Catholic Schools, Urban Neighborhoods, and Education Reform

M. Brinig, N. Garnett
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引用次数: 25

Abstract

More than 1,600 Catholic elementary and secondary schools have closed or been consolidated during the last two decades. The Archdiocese of Chicago alone (the subject of our study) has closed 148 schools since 1984. Primarily because urban Catholic schools have a strong track record of educating disadvantaged children who do not, generally, fare well in public schools, these school closures have prompted concern in education policy circles. While we are inclined to agree that Catholic school closures contribute to a broader educational crisis, this paper shies away from debates about educational outcomes. Rather than focusing on the work done inside the schools, we focus on what goes on outside them. Specifically, using three decades of data drawn from the census and from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (“PHDCN”), we seek to understand what a Catholic school means to an urban neighborhood. We do so primarily by measuring various effects of elementary school closures in the Chicago neighborhoods where they operated for decades. We find strong evidence that Catholic elementary schools are important generators of social capital in urban neighborhoods: Our study suggests that neighborhood social cohesion decreases and disorder increases following an elementary school closure, even after controlling for numerous demographic variables that would tend to predict neighborhood decline and disaggregating the school closure decision from those variable as well. This paper discusses these findings and situates them within important land-use and education-policy debates.
天主教学校、城市社区与教育改革
在过去二十年中,有1600多所天主教小学和中学关闭或合并。自1984年以来,仅芝加哥大主教管区(我们的研究对象)就关闭了148所学校。主要是因为城市天主教学校在教育弱势儿童方面有着良好的记录,这些儿童通常在公立学校表现不佳,这些学校的关闭引起了教育政策界的关注。虽然我们倾向于同意天主教学校的关闭导致了更广泛的教育危机,但本文回避了关于教育成果的辩论。我们关注的不是学校内部的工作,而是学校外部的工作。具体来说,我们利用从人口普查和芝加哥社区人类发展项目(“PHDCN”)中提取的三十年数据,试图了解天主教学校对城市社区的意义。我们这样做主要是通过衡量关闭了几十年的芝加哥社区小学的各种影响。我们发现强有力的证据表明天主教小学是城市社区社会资本的重要产生者:我们的研究表明,在小学关闭后,社区社会凝聚力下降,无序增加,即使在控制了许多倾向于预测社区衰落的人口统计学变量并从这些变量中分离出学校关闭决策之后也是如此。本文讨论了这些发现,并将它们置于重要的土地利用和教育政策辩论中。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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