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US Private Schools in the Mid-twentieth Century
USINFO | 2013-12-09 15:10
Private schools experienced phenomenal growth in the years during and following World War II (1939–1945), increasing by 118 percent, compared with 36 percent in the public sector, and enrolling 13.6 percent of the total elementary-secondary school population in 1959–1960, up from 9.3 percent in 1939–1940 and 11.9 percent in 1949–1950. Assuming an average cost of $500 per pupil in the 1960s in public schools, private schools saved state and local governments roughly $31 billion during that decade. Private schools also became embroiled in a number of legal struggles during that period, struggles that focused on religiously affiliated private schools. In the next several decades the Supreme Court upheld public bus transportation to private schools and the loan of secular textbooks to the schools, and forbade most other kinds of aid on the grounds that such aid violated the establishment clause of the First Amendment that requires the separation of church and state. The basic legal principles on which the Court based its decisions were that: (1) the legislation must have a secular legislative purpose; (2) the principal or primary effect of the legislation could not violate religious neutrality; and (3) the legislation could not foster "excessive entanglement" between church and state (these were collectively known as the "Lemon Test," because of Lemon v. Kurtzman, 1979). The Court also invoked the "child benefit" principle, which identifies the child as the principle beneficiary of government aid. Indirect aid that flowed to the parents and through them to the schools had a better fate than direct aid to the private schools themselves.
In the midst of the debate regarding the legality of government aid to nonpublic or private schools, Catholic schools reached their all-time enrollment high in 1965–1966 with 5.6 million pupils, constituting 87 percent of private school enrollment. Catholic enrollment plummeted in the years following, stabilizing some years later. Meanwhile, Christian Day Schools, founded by evangelical and fundamentalist Christians, were established and proliferated. The number of these private school institutions founded between the mid-1960s and the early 1980s has been calculated at between 4,000 and 18,000, with an enrollment range from 250,000 to more than 1.5 million. The best estimates seem to be between 9,000 and 11,000 schools with a student population of around 1 million.
The charge of elitism. One of the most serious charges leveled at private schools of all types by their opponents is that they are "elitist." Several major studies were conducted in the 1980s that would seem to belie that accusation. One of these was Inner-City Private Elementary Schools, conducted in 1982, which was sponsored by the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. Using a randomly selected sample of sixty-four schools in eight cities, fifty-four of which were Title I recipients, and with a minority population of at least 70 percent, this study found strong support for these schools by their patrons. Residing in rundown facilities, beset with financial problems, the majority operated under Catholic auspices, but with a third of the student body Protestant, these schools provided a safe environment, emphasized basic learning skills, and fostered moral values in their pupils. The academic achievement of minority students in Catholic secondary schools, which surpassed that of minority students in their public counterparts, was reported by the priest-sociologist Andrew Greeley. Further, the overall minority enrollment (African American, Hispanic American, Asian American, and Native American) had grown from 4 percent of the total private school population in 1970 to 11.2 percent in 1987.
But it was two controversial studies headed by the noted sociologist James S. Coleman that occupied center stage for private schools in the 1980s. The first, High School Achievement: Public, Catholic, and Private Schools Compared, which was published in 1982 and which Coleman cowrote with Thomas Hoffer and Sally Kilgore, produced results indicating not only that students in Catholic high schools and possibly other private secondary schools academically outperformed those in public schools, but also that these schools were more integrated racially than were their public counterparts. Coleman, Hoffer, and Kilgore claimed to have controlled for "selection bias" in this study; they also maintained that private schools provided a safer, more disciplined, and orderly environment than public schools. The second book, Public and Private High Schools: The Impact of Communities, which was published in 1987 and written by Coleman and Hoffer, continued the line of reasoning present in the 1982 work. In this second report the authors stated that the goals of education are determined by the social organization of schools, their communities, and the families that they serve. In "functional communities," in which the parents, teachers, and students know one another, schools–whether public or private–are more likely to be successful. "Social capital," the relationships that exist among parents, and the parents' relations with the institutions of the community that result promote high levels of academic achievement, particularly among students most at risk of school failure.
In the midst of the debate regarding the legality of government aid to nonpublic or private schools, Catholic schools reached their all-time enrollment high in 1965–1966 with 5.6 million pupils, constituting 87 percent of private school enrollment. Catholic enrollment plummeted in the years following, stabilizing some years later. Meanwhile, Christian Day Schools, founded by evangelical and fundamentalist Christians, were established and proliferated. The number of these private school institutions founded between the mid-1960s and the early 1980s has been calculated at between 4,000 and 18,000, with an enrollment range from 250,000 to more than 1.5 million. The best estimates seem to be between 9,000 and 11,000 schools with a student population of around 1 million.
The charge of elitism. One of the most serious charges leveled at private schools of all types by their opponents is that they are "elitist." Several major studies were conducted in the 1980s that would seem to belie that accusation. One of these was Inner-City Private Elementary Schools, conducted in 1982, which was sponsored by the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. Using a randomly selected sample of sixty-four schools in eight cities, fifty-four of which were Title I recipients, and with a minority population of at least 70 percent, this study found strong support for these schools by their patrons. Residing in rundown facilities, beset with financial problems, the majority operated under Catholic auspices, but with a third of the student body Protestant, these schools provided a safe environment, emphasized basic learning skills, and fostered moral values in their pupils. The academic achievement of minority students in Catholic secondary schools, which surpassed that of minority students in their public counterparts, was reported by the priest-sociologist Andrew Greeley. Further, the overall minority enrollment (African American, Hispanic American, Asian American, and Native American) had grown from 4 percent of the total private school population in 1970 to 11.2 percent in 1987.
But it was two controversial studies headed by the noted sociologist James S. Coleman that occupied center stage for private schools in the 1980s. The first, High School Achievement: Public, Catholic, and Private Schools Compared, which was published in 1982 and which Coleman cowrote with Thomas Hoffer and Sally Kilgore, produced results indicating not only that students in Catholic high schools and possibly other private secondary schools academically outperformed those in public schools, but also that these schools were more integrated racially than were their public counterparts. Coleman, Hoffer, and Kilgore claimed to have controlled for "selection bias" in this study; they also maintained that private schools provided a safer, more disciplined, and orderly environment than public schools. The second book, Public and Private High Schools: The Impact of Communities, which was published in 1987 and written by Coleman and Hoffer, continued the line of reasoning present in the 1982 work. In this second report the authors stated that the goals of education are determined by the social organization of schools, their communities, and the families that they serve. In "functional communities," in which the parents, teachers, and students know one another, schools–whether public or private–are more likely to be successful. "Social capital," the relationships that exist among parents, and the parents' relations with the institutions of the community that result promote high levels of academic achievement, particularly among students most at risk of school failure.
