Catholic
Education
Despite low profile, Catholics played key roles
By ERIK GUNN
While the Milwaukee archdiocese has
long been part of the campaign for vouchers, Catholic officials have tried to
keep a low profile in the effort.
One of my concerns was that this not be viewed as a Catholic
issue, said John Norris, superintendent of Catholic education for the
Milwaukee archdiocese, in an interview last summer. We needed to, from
the get-go, make it a parent issue. We needed parents to very much take
leadership.
In its political advocacy for vouchers, the archdiocese forged
alliances with business groups, principally the Metropolitan Milwaukee
Association of Commerce, who backed school choice as a sort of market-driven
vehicle to pressure public schools to improve.
Another organization at the forefront of the choice battle has its
roots in the archdiocese. Parents Advancing Values in Education, or PAVE,
started out as an archdiocesan foundation in 1987 designed to sustain Catholic
inner-city schools. But after four years, said Catholic layman Dan McKinley,
PAVE director, we realized we werent making much headway.
The organization split from the archdiocese and shifted its focus
from schools to families in need, becoming primarily a scholarship
and advocacy group. PAVE awarded 4,371 scholarships last year to low-income
families with children in private schools. In the process, PAVE has helped
build an informal network of parents to advocate for tax-supported school
choice.
But the single greatest source of private financial backing for
choice -- its rich uncle, in a sense -- has been another Catholic layman,
Michael Joyce.
It was Joyce, as president of the Milwaukee-based Harry and Lynde
Bradley Foundation, who helped fund research that gave vouchers intellectual
respectability, scholarships for religious schools that were excluded from the
program for six years, and the legal defense that preserved the program for
nonsectarian schools and later its expansion to religious ones.
Under Joyces direction, the Bradley Foundation has
bankrolled a wide array of scholars and causes, many of them conservative. One
of those backed by the foundation was Charles Murray, who argued that social
welfare programs perpetuated poverty rather than abolishing it and called for
their abolition in the book Losing Ground. More recently, Murray has
been famous as a coauthor of The Bell Curve, which sought to demonstrate
that human intelligence is largely inherited and suggested a link between
intelligence and race. (Joyce has on several occasions distanced himself and
the foundation from Murrays latter conclusions.)
The foundation has poured some $14 million into school choice,
most of that -- $9.5 million -- to fund scholarships through PAVE. Another $2
million has gone to finance the states defense of the program against two
lawsuits filed by choice opponents. The remaining amount has gone to finance
research and parent-networking organizations.
For Joyce, the Bradley Foundations support of school choice
is a natural extension of the foundations guiding philosophical
principles. Its also the natural outgrowth of interests he brought to
Milwaukee with him from the equally conservative John M. Olin Foundation, where
as president he had funded research that argued for school vouchers as a means
by which low-income parents dissatisfied with public education could exercise
the same right to choose that middle-class and wealthy parents enjoyed when
they moved to the suburbs or enrolled their children in private schools.
Joyce came to Milwaukee as the Bradley Foundations founding
director. The foundation, with assets of more than $500 million, was created
with proceeds from the sale of a privately held manufacturer of industrial
controls, the Allen-Bradley Co., to Rockwell International.
At the foundation, Joyce says, weve come to the view
that one of the biggest challenges to the continuation of the self-governing
republic is the reduction of the role of citizens thats occurred mostly
in this century. Among those lost citizenly virtues is
education.
One of the most important things a citizen does as a parent
is provide for the education of the children, Joyce says. And while
its one thing to seek help in the task from others, what has
happened over this century is a centralizing cult of expertise and rational
credentialism that has pushed further to the margins the role of
citizens.
Joyce contends the public school movement that took root in the
last century was in large part ruled by anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant sentiment
on the part of well-intentioned New England Protestants who feared
waves of Catholic immigrants who taught their children in parochial
schools.
And while he doesnt oppose universal school choice that
would offer relief to middle-class families who may be struggling to send their
children to parochial schools, Joyce says thats a battle for another day.
Our view was we first must deal as Christians, if for no other reason,
with the preferential option for the poor, he says.
Joyce, who keeps a portrait of Thomas More above his desk, says
his own Catholicism influenced his interest in the issue as well. I try
to live a life rather like he did, Joyce says of More. He was a man
in the world but not necessarily of the world, a man who only at the most
extreme level had to choose between the life in civil society and the life in
the communion of saints. Happily, in free self-governing republics like ours,
we dont have to choose that.
But, Joyce adds, in his moral and financial support of choice,
I am not in the service of the Roman Catholic church. Indeed, he
was among the advocates of converting what had been the archdiocesan foundation
to support urban Catholic schools into the parent-supporting, independent PAVE.
Doubters within the church raised the fear that parents wouldnt as a
consequence choose Catholic schools, Joyce says, but to him that didnt
matter.
They said, What if parents choose evangelical
schools? Joyce recalls. His response: Good, if thats
what parents think is best for the child.
National Catholic Reporter, March 26,
1999
|