Urban Catholic High Schools and Disadvantaged Females

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to discover the life experiences of disadvantaged female graduates of urban Catholic high schools and what they say about the capacity of Catholic education to meet their academic, emotional, social, and spiritual needs. Based on narrative inquiry, this study was conducted using a series of in-depth, semistructured interviews to elicit the life experiences of 5 participants. Twelve common personal characteristics emerged directly from the narratives of the participants and provided the backdrop for two patterns: (a) the importance of education, and (b) the importance of relationships. This study found the high school experiences met the academic needs of all participants, but the different school sites varied in their ability to meet the emotional, social, and spiritual needs. This study also found four characteristics interacted in creating the Catholic school culture: (a) building relationships, (b) promoting a sense of community, (c) supporting a caring and nurturing environment, and (d) emphasizing respect for all members of the school community.

Examining the Legacy of Urban Catholic Schooling in the U.S.: A Systematic Literature Review

“…The remaining studies reviewed in this cluster focused on the lived experience of students (Aldana, 2016;Candal & Glenn, 2012;LeBlanc, 2015LeBlanc, , 2017Merritt, 2008;Neugebauer & Blair, 2020), parents/families (Joseph et al, 2017), and faculty/ staff (Burns, 2019;Hooker, 2019) in urban Catholic schools. These studies provided some evidence about how urban Catholic school stakeholders perceived the effectiveness and quality of these schools for particular communities.…”

“…Some studies examined the way stakeholders navigated experiences in individual school contexts that reflected distinct organizational forms commonly found in urban Catholic education, including single-sex college preparatory secondary schools (Aldana, 2016;Merritt, 2008; and neighborhood elementary schools serving multi-racial low-income communities (LeBlanc, 2015(LeBlanc, , 2017. These studies tended to suggest that certain Catholic school cultures were more conducive to low-income communities of color feeling a sense of ownership and value in the school than others.…”

“…For example, LeBlanc (2015LeBlanc ( , 2017 found in his ethnographic investigation of an elementary school that students from diverse racial backgrounds in the school community tended to enact the inequitable racial hierarchies in school that they saw modeled in their community without much intentional interruption from the staff. Alternatively, Merritt (2008), Aldana (2016), and each found students of color at individual urban Catholic high schools discovered ways inside their school communities to mitigate the negative effects of social marginalization present outside of those communities through intentional advocacy and support structures the schools provided them. Similarly, Joseph et al (2017) and Burns (2019) investigated the ways a Latino parent community in an elementary school and a white principal of a racially diverse dual-language elementary school, respectively, intentionally confronted racially unjust conditions outside of school by establishing concrete equity goals that could be achieved inside the school environments.…”