News feeds
E-mail alerts
Mobile
Text alerts
Twitter
Facebook
Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
Home > Blogs > Get on the Bus > Archives > 2005 > December > 02
Friday, December 2, 2005
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
