The Gift of Catholic Schools

In Sunday’s New York Post, Naomi Schaefer Riley had an excellent article on the value of Catholic schools, and why we must work to save them! She shares a wonderful story of a student, Jason Tejada, who attended Incarnation School in Washington Heights and All Hallows High School in the Bronx, and went on to Columbia University, and is now working at JPMorgan.

The details of Jason’s story may be particularly poignant, but the success that Catholic schools can bring underprivileged students is widely understood.

The achievement, graduation rates and college completion rates are much higher for students who attend Catholic school than public school, even controlling for family income. A recent Brookings/Harvard study found that African American students in New York who won and used a scholarship to attend private school starting in kindergarten were 24% more likely to attend college than those who applied but didn’t win a scholarship.