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Many people have put hard work into making Catholic education a success.

The very first Catholic school in America was founded in 1783 in Philadelphia.

This event was only possible thanks to multiple priests and nuns. Their hard work and dedication made Catholic schools bloom all over America.

Their dedication lead to schools where students get to connect their education to their faith every single day. As they are connecting in many different levels with their faith, they are also spreading the joy of Catholic education wherever they may go. Their faith foundation they have built in Catholic education will be with them forever.

"Catholic education is an important part of educational history in America — of which we should be proud. Today our Catholic schools comprise the largest parochial school system in the world. As we recommit to the future and work together to keep our Catholic schools strong and accessible for generations to come."

The Catholic schools that we know and love today, would never be the same without their dedication and sacrifices.

Annemarie. (2017, July 31). A history of Catholic schools. Catholic Schools Center of Excellence. https://cscoe-mn.org/history-catholic-schools/

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1790: St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Stands up for Catholic education

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1790: St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Stands up for Catholic education

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One of the most important people in Catholic education in St. Elizabeth Ann Seton. She was “a revered pioneer from the early 1800s”. She also is “a native of New York who worked in Maryland with the support of Bishop John Carroll (the nation’s first and only bishop 1790-1800) to found a teaching order of sisters and establish schools in several Eastern cities.”

St. Elizabeth began founding teaching orders in the era of no tolerance for Catholics. “In 1790, when the 13 colonies became the 13 states, Catholics numbered only 35,000 in a population of 4 million; and by 1820 the number of American Catholics was still no more than 200,000.” Her goal was to improve the amount of members of the Catholic community.

“Seton is a heroine of Catholic education, but she labored in the vineyard during a simpler era of anti-Catholic discrimination, when Catholics were few on the ground. Two decades after her death came the dawn of a new era, in which our Protestant brethren would have to count their papist neighbors in millions rather than thousands.” Even after she had passed, her determination was proven a success. The number of Catholics more than doubled since she began her determination.

Today we need to think about and thank early members that made our Catholic education a success. St. Elizabeth was just one of many members that fought for our faith.

Banos, E. (2022, October 18). Catholic education in America: Struggle and success. Archdiocese of San Francisco. https://www.sfarch.org/catholic-education-in-america-struggle-and-success/

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Sr Mary Alfred Maria Catherine “Mother Alfred” Moes, Academy of Our Lady of Lourdes 1877-Present

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Sr Mary Alfred Maria Catherine “Mother Alfred” Moes, Academy of Our Lady of Lourdes 1877-Present

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In 1877 Mother Alfred saw the need after the tornado through Rochester to build Mayo Clinic and also founded Academy of Our Lady of Lourdes. Mother Alfred has contributed to many Catholic schools over the US. This connection and building the school impacted the lives that have come and passed and stayed in Rochester MN for medical reasons due to Mayo Clinic. The impact on Catholic Education has been built up and has giving many opportunities for students and staff to encounter the faith and share it with the community. The Catholic education has grown with the sisters of Assisi as they still are often coming and going from the schools. Academy of Our Lady of Lourdes has now transformed to Lourdes High School, but also the Sisters of St. Francis of Assisi have contributed to 5 other schools over the years. Over time, a board of trusties, Catholic communities and parishes have come together to create Rochester Catholic Schools, five buildings one mission. That mission is to bring the gift of God's peace into the schools through faith, academics and community as the students grow. The impact of the sisters and Mother Alfred has truly impacted the community to give and receive to the Catholic education of these students. Due to the community involvement and parishes, the schools work closely to bring Christ's light wherever they go.

Sources:
https://www.rcsmn.org/about/rcs-history

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/55319085/mary_alfred-maria_catherine-moes

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1877 - Academy of Our Lady of Lourdes - First Catholic school in Rochester

The Academy of Our Lady of Lourdes was founded by Mother Mary Alfred Moes in December of 1877. Classes opened with approximately 210 female students in attendance. The school was staffed by six Franciscan Sisters with Mother Mary Alfred working as the director.

1888 - Saint John's Grade School
A south wing was added to Saint Mary's Hall in 1888 which accommodated girls in grades 1 through 8. Housed in Saint Mary's Hall, the school became Saint John's Grade School.

1913 - Heffron High School for Boys and St. John's High School for Girls

Brothers of the Christian Schools were the faculty for the new high school for boys. Sisters of Saint Francis taught high school girls at the St. John's High School housed in Saint Mary's Hall.

1925 - Saint John's High School

The two separate boys and girls high schools became one co-educational institution housing students in grades 7-12, and taught by the Sisters of Saint Francis (the Christian Brothers had left Rochester). The former Heffron building was converted into an elementary school housing grades 1-6.

1942 - Lourdes High School

A newly constructed building located on the corner of 7th Avenue and Center Street named Lourdes High School opened in January of 1942. Enrollment totaled 260 students. The choice to name the new institution of learning "Lourdes" gave promise that the school would operate according to the sound educational philosophy established by the Franciscan Sisters and continue the noble traditions characterized by Rochester's first Catholic academy founded in 1877.

1952 - St. Francis of Assisi School

St. Francis of Assisi parish, located in the southeast quadrant of Rochester, opened its school for children in grades K- 6. By the time grades 7-8 were added in 1959, the enrollment was 1,015 students.

1956 - St. Pius X School

St. Pius X School opened in 1956 for students in grades 1-8. The school opened with 325 students in a two story building with the Sisters living on the second floor. Enrollment grew so quickly that within five years it more than doubled to 700 students, and the parish built a convent for 18 Sisters.

1958 - St. John's School
St. John's School was torn down and re-built in 1959.

2013 - Newly Built Lourdes High School

Due to age and dynamic educational demands, Lourdes was faced with a challenge to re-build. Over the course of five years, Rochester Catholic Schools completed its first ever Catholic capital campaign raising over $15 million to make possible Rochester Catholic Schools' new "state of the art" high school. The new Lourdes High School building and campus is located at the corner of 19th Street and Valleyhigh Drive NW.

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RCS History - Rochester Catholic Schools

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RCS History - Rochester Catholic Schools

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National Catholic Educational Association Logo (Google Images). 

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1900's American Catholic Schools/Formation of the NCEA 

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1900's American Catholic Schools/Formation of the NCEA 

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Something remarkable began in the early 1900s, Catholic nuns and priests continued aiding in the creation/formation of Catholic schools throughout America. However, the main reason for the sudden increase in Catholic schools during this time was due to the immigration of Catholics in the later 19th century. Many of those immigrants wanted to continue to help their children receive correct Catholic Education in the USA so they went on to pay Catholic Sisters to teach in these schools. By 1920, over 6,551 Catholic elementary schools were in existence in America. In those schools, they enrolled 1.8 million students taught by 42,000 teachers. This number continued to increase rapidly to meet the all-time amount of students in the 1960s.
In July 1904, the formation of the Catholic Educational Association was born. The stakeholders, in this case, were Catholic Education Organizations: Education Conference of Catholic Seminary Facilities formed in 1898, the Parish School Conference which was formed in 1902, and the Association of Catholic Colleges which was formed in 1899. This had a great impact on Catholic Education because it created one large united Catholic Education Association that would work together, along with the National Catholic Welfare Council created in 1919, to coordinate all Catholic activity in general, which also had a focus on Catholic Education. The bishops were the ones who would oversee these meetings to make sure things were running efficiently and according to the Catholic Faith. After this collaboration, in 1927 the name of the organization slightly changed. The National Catholic Education Association was created and still exists today. This led to more leadership structural formation where leaders wanted to change their location to serve the best interest of the students in the Catholic Education system. In 1929, they moved their headquarters to Washington D.C. to be close to all the other major Education associations in the United States. The NCEA formed partnerships and collaborated with several public and private education agencies and the federal government to ensure that Catholic Education would be top-notch and relate to the general American Education system. This would make sure Catholic schools were running efficiently and following the expectations of American private schools while collaborating with public schools as well. This had also been a push from society to ensure Catholic schools were not only applying faith principles to their education but also serving their students' education and academics the way the public schools at the time were.
Sources:
Annemarie. (2017, July 31). A history of Catholic schools. Catholic Schools Center of Excellence. https://cscoe-mn.org/history-catholic-schools/
Wikimedia Foundation. (2023, August 24). National Catholic Educational Association. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Catholic_Educational_Association

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"Political cartoon from the Portland Telegram criticizing the Act and depicting how it can brew resentment in immigrant communities (1922" (Wikipedia).

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In 1922, the Masonic Lodge of Oregon created a movement for ALL school-age children to attend a public school. The support, some from Walter M. Pierce and the Ku Klux Clans, the Compulsory Education Law passed. The main purpose of it was to eliminate Catholic schools in Oregon, but also affected some military and other private schools there. It was challenged in 1925 at the Supreme Court level in Pierce v. Society of Sisters, but it was struck down. The law was officially known as the Oregon School Law.
Requirements of the law:

All children 8-16 attend school

All must only attend PUBLIC school

On account of this law, private/parochial schools were shut down by the state.
Backlash and outrange ensued by Catholics at local and national levels. They began to fight for the right to send their kids to Catholic schools. In 1925, the US Supreme Court ruled that the Law was unconstitutional. The ruling has been referred to as the "Magna Carta of the parochial school system." The court said in the ruling that children are not "mere creatures of the state" and said that private schools have as much of a right to exist in the USA as public schools do.
In 1929, Pope Pius XI talked frequently about this case and mentioned it often in his encyclical: Divini Illius Magistri on Catholic Education.
The stakeholders in this event were all Catholic Schools in the state of Oregon especially but beyond as well. They would fear this law would spread from state to state and shut down schools. It also affected parents and students of Catholic schools in Oregon and their teachers. It greatly impacted Catholic Education because it led to the Compulsory Education Act which said that parochial schools have a great right to exist in America. Leadership in Catholic Education became stronger on account of this case because it made leaders fight for the right to educate students in Catholic schools. It made a stronger Catholic school system and community. It also made the mission of Catholic Education stronger because it showed the importance of a Catholic Education and Pope Pius XI even referenced the importance of this case in his writings about the importance and mission of Catholic Education. It really made some people see the importance and mission of Catholic Education. Society influenced this case by parents of private school students fighting back and influencing leaders to change and overturn this law. As one can see by the above drawing, some people in society, still did not want this law to be overturned which is why it is so important, even today, to continue to talk about how important and key Catholic Education/schools are today in the United States.
Wikimedia Foundation. (2023a, August 10). Oregon Compulsory Education Act. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_Compulsory_Education_Act

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Catholic schools outperform public and charter counterparts in first post-Covid national assessment (2022)

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Catholic schools outperform public and charter counterparts in first post-Covid national assessment (2022)

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Students were able to be in-person or to a degree which was critical to the students' learning, "By the beginning of the 2020-21 school year, according to Ms. Porter-Magee, 92 percent of Catholic schools nationwide were open to “some kind of in-person learning, compared to only 43 percent of public schools and 34 percent of charter schools. Ms. Porter-Magee said. Emerging post-shutdown studies, she said, support the proposition that the more time students have been able to experience in-person instruction, the better they have performed both academically and in terms of social-emotional learning."

Catholic schools are out performing public schools which aloud for more in-person experience with faith and encounters with the faith.
The leaders of the school are stepping up and taking this seriously, "Lincoln Snyder, the president of the N.C.E.A., called the results a proud moment for Catholic education. “One of the reasons Catholic schools performed so well is that our teachers showed up for the kids,” he said. “In every state, we were among the first to transition to distance learning, and after that brief time, also among the first to return students to a safe in-person environment. That’s why I call our educators heroes.”

This impacts the mission of Catholic Education by allowing for good examples of how the Church comes together in times of need and where the kindness comes through to the community and helping each other out.

Source:
https://www.americamagazine.org/politics-society/2022/10/25/catholic-schools-naep-244026

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Bad news about the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on learning was even worse than expected, though the numbers were probably not a complete shock to parents who have spent months juggling Zoom schedules and wondering if their kids were learning anything. Children in the United States have suffered unprecedented losses in math and reading scores, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a congressionally mandated report card on academic progress.

Years of progress in math were reversed during the pandemic as math scores saw their largest decrease ever, and reading scores dropped to 1992 levels. Nearly four in 10 eighth graders failed to grasp basic math concepts. Not a single state saw a notable improvement in average test scores, with some simply treading water.

But the nation's Catholic schools either held the line on their previous N.A.E.P. scores or lost substantially less ground than both public and charter schools. On eighth-grade reading scores, Catholic schools even managed to score a one-point improvement while charter and public schools each lost three points.

The nation's Catholic schools either held the line on their previous N.A.E.P. scores or lost substantially less ground than both public and charter schools.

According to the N.A.E.P., Catholic school eighth graders scored five points lower in math in 2022 than in 2019, a serious decline but better than the eight-point loss among public school students and the nine-point drop at charter schools. According to the National Catholic Educational Association, Catholic school students' average scores remained 15 points higher than the average scores of their eighth-grade public school peers in the assessment.

"I was heartened by the results," said Kathleen Porter-Magee, an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute and the superintendent of Partnership Schools, a network of urban Catholic schools in Harlem, the South Bronx and Cleveland.

"I think [they are] a reflection of the hard work that Catholic school teachers and leaders have been doing throughout the pandemic and...a reflection of what Catholic schools' mission-driven, faith-filled and community-focused leadership has done to support kids and communities throughout Covid."

In an assessment on Twitter, she pointed out: "If Catholic schools were a state, they'd be the highest performing in the nation on all four N.A.E.P. tests."

In an interview with America, Ms. Porter-Magee said that the performance outcomes "really shines a bright light on just how important the American Catholic school system is to the landscape of American education, and it shows that America needs a truly diverse network of educational options for kids; there is no one-size-fits-all solution."

In an assessment on Twitter, Kathleen Porter-Magee pointed out: "If Catholic schools were a state, they'd be the highest performing in the nation on all four N.A.E.P. tests."

According to a statement released on Oct. 25 by the N.C.E.A., the report card's data also shows that Catholic schools are near the top in learning outcomes for students receiving free and reduced-price lunch, "demonstrating the system's commitment to underprivileged students."

Lincoln Snyder, the president of the N.C.E.A., called the results a proud moment for Catholic education. "One of the reasons Catholic schools performed so well is that our teachers showed up for the kids," he said. "In every state, we were among the first to transition to distance learning, and after that brief time, also among the first to return students to a safe in-person environment. That's why I call our educators heroes."

In the first nationally representative study of the pandemic's impact on learning, the N.A.E.P. tested hundreds of thousands of fourth and eighth graders across the country this year-the first time the test has been administered since 2019. Confirming what many had feared, racial inequities appear to have widened. In the fourth grade, Black and Latino students saw bigger decreases than white students, widening gaps that have persisted for decades.

Inequities were also reflected in a growing gap between higher and lower performing students. In math and reading, scores fell most sharply among the lowest performing students, creating a widening chasm between struggling students and the rest of their peers. Los Angeles schools bucked the national trend with eighth-grade reading scores increasing by nine points, the only significant uptick in any district, and a number of other big-city systems like New York and Houston were able to hold the line against achievement losses.

Confirming what many had feared, racial inequities appear to have widened.

Those better results were not enough to offset what translated into lost ground in every state in the nation. No part of the country was exempt. Every region saw test scores slide, and every state saw declines in at least one subject.

"It is a serious wakeup call for us all," Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, a branch of the Education Department, told The Associated Press after the report card was released on Oct. 24. "In N.A.E.P., when we experience a one- or two-point decline, we're talking about it as a significant impact on a student's achievement. In math, we experienced an eight-point decline-historic for this assessment."

Researchers usually think of a 10-point gain or drop as equivalent to roughly a year of learning.

"Eighth grade is a pivotal moment in students' mathematics education, as they develop key mathematics skills for further learning and potential careers in mathematics and science," said Daniel J. McGrath, an associate commissioner for assessment at the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics, in a statement released with the report. "If left unaddressed, this could alter the trajectories and life opportunities of a whole cohort of young people, potentially reducing their abilities to pursue rewarding and productive careers in mathematics, science, and technology."

As the crisis unfolded through the winter and the summer of 2020, Catholic schools, like all other schools, closed according to state and local mandates aimed at suppressing the spread of Covid-19, but many were quick to reopen to modified in-class learning as soon as they were allowed to. Did that make the difference?

As the crisis unfolded through the winter and the summer of 2020, Catholic schools, like all other schools, closed according to state and local mandates.

"I think it was huge," Ms. Porter-Magee said. Emerging post-shutdown studies, she said, support the proposition that the more time students have been able to experience in-person instruction, the better they have performed both academically and in terms of social-emotional learning.

She emphasized the importance of following the science in making decisions about school closings and re-openings as the nation struggles with the lingering pandemic or confronts other health crises that might emerge in the future. She pointed out that Catholic school officials never followed an "open at all costs" approach during the pandemic.

By the beginning of the 2020-21 school year, according to Ms. Porter-Magee, 92 percent of Catholic schools nationwide were open to "some kind of in-person learning, compared to only 43 percent of public schools and 34 percent of charter schools."

"That decision to reopen accounts for the biggest part of the story of the difference in Catholic school achievement," she said.

Now that this failing national grade has been released, Ms. Porter-Magee said it is critical for educators and policymakers to begin making investments to mitigate the damage.
[The Editors: Catholic schools can't serve only the rich. School vouchers make fulfilling that mission possible.]
"We need to be working right now to empower all parents with school choice, so that they can find-pretty urgently-the school that's going to best meet whatever their particular children's needs are, and we're going to have to make sure that we're stepping up additional supports or tutoring and also intensifying our support in school [to counter] student learning loss."

Restoring the lost year experienced by so many now fifth and ninth graders will be a national challenge. Ms. Porter-Magee suggests it could be an opportunity for Catholic schools to stand out for families that are looking for alternatives to public schools.

"I hope what this is going to do is rekindle the support for all Catholic schools, but particularly for urban Catholic schools, to revitalize an interest in finding creative ways to preserve the legacy of American urban Catholic schools and American education."
Material from The Associated Press was used in this report. Correction (Oct. 26): In an earlier version of this report, the National Catholic Educational Association was misidentified as the National Catholic Education Association.

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Catholic schools outperform public and charter counterparts in first post-Covid national assessment

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"If Catholic schools were a state, they'd be the highest performing in the nation on all four N.A.E.P. tests," Kathleen Porter-Magee, the superintendent of Partnership Schools, pointed out on Twitter.