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Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
Home > Blogs > Get on the Bus > Archives > 2005 > December > 02 > Entry
Catholic schools: Victims of choice
On Thursday, three Dayton Catholic schools announced plans to close. And this is only the beginning. Several other Catholic schools are in talks about merging or consolidating services. Expect more closings in the near future.
Some background that I had written on the reasons why this is happening didn’t make it into the story for space reasons, but this trend is unmistakably the result of the growth of charter schools in Dayton.
Over the past five years, intense competition for students from new charter schools in the city has forced private schools
into the unfamiliar role of competitors and caused a dramatic 20 percent drop in private school enrollment.
Charter schools are tuition-free public school run by private operators and freed from many state regulations in return for the promise of better academic performance and innovation. Dayton has grown into the nation’s No. 1 charter school market since the first school opened here in 1998, even though as a whole their students have performed lower on state tests than most traditional public school students.
Today, Dayton has 33 charter schools and a total charter enrollment of 6,550, or close to 23 percent of the city’s nearly 29,000 schoolchildren. The Dayton school district enrolls about 58 percent (16,552) of all kids and private schools enroll about 19 percent (5,547). That 23 percent is the highest in the nation and private schools have taken a big hit as charters have grown.
The impact of charter schools on private schools started slowly and caught some private schools by surprise. Very few students transferred from private to charter schools in the first few years of charter schools, but a growing number of families began choosing charters for kindergarten. That trend has caught up with private schools the past three years, especially those in the Catholic network.
Private schools, in many cases, did not anticipate they would compete so directly with charters. They believed charters would hurt the poor performing school district’s enrollment, which it did, but thought demand would not diminish for their higher quality product. Yet to parents, the track records of private schools apparently mattered less when they could get a private school atmosphere for free.
I don’t think anybody expected such a direct impact on private schools so quickly. It reached the crisis stage with the decision in 2003 by Dayton Christian Schools to close its two Dayton campuses and relocate to suburban Miami Twp. after more than 30 years in the city. Catholic schools then soon began talks of consolidating.
There are other factors in play. Catholics still continue to move from the city to the suburbs. What you see happening with the schools is also happening with Catholic churches in the city — they are shrinking and consolidating. And fewer Catholics see Catholic school as a must the way their parents did a generation ago.
Even so, when you look at the enrollment data, the connection to charter growth is unmistakable.
Through most of the 1990s, private school enrollment was actually growing in Dayton. For most schools you see the numbers going up, up, up until 1999, the second year of charter schools when eight charters opened. From there, private enrollment had gone down dramatically.
Over the past five years only one of 20 private schools in the city — Chaminade-Julenne High School — saw enrollment rise. Eleven private schools are at 10-year enrollment lows, according to data from the Ohio Department of Education. Nine of 15 Catholic schools had enrollment losses of at least 10 percent in the past two years alone. For school-by-school data, click on the graphic that accompanies today’s story.
This is a big and unexpected side effect of the vibrant charter school movement here. It can be seen as a good thing or a bad thing. For more on those arguments see my debate with myself over the effects of charter schools.
What do you think about the trend toward more charter schools and fewer private school options?
Permalink | Comments (3) | Categories: Charter Schools and School Choice
Comments
By Fatih Kandil
December 3, 2005 10:23 AM | Link to this
I do not think it is fair to blame charter schools, for failure in the field of education. I believe September did a great analysis about the closing schools and the history of public and private school education in the city of Dayton. It is abvious that September sees the big picture. Ignoring all other factors that have direct impact on the quality of education and using charter schools as a “Black Sheep” is not helping us to help our children. I believe chances are higher to find a solution if we approach with more constructive suggestions rather than destructive statements. Thanks,By september
December 2, 2005 7:23 PM | Link to this
The decline of catholic school students in the city is heartbreaking, but I disagree with your reason of why this is happening. I must admit that I am a part of this problem, so this is my story and, I imagine, the bigger problem regarding declining enrollment. My family is not Catholic, but I attended Holy Family School through the 8th grade. When I married and had a child, my husband and I never considered anything other than catholic school for our daughter. We wanted to live in the city because it is where we both grew up. The Dayton Public Schools were failing, and we didn’t even consider them. I loved the experience I had at Holy Family, and we made the decision to enroll our daughter at St. Rita. She started at the daycare provided by St. Rita’s when she was 2 and, when it was time, we enrolled her at St. Rita for kindergarten. She’s now in the 3rd grade, and she loves her school. While it would have been nice for these last few years to save all that money that we have paid for tuition, we felt that her education and her safety while at school was far more important than a few dollars. Charter schools were never a consideration to us because they have not proven themselves to be beneficial. They are failing miserably in every area, from test scores to disciplinary problems. In my eyes, and I would imagine the same for most people that have studied them, charter schools (at least in Dayton) are no better than the public school system, maybe even a little worse. After all that, I will tell you that after the Christmas break, our daughter will no longer be attending St. Rita. This is through no fault of the school. Definitively, it is a result of the declining city. When we moved into our neighborhood (on the border of North Dayton and Harrison Twp.) in 1995, we loved it. Neighbors were friendly, streets were quiet and it was a peaceful place to live. For the last ten years, we have watched the city, including our own neighborhood, decline severely. More tenants, more welfare, more crime, less police patrol and declining property values. It for those reasons only that we sold our house and moved away from the city. It was a tough, but necessary, decision to make. In 2000, our home was broken into in broad daylight. Two weeks later, our car was stolen from in front of our house. Last year, our next door neighbor, who is over 70 years old, was robbed at gunpoint getting out of her car in her own driveway. There are neighbors that we will miss, and our daughter will surely miss her friends at St. Rita. I have to say that I am a little bitter about this move, and I blame it directly on those running the City of Dayton. If the direction of the city doesn’t change, people will continue to rush out. Before I wrote this, I checked the MLS listings for our old street. There are 8 houses for sale there now; all long time residents of the city who, no doubt, are fed up with the same things I am. The more that happens, the more apparent negative effects on the city, as a whole, will become; one of the casulaties of that decline being private school enrollment.By Mary
December 2, 2005 9:37 AM | Link to this
Part of me is just loving the shakeup of the status quo of the education establishment and the “free market” choices families now have. We still have a long way to go to update and upgrade our educational systems in private, public and charter - suburbs and rural, as well urban. An interesting part of the issue you did not address here is this must put additional demands on the taxpayers for education since the switch from private to charter implies more tax dollars. I think this will drive the need to better prioritize education tax dollars for the classroom - something that should have been done a long time ago.