Education Reform

The Wall Street Journal has an excellent editorial written by Micheal Flaherty on Catholic education reform.

Here is an excerpt from the editorial:

Parent Revolution has made national news in its ongoing attempt to use California’s new “parent trigger” law, which allows parents to transform a failing school by, among other things, replacing it with a charter school. Parents have already filed a charter petition in the Compton Unified School District, where only 47% of students graduate and less than 2% go to college. It is this injustice that enrages Ms. Serrato and Ms. Sanchez, both 20-somethings who attended Los Angeles public schools and then graduated from Stanford and Yale, respectively.

You can read the whole editorial here.

I also came across an interesting article in the City Journal written by Sol Stern. He writes about Pathways to Excellence, a strategic plan to revitalize Catholic schools in the Archdiocese of New York.  Here is an excerpt from the article:

In recent years, urban dioceses across the country—for example, in Boston, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C.—have belatedly concocted strategic plans, trying desperately to reverse the downward spiral. Others, such as Chicago’s, are beginning the planning process. But the most ambitious of all the efforts to date is Pathways to Excellence, which the Archdiocese of New York unveiled last October. The reforms that Pathways will execute—coupled with several that it hasn’t proposed—might just manage to save New York’s vital Catholic schools.

You can read the whole article here.