ABSTRACT
Catholic schools, among the oldest educational institutions in the United States, trace their or-igins to colonial times. Although few in number during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Catholic schools of the era-college seminaries for boys and academies for girls-generally educated the Catholic elite. Religious orders of women dispensed tuition revenues from the girls' academies in major cities to fund free schools for children of the poor. The first parish primary schools emerged in these cities late in the eighteenth century.
