Using a national sample of kindergarten to eighth grade students from Catholic and public schools who took MAP Growth assessments, we examine achievement growth over time between sectors. Our findings suggest that while Catholic school students score higher in math and reading than public school students on average, they also enter each school year at a higher level. Public school students close this gap to some degree during the school year. Additionally, these patterns varied by age and subject. Catholic school students in the earlier grades show less growth in both reading and math during the academic year compared to their public school peers, but in middle school growth patterns in math were comparable across sectors.
As a ministry of the Catholic Church, Catholic schools are charged with educating students’ hearts and minds. Multiple standardized academic tests and other student assessments are available for monitoring both student and teacher outcomes in Catholic schools, but fewer measures exist for considering the school’s faith-related mission. Although tests of student religious knowledge and benchmarks related to specific Catholic elements of the school are available, we do not yet have a robust set of instruments that provide teachers and leaders an understanding of their progress in providing a school environment permeated by Catholic culture and faith. To consider how students in Catholic schools perceive the Catholicity of their school and how these perceptions vary among different student groups, we developed, piloted, and validated the Sense of School Catholic Identity Survey (SSCI). This 20-item survey measures Grade 5 through 8 students’ perceptions of their Catholic school as personal and invitational, sacramental, unitive, and eucharistic. Findings from the pilot study suggest that responses differ by student grade level, religious tradition, and gender. Future testing of the scale will examine school-level differences in Catholic identity.
Accountability pressures in education have risen steadily over the last two decades and public schools and districts now track school- and student-level data in response to state and federal mandates. Catholic schools and dioceses have not faced the same level of regulation over this period, and less is known about data access and use in the Catholic sector. This descriptive and exploratory research draws on survey and interview data from a national sample of Catholic school superintendents to examine data practices in diocesan central offices as well as barriers faced in the use of data. Findings suggest that although considerable variation exists among dioceses, common data efforts include working toward data centralization, developing tools to monitor the operational health of schools, and finding ways to foster the data culture within dioceses. These practices were present in close to half of all dioceses, but several common challenges related to governance, resources, and data systems hindered progress in and toward these efforts.
Charter school policies have focused on improving three aspects of schools—autonomy, innovation, and accountability—with the intention of promoting advances in curriculum, instruction, and learning that lead to better student outcomes. However, most research on charter schools tends to neglect school organizational and instructional conditions. Overall, reviews show that charter schools have inconsistent effects on student achievement scores, a finding that masks heterogeneous effects among different types of charter schools, operators of charter schools, and authorizers of charter schools and the organizational and instructional conditions under which they operate. This systematic review of the literature focuses on what we know about the organization of charter schools and the resources—material, human, and social as well as professional development and teaching practices—within them. We end by identifying gaps where more research is needed.
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