ABSTRACT
It's a common observation in the inner city: the public school is a mess, but the Catholic school around the corner is a great success. The conventional explanation is that the Catholic schools skim off the children from more motivated and more financially stable homes. Besides, they can expel troublesome students and the public school can't. As Howard Stern writes, a study by the New York State Education Department found that Catholic and public schools have similar percentages of students from troubled families with low incomes, and another report shows that Catholic schools expel far fewer students than public schools. A communal culture also makes religious schools relatively immune to most of the disastrous fads that plague the public system: multiculturalism, dumbing down, the narrow obsession with self-esteem, use of bilingual programs to delay or avoid the mainstreaming of immigrant children.
