After years of negative headlines about declining enrollment and closures, Catholic school boosters have had a lot to celebrate. The public school exodus that began in 2020 has meant increased enrollment for many Catholic schools around the country. According to the National Catholic Education Association (NCEA) data for the 2023–2024 school year, twenty new Catholic schools were founded last year.
But this is qualified good news. The NCEA also reported that more than twice as many Catholic schools closed or consolidated in the same period. And the enrollment growth has been lopsided, taking place primarily in Southern states, even as communities in the traditional Catholic strongholds of the Northeast continue to contract steadily. Observers often point to the decline of religious orders in the United States as a major reason for the decline of Catholic schools in recent decades. Among the ways the presence of fewer religious has impoverished Catholic education, it has arguably had a particular ripple effect on administration. Diocesan Catholic schools, for all their many wonderful qualities (my own children have attended several), cannot replace religious orders’ charisms and rules of life. Religious orders’ distinctive characteristics provided a degree of standardization in the way they ran Catholic schools that did not have to be drawn up from scratch. With a few adaptations here and there, a Christian Brothers school was a Christian Brothers school, no matter where in the country you lived. Today, the administration of US Catholic schools is lopsided: The NCEA’s 2023–2024 data shows that 80 percent of Catholic schools have governing boards or advisory councils—which means that 20 percent have neither. This of course places a heavy administrative burden on principals and pastors, who now are the focus of single-point, often ad hoc decision making for an entire school. It’s also inefficient—and inefficiency rarely makes things cheaper.
Vouchers and scholarships can be effective ways to lessen the cost of a Catholic education. But they don’t address a broader systemic issue—namely, that more often than not, there is no system. A nationwide network of Jewish day schools, called Tamim Academies, may provide a blueprint for sustainable, affordable, and dynamic diocesan Catholic education. While such a network can never replace the heroic sacrifice of the sisters and brothers who ran Catholic schools for much of the twentieth century, it can invite the laity to participate in the future of American Catholicism by putting their resources and skills to work in the service of the Church’s children.
“Diocesan leaders should find and support leaders willing to take risks and reform the existing schools into models of academic excellence, formative education, and fiscal stability.”
Dioceses in the South are an instructive case. For most of US history, Catholics have not had much of a presence south of the Mason-Dixon Line. This places Southern dioceses in an interesting administrative position. Often tasked with a wide area, today’s Southern bishops are responsible for growing, flourishing communities with chanceries that took shape in an earlier, less dynamic time for the faith in the region. Schools, therefore, are just one of many things for which the bishop is responsible.
Tamim Academy does two things that these diocesan schools could easily adapt. First, it helps establish new schools. “Tamim HQ” works to help any community that wants a Jewish day school to found one. Once a school is established, it centralizes curricula, teacher professional development, and—crucially—administrative functions. This last aspect reduces operating costs for individual schools (and therefore tuition!), because Tamim HQ is able to scale administrative tasks for all the schools under its aegis.
Ray Domanico, the director of education policy at the Manhattan Institute, sums it up in a 2022 issue brief on Tamim Academy:
The Tamim model is intentionally designed to be amenable to replication in new communities. The centralization of administrative functions and program planning in headquarters means that new schools do not have to design these things themselves. Tamim headquarters even provided a detailed financial plan to prospective school sponsors, so they know what it will take to grow and sustain these schools. (“Centralized Standards, Local Control”)
In a Catholic context, this model is still flexible enough at the local level that it would enable—rather than stymie—subsidiarity. Indeed, the parish priest would be crucial to the success of this model by integrating school families more fully into parish community life. Domanico points out that “relational trust” is “a core element of school success.” Tamim Academy builds schools in cooperation with local Chabad houses (Chabad is a movement within Orthodox Judaism dedicated to cultivating participation in Jewish life; it dispatches emissaries to Chabad centers around the world). Domanico writes that the active presence of the local Chabad leadership is crucial to the success of a local Tamim school. Using the example of an Upper West Side Tamim Academy in Manhattan, Domanico writes, “The school and Chabad rabbis make sure that families who may not have family connections in New York know that there is a place for them at someone’s seder or other seasonal commemoration. In secular terms, the Chabad emissaries are building relationships with and within the community they serve.”
Like priests, Chabad emissaries are busy. “[They are] already stretched thin running a synagogue, mikvah, preschool, adult education and all the other services offered at a typical Chabad center,” a Chabad article on Tamim Academy said, “Creating a full elementary school is simply a prohibitive task.” But a Tamim Academy director in Boca Raton, Florida, quoted in the article said that a chance to partner with the network was bashert—destiny. “I needed the curriculum support, the financial support and the guidance they have provided,” she said. “It is essential for us and this has become an excellent partnership.”
Transforming diocesan schools into Catholic school networks could be a big help for bishops too. With Tamim’s aid shouldering the nuts and bolts of administering and overseeing a school, religious leaders are free to work with school leadership to “help the next generation of Jews take on the world.” Such a model would be highly beneficial for Catholic clergy as they work to do the same for the next generation of Catholics.
Diocesan school superintendents already oversee curricula, but consolidating the administrative tasks that individual schools handle could help principals, pastors, and parents be less reactive and more proactive in supporting their schools in their missions. For example, my children have attended four Catholic schools in Tennessee, Kansas, Maryland, and North Carolina. Every school used FACTS software for information management and tuition management. Through this system, there can be a non-refundable fee for parents, sometimes as much as $100 per child, to even apply—sometimes even to apply for financial aid! Often, this charge is to cover the school’s operating costs to use FACTS. Although FACTS does much to improve efficiency for Catholic school administration, if dioceses reconceived their schools as networks managed by a centralized headquarters, they could streamline this process even further.
A diocese that did this wouldn’t be the first. Partnership Schools is a Catholic school network founded under the Archdiocese of New York’s auspices to serve poorer urban communities, which has since expanded from New York City to Cleveland, Ohio, and the archdiocese there. Like Tamim, Partnership Schools utilizes economies of scale to handle financial and administrative operations, and passes the savings on to families. The New York Partnership Schools saw a 28 percent enrollment increase between 2020 and 2023. When CityJournal spoke to a Partnership School principal back in 2016, just three years after the network’s founding, she said that with Partnership taking on so much of her administrative work, she wasn’t worrying about things like “boilers and tuition collection and human resource paper processing.” Instead, she was focused on “helping teachers hone their craft and working with parents.”
Both the Tamim and Partnership models rely heavily on philanthropy. Catholic school supporters who are interested in flourishing, accessible Catholic schools can certainly help there. But Church leaders need to see the vision, too, and collaborate with the laity who have the expertise and drive. Writing about Partnership Schools in 2023, Domanico said that, “Any Catholic school renewal will require diocesan offices to write a new job description for themselves.” That means seeing beyond the traditional parish school model. “Instead,” he wrote, “diocesan leaders should find and support leaders willing to take risks and reform the existing schools into models of academic excellence, formative education, and fiscal stability.”
Ambitious? Certainly. But what is at stake is nothing less than our children’s souls and the advancement of the kingdom of heaven. And as my kids recite every morning at school after the Morning Offering, Pledge of Allegiance, and announcements, “For God, all things are possible.” What do we have to lose?
