An Obvious Example of Pin-Stripe Patronage

Clout Street

CHICAGO TRIBUNE'S LOCAL POLITICAL COVERAGE

A rising force in Hispanic Chicago

UNO works within system, gets $98 million for charter schools

By Dan Mihalopoulos and Azam Ahmed
Tribune reporters

The recent dedication rally for a new school on Chicago's working-class Southwest Side drew a long list of political heavyweights, including the governor, the Illinois Senate's top Republican and some of the mayor's highest-ranking Latino aides.

The outdoor rally on 47th Street wasn't just about turning a former industrial bakery into a striking, luminous glass school building. It also was a display of political prowess by the people who built it.
The United Neighborhood Organization, the city's largest Latino community group, is poised to become the biggest charter school manager in Illinois after scoring a $98 million state grant to build eight more schools.

How UNO landed all that cash -- believed to be the largest-ever taxpayer windfall in the U.S. for a community-run charter group to build schools -- at a time of massive government budget deficits is a classic Chicago story of awakening immigrant clout and lobbying muscle.

It's the High School Graduation Rates, Stupid

By Katrina Trinko
National Review Online   April 19, 2011

If we’re serious about giving students from low-income backgrounds a chance to succeed economically later in life, we need to start making vouchers more widespread. From my USA Today piece:

In Washington, D.C., a 2010 study by the U.S. Department of Education found that there was a 21 percentage point gap between the graduation rates of those in the voucher program (graduation rate: 91%) and those who had applied, but had failed to win the placement lottery (70%). A study released late last month by the University of Arkansas’ School Choice Demonstration Project showed a similar pattern in Milwaukee, with those using vouchers in the 9th grade graduating at a rate (77%) eight percentage points higher than their peers in public schools (69%).

Both the Washington, D.C. and Milwaukee voucher programs serve low-income students, for whom educational success is not the norm. According to Teach for America, an organization that recruits recent college graduates to teach at failing public schools, only half of low-income students graduate high school by age 18.

An Interesting Commentary From the Wall Street Journal

By RICHARD RIORDAN

Earlier this week, the Los Angeles Catholic Education Foundation announced a campaign to raise $100 million for Catholic schools in our area.

Catholic education in the United States is in dire straits. A report from Loyola Marymount University in June found that Catholic schools continue to close even though they graduate 98% of their high school students and send almost all of them onto college. In the early 1960s, the U.S. had over 13,000 Catholic schools with 5.5 million students. Today there are 6,900 schools with two million students. In the Los Angeles area, enrollment has fallen by 20% over the past 10 years, to 80,000 students from 100,000. This trend is due not to lack of demand, but to the inability of parents to pay tuition.

The urban poor are more desperate than ever for Catholic education. Urban public schools have failed these families, graduating approximately 30% of Los Angeles high school students in four years. Catholic schools are their best hope—something I know from personal experience.

Unexcusable absence: Catholic schools recruit Hispanic students

By Jeff Parrot U.S, Catholic
01/20/2011

Catholic schools have largely failed to attract Hispanic Catholics, but some parishes have found innovative ways to draw them in.

As her Puerto Rican immigrant mother had done with her as a child growing up in Chicago, Jennifer Bonesz sent both of her daughters to Catholic schools. Athena, 14, attended from preschool through eighth grade, and Damary, 8, from preschool through third grade.

But after a divorce coincided with a decrease in the financial aid she was receiving from her parish to put her daughters through the local Catholic grade school, the computer support supervisor says she was faced with a sad truth: The cost of Catholic education was suddenly beyond her reach.

Urban Minorities Benefit Most From Catholic schools

From:  University of Chicago Chronicle
            March 6, 1997
            Vol. 16, No. 12
Study shows greater earning power, more college degrees African-American and Hispanic students in urban areas benefit most from attending Catholic schools, achieving higher graduation rates from high school and college than students from similar backgrounds who attend public schools, according to new research by Derek Neal, Associate Professor in Economics. Neal's findings are reported in "The Effects of Catholic Secondary School on Educational Achievement," published in the March issue of the Journal of Labor Economics.

Compared with their public-school counterparts, more than twice as many minority Catholic-school graduates from urban areas finish college: 27 percent of the Catholic-school graduates finish college, while only 11 percent of minority public-school graduates receive their degrees. And while 62 percent of minority students at urban public high schools graduate, 88 percent of students from the same background complete high school when enrolled in Catholic schools, according to the study.

Saving Catholic Schools

By:  RiShawn Biddle 

The American Spectator   03/05/2010

The poor black and Latino children attending Sacred Heart School in the Columbia Heights section of Washington, D.C., probably don't know that Century Foundation Senior Fellow Richard Kahlenberg thinks their participation in the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship and other voucher plans merely helps to make "'separate-but-equal' work." Chances are, they don't even know about the contention among progressives and even otherwise school choice-supporting centrist Democrats that public funding of parochial schools is somehow a plot among conservatives to cut government spending and violates the Constitution's ban against the intermingling of church and state.  Nor should they or their parents care one way or another.

Why we can't afford to close Catholic schools

By Kevin Clarke
US Catholic, Vol 66, No 5 May, 2001

It's pretty subdued day at Our Lady of Mercy School on Chicago's Northwest Side. Most of the kids are in class, huddled over Terra Nova achievement tests; George and Julio are "timing out" on a bench just outside the lunchroom but still smiling mischievously at each passerby; a Commonwealth Edison crew is cleaning up the mess after somebody crashed into a light pole beside the side entrance the night before; and principal Debbie Sullivan is in her office by an ancient Rich public address machine worrying over how the school is going to make ends meet.

All in all, a fairly normal day.

There are 230 kids at Our Lady of Mercy. That's down from 275 last year and more than 300 just a few years before. A 10 percent tuition hike next year may mean more empty seats in September, though Sullivan is trying to remain optimistic. Tuition here runs about $2,400 a year, though it costs the school closer to $3,700 to educate each student.