and reading skills of children in kindergarten through fifth grade. We use nationally representative data and a set of matching estimators to estimate the average effect of Catholic schooling and the extent to which the effect varies across educational markets. When we use public school students nationwide or within the same county to provide a counterfactual estimate of how Catholic school students would have performed in public schools, we find strong evidence indicating that Catholic elementary schools are less successful at teaching math skills than public schools (Catholic school students are 3–4 months behind public school students by third and fifth grade), but no more or less successful at teaching reading skills. Moreover, unlike prior research, we find no consistent evidence that the effects of Catholic schooling vary substantially by race or urbanicity, though our power to detect such differences is weak.     

Schooling for Faith,Citizenship and Social Mobility: Catholic Secondary Education in New Zealand, 1924–1944

The increased demand for secondary schooling, which took place in New Zealand in the years after 1924, had important consequences for the Catholic educational mission. No longer was it sufficient to provide a comprehensive elementary system of education that transmitted a ‘simple faith to a simple people’, and a secondary schooling for the educational advancement and social mobility of the select few. Justified on the basis of the need to protect the faith of the growing number of pupils going on to secondary school, the expanded educational mission was also grounded in a new Catholic identity as ‘moral’ patriotic citizens committed to Catholic family values and successful participation in New Zealand society. Catholic secondary schools offered a utilitarian secondary education, which focussed on success in state‐mandated examinations, to the children of parents ambitious for their social and economic success in the world. Nevertheless, there were tensions in a Catholic educational mission that worked for the social and educational advancement of Catholic pupils while aiming for their ultimate salvation and the protection Catholic religious and cultural values.     

Catholic schooling,the concept of laity,and the future church

The Catholic laity currently faces some concerns that are of importance to its future. The current decline and ageing of clergy affects the availability of sacraments and leadership. Moreover, the plurality of views among Catholics on ordination, ethical issues and Church governance suggests that controversy may accompany concurrent increased lay involvement. Finally, in recent years theorists have argued that the traditional establishment of clergy and laity as distinct categories unhelpfully sustains the laity in a passive role. So if the Catholic school wishes to respond to these challenges, it would be prudent to have some awareness of how Catholic school adolescents are currently establishing themselves within the Church. This paper uses semi-structured interviews with 16 Catholic high school students to focus on the questions of (1) what images and expectations adolescents have of the laity; and (2) how they respond to the fact of an ageing and declining clergy. These questions are coordinated so that conceptualising about the laity leads to indicating participants’ assumptions about the basis for any action in the Church, thus illuminating how one might think about Catholic education contributing to ecclesial structures.     

论高等教育发展的治理模式

治理理论为政府公共事务管理改革提供了新的理论视角,从管制走向治理是高等教育管理改革的重要趋势。市场型治理、参与型治理、解制型治理和弹性化治理是当今世界高等教育发展的四种治理模式,对我国高等教育的改革和发展具有重要的参考价值。     

Dual identities: organizational negotiation in STEM-focused Catholic schools

In the last decade, STEM-focused schools have opened their doors nationally in the hope of meeting students’ contemporary educational needs. Despite the growth of these STEM-focused institutions, minimal research exists that follows how schools make a transition toward a STEM focus and what organizational structures are most conducive to a successful transition. The adoption of a STEM focus has clear implications for a school’s organizational identity. For Catholic schools, the negotiation of a new STEM focus is especially complex, as Catholic schools have been shown to generally possess a distinct religious and cultural organizational identity. The adoption of a second, STEM-focused identity raises questions about whether and how these identities can coexist. Framed by perspectives on organizational identity and existing conceptualizations of the cultural and religious hallmarks of Catholic schools, this study utilizes a multiple-case study design to explore the organizational transition of four Catholic K-8 institutions to Catholic STEM-focused schools. These cases demonstrate the particular challenges of negotiating multiple organizational identities. While variation existed in how the four schools accommodated these identities, the most promising environments for successful transition drew upon an aggregative model of identity negotiation, that is, when schools attended to both identities, but ensured that the original Catholic identity of the school remained foundational to all decisions. The least successful identity negotiations occurred when there was a lack of common understanding about what comprised a STEM-focused school, leading to minimal buy-in from stakeholders or when a school sought to make the transition for recruitment or marketing rather than mission-driven reasons. Discussion of the more successful identity aggregation provides a framework for schools within and beyond the religious sector that desire to adopt an additional STEM-focused identity.     

Models for Adolescent Ministry: Exploring Eight Ecumenical Examples 1

This study addresses eight models for “doing” ecclesial adolescent ministry in the United States from both a Catholic and ecumenical perspective. The article offers youth ministers in the field with creative insights to further enhance their ministry with adolescents. The eight models represent an inclusive theological and pastoral framework on three levels that youth ministers will find helpful. First, the study examines theologically each model under consideration. Second, the article provides pastoral insights for integration into the youth ministry. Third, the essay will address the possible strengths and limitations that a parish youth minister may encounter and find useful. Evangelical, Protestant, and Catholic youth ministers will find each model appropriate and applicable to adolescent needs and church demands as they embark on their valuable and important work.     

PLANS FOR LEADERSHIP IN SUNDAY SCHOOL ADVANCE

There is a movement toward “corporatization” evident in Catholic hospitals, Catholic schools, and Catholic social service agencies taking up management structures and other features and behaviors employed by corporations. Many see these practices as threatening the identity and influence of religion as the profit concerns begin to take center stage. This development is assessed from two perspectives. The 19th-century shift in Catholic education was equally radical and raised no less conflicting values in religious identity. The story of Catholic healthcare's movement over the past 30 years from direct control and administration primarily by religious orders of women to mega health systems provides a parallel experience adjusting this Catholic ministry to the demands of the corporate world and re-expressing Catholic identity.     

天主教传入湖北谷城沈垭历史略述

湖北省谷城县沈垭天主堂从清朝雍正年间便是天主教在鄂西北的总堂。它曾在天主教传入中国的历史上具有重要的地位和影响。沈垭天主堂经历了漫长的历史风雨的洗礼，现根据有限的资料，对沈垭天主堂近四百年的历史演变做一个简要的梳理，以求教于方家。     

Catholic women teachers and Scottish education in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

Catholics remained outside the Scottish educational system until 1918. The Church preferred mixed‐sex infant schools and either single‐sex schools or separate departments. In small towns and rural areas the schools were mixed‐sex. Women were considered naturally best suited to teach infants and girls, but even in boys' schools, female assistants were increasingly employed in the later Victorian period. Female religious orders were crucial for developing Catholic education in larger urban centres, but by 1918 only 4% of Scotland's Catholic schoolteachers were members of religious orders. Lay women quickly became numerically predominant in elementary education and were key to implementing the Church's strategy to enhance the respectability of a largely immigrant community through separate schools. It is the contention here that the part played by lay women in Catholic schooling needs to be considered to reflect more widely on the place of women in Scottish education.     

Supporting novice elementary mathematics teachers’ induction in professional communities and providing innovative forms of pedagogical content knowledge development through information and communication technology

This paper reports on the needs identified as important to 27 novice elementary mathematics teachers and examines how Connect-ME, an online mathematics community, provides these supports. Qualitative data were collected using two focus groups and 16 telephone interviews. Findings validate the need for alternative teacher professional development (TPD) models and the value of professional communities and knowledge acquired through technology-facilitated learning. The results indicate that teachers actively seek formal and informal TPD experiences, opportunities for sharing and communicating, and access to quality resources. This study provides educational researchers and administrators with essential elements for effectively supporting novice elementary mathematics teachers.     

Response to Intervention in Middle Schools: Practices and Outcomes

Response to intervention (RTI) is advocated in elementary school as a system‐wide, multitiered model of academic and behavioral interventions. Middle schools have begun adopting RTI models based on these existing elementary models. This investigation into current middle school RTI practices describes technical aspects as well as some of cultural and contextual issues surrounding implementation. The study included multiple data collection procedures including surveys, discussion groups, phone interviews, and site visits. Although many schools reported substantial progress with implementation, they recognized rigorous implementation of RTI posed such on‐going challenges as changes in staffing, curricular realignments, very limited selections of screening and progress monitoring tools aligned with their curriculum, and scheduling of secondary and tertiary level interventions.     

Preservice Elementary Teachers' Evaluations of Elementary Students' Scientific Models: An aspect of pedagogical content knowledge for scientific modeling

Part of the work of teaching elementary science involves evaluating elementary students' work. Depending on the nature of the student work, this task can be straightforward. However, evaluating elementary students' representations of their science learning in the form of scientific models can pose significant challenges for elementary teachers. To address some of these challenges, we incorporated a modeling-based elementary science unit in our elementary science teaching methods course to support preservice teachers in gaining knowledge about and experience in evaluating students' scientific models. In this study, we investigate the approaches and criteria preservice elementary teachers use to evaluate elementary student-generated scientific models. Our findings suggest that with instruction, preservice elementary teachers can adopt criterion-based approaches to evaluating students' scientific models. Additionally, preservice teachers make gains in their self-efficacy for evaluating elementary students' scientific models. Taken together, these findings indicate that preservice teachers can begin to develop aspects of pedagogical content knowledge for scientific modeling.     

Who governs? Academic decision-making in US four-year colleges and universities, 2000–2012

This study compares the explanatory power of two models of academic governance: dual and managerial control. The research is based on characterizations by chief academic officers of the primary decision-makers involved in 13 types of recurrent academic decisions. We examine change between responses to surveys fielded to US four-year colleges and universities in 2000 and 2012. We find limited support for the dual control and the managerial control models in both years. As an alternative to the two dominant conceptual models, we develop an empirically grounded classification based on multidimensional scaling and cluster analysis. In each year we find high faculty participation and management-dominant clusters. The other identified clusters do not map well onto either of the two dominant conceptual models. Given these results, we argue that configurational analysis should be used as a supplement to future studies monitoring the incidence of dual and managerial control in academic governance.     

Catholic education in Zambia: mission integrity and politics

This article provides the history of Catholic state-aided schooling in Zambia for over a century. It notes how the Catholic Church came to view its school to be a pivotal means of church development. By cooperation with the state it entered more fully into the nation’s future by offering high-quality state-sponsored schooling. This proved to engender its acceptance because this is what the younger generation of Zambians treasured. Progressively, the Catholic school faced a major challenge by becoming embedded in a paradigm of learning that ran counter to its religious mission. It will be argued that this dilemma remains and that the future of the Catholic school in Zambia and beyond pivots on a satisfactory outcome if it is to make a distinctive contribution.     

社会关怀与史学旨趣：陈垣的教育实践

追溯陈垣自1898年教蒙学至1929年开始担任辅仁大学校长这30年闻各种教育实践之历程,发现至少有两条线索贯穿其中,一是他的社会关怀和责任感,一是他的史学旨趣。两条线索或平行或相交,最终相交于国学研究,这是陈垣执掌辅仁大学、开始后半生教育生涯的深层原因。     

全球化时代的地方治理:构建公民参与和自主管理的制度平台

当代地方治理是在不可逆转的经济全球化浪潮冲击和挑战下兴起和发展的。全球化不仅客观上压迫、促使民族国家构建富有弹性、回应性和创新性的地方治理模式 ,而且全球化提出的公共问题也决定了当代地方治理的目标和行动方向。公民参与和自主管理是全球化时代地方治理的内在要求 ,是其本质特征的反映 ,同时 ,地方治理为公民参与和自主管理提供了制度安排和广阔的发展空间。     

Writing Like a Scientist: Exploring Elementary Teachers’ Understandings and Practices of Writing in Science

This qualitative study examined the connections between elementary teachers’ conceptions of how scientists use writing and how the teachers used writing during science lessons. Data collected included lesson observations, interviews, handouts to students, and curriculum resources. The findings revealed that teachers in this study thought scientists write for several purposes: the presentation of data, observations, experiences, procedures, and facts. The teachers used writing tasks that mirrored this with their students. The teachers also had a limited definition of creativity in writing, and when they had students write creatively in science it was to add in fictional elements. Implications of this study include providing teachers with better models for how and why scientists write, including these models in more inquiry-based science lessons, and directly relating concepts of nature of science to elementary science writing.     

The funding and future of Catholic education in the United States

The Catholic school system in the United States is undergoing significant changes in size, populations served and the funding models which have traditionally supported such schools. The closing of many schools in urban areas in the last 10 years in conjunction with the rising costs of schooling suggests that unless a new approach to funding schools is developed, the future of Catholic education in the United States is seriously threatened and with it the American Church. This article explores the link between traditional sources of funding Catholic schools and the increased role of federal and state funds. The rise of Charter Schools has added a significant model for Catholic schools to emulate in regarding future sources of funding. Three strategies for future funding are explored with an emphasis on the development of Faith-based Charter Schools and the development of ‘Catholic’ Charter Schools.     

公共治理之道--新制度主义途径述评

新制度主义为治理理论在公共事务治理实战中的运用提供了一种途径,推动了治理理论的发展。制度分析框架及其方法作为新制度主义途径下治理理论的典型,为公共事务的治理方式提供了多种可能的模式。当然,治理理论与新制度主义的结合也存在一定的问题。