Catching up

My intent to blog regularly ran into a buzz saw that is the job...but I did just post a rather long item on Catholic schools in Los Angeles. This was originally in response to this article in the NY Times that in my mind was a big negative about the future of Catholic schools. You can read my post in full but in short my belief is that Catholic schools have a bright, optimistic future in Los Angeles. With a large and growing population, a dedicated and capable team in the Department of Catholic Schools, and an Archbishop who is clearly committed to seeing Catholic schools strong and viable, there is no limit to what can be accomplished.

Catholic Schools in Los Angeles

There has been much in the national press recently on the enrollment crisis that has affected Catholic schools in the United States in recent times. The announced closure of 25 more schools in the Archdiocese of New York last week added to the already large number of Catholic schools that have been closed in recent years. While we have not closed schools in significant numbers, the Archdiocese of Los Angeles has had similar struggles. During the period from 2001-2010 we saw a 23% decline in enrollment in our K-8 Catholic schools.

But in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, we do not see a grim future ahead. Indeed, we see tremendous hope on the horizon that is driven by a realistic optimism in the purpose of Catholic schools. For the first time in over a decade we have had enrollment increases in our K-8 schools in 2011-12 and 2012-13. In addition, we have focused on a growth agenda that aims to further increase the Catholic school student population in the coming years. We are blessed to have Archbishop Jose Gomez leading us at this time and he is a tireless advocating for the promise and the purpose of Catholic schools.

A reason for optimism is the tremendous support we receive from multiple partners in our mission of faith education. The Catholic Education Foundation, which is celebrating its 25^th anniversary this year, has provided over $120 million in scholarship assistance to families since it began. This, in addition to the archdiocesan Together in Mission appeal, has assisted countless schools and without a doubt kept many open over the past two decades. We are also blessed to have strong university partnerships with both Loyola Marymount University and Mount St. Mary College and both offer training programs to assist both our teachers and our principals.

However, the key reason we are optimistic about the future is the data. With just under 5 million Catholics the Archdiocese of Los Angeles is far and away the largest in the U.S. With approximately 1 million Catholic school age children (which is predicted to reach 1.6 million by 2040) there are plenty of students for our schools. But our currently Pre-K-12 enrollment is just over 80,000 – just 8% of the Catholic school age population. If we could increase that number to 10% - just 1 Catholic student out of 10 – we could double our current enrollment to 160,000 by 2040. This doesn’t take into account the large number of non-Catholic students that we have in our schools nor the fact that 10% is a rather low goal to shoot for. What it we got 15%? Or 20%?

But the big question that follows is how? The fact is a large percentage of the 5 million Catholics in Los Angeles are low-income, minorities who are often first or second generation immigrants to the US. The issues of access and affordability are essential if we are to tap into this population that is in desperate need of Catholic education. There are many aspects to this growth agenda but I will touch on two briefly.

The first is leadership. In order to create long term growth and sustainability schools need to have strong leaders who focus on establishing clear Catholic identity, rigorous Academics and active Stewardship. Leadership has to be present both in the principal who runs the school and in the pastor of the parish of our K-8 schools. Quality schools of value attract parents and students and, even in low income areas, a strong leader who creates and develops a quality program tends to lead to solid enrollment.

The second area is innovation. Catholic schools need to adapt and innovate to meet the needs of the 21^st century family and student. The ways that have worked in the past will not in the future so change is a requirement for growth. The original model for the Catholic parochial school is not sustainable in many locations and the advent of new technologies requires new approaches to how we govern and educate students in Catholic schools. This includes how we integrate technology into our classrooms as well as curriculum innovation, such as dual language immersion schools, to better meet the needs of the 21^st century student and family. The ability to innovate has contributed to some Catholic schools in Los Angeles staying open even when enrollment has declined significantly. We have been able to implement alternative structural models that have allowed schools to stay open and financially viable for the communities they serve.

With approximately 5 million Catholics, we firmly believe that we have the capacity to grow significantly in enrollment in the coming decades and why we see great signs of hope for Catholic education in Los Angeles. It will require solid, effective leadership at the school site level that focuses on faith, academic excellence and efficient administrative management. We also must continue to innovate in areas of governance, technology integration and instruction and assessment so we are best able to meet the needs of the 21^st century learner.

The crisis is real in Catholic schools but the response should be to approach the challenges with a bounding optimism that faces the challenges with hope and confidence that the best days of Catholic education lie ahead of us and not in the past. 

Excellence

The next area of focus will be on Excellence, which is centered narrowly on academic rigor and excellence. The reason for this is very specific - if you ask Catholic school principals what makes their school excellent, most will reply with some form of answer that centers on Catholic identity. They will cite the tangible identity that is present, the wonderful sense of community, the shared values between family and school...all of these are wonderful characteristics and those of us committed to them appreciate how integral they are to school excellence.

But that is why we have an exclusive focus on Faith (see previous post) that addresses this directly and stresses that faith should not simply be part of the school but infused through all aspects of school life. So when we cite Excellence, we are referring to academic rigor and achievement, which are both hallmarks for Catholic schools historically.

We start from the premise that Catholic schools charge for a product that is free down the street. Because we compete with free public schools (including charter schools) we need to ensure that the academic product that results in our schools is at minimum equal to those in other academic environments. Ideally we know that the product to be superior to that found in other schools.

The bottom line with our focus on excellence is this: Catholic schools have a deserved reputation for academic excellence. When the nuns were teaching in elementary schools it was a badge of honor to be able to effectively diagram a sentence or have perfect handwriting. But we can never rest on what we have accomplished in the past. Jim Collins in his book Good to Great says it well, "No matter what you have achieved, you will only merely be good in relation to what you can become." We have to reject the status quo and continually look to new ways to improve what we do in the classroom.

This requires thinking about education for the 21st century vs continuing with how things have been done in the past. Using data to drive instruction in the classroom, exploring alternative curricular models such as immersion language instruction and utilizing technology to both access content and engage learners. I will have a separate post on technology but the key point in this area of excellence is that we must ensure we know what we want to accomplish prior to implementing any new technology. So the new technology is not the innovation, it is the tool for the student and teacher to use in order to learn.

Job Titles and Descriptions

I saw this following article in my daily SmartBrief email and it struck a nerve with me:

HR vs. Leadership Development

I am in the midst of a re-organization of how we strucure and view the role of the Department of Catholic Schools in Los Angeles. In thinking about it for quite some time, my thoughts are that individuals within the office need to have a specific area of expertise that is their central focus. This is as opposed to how we are currently structured where individuals 'supervise' schools and pick up duties on the side.

The reason this article struck me in particular is that I have come to see the role of the Director of Personnel (which is the current title for our 'HR' person) as a Leadership Identifier and Developer. This is not the title, obviously, but you get the point. I know other Catholic school offices around the country do things differently but for us we don't do many of the strict HR functions that are outlined in the article. That is for the pastor to do at the local site. The purpose of the person in our office is to identify potential leaders for the future and then create (in collaboration with others) a program that will develop skills within each of them so as to bring high quality leaders into our schools.

There are other areas of 'expertise' that we are looking at as well - Catholic identity/catechesis, curriculum/instruction, data/assessment, fiscal management, enrollment management, technology integration, etc...And I will get to those over time but thought I would share the article to see if anyone had thoughts to share. That is, after all, what a blog is all about, right?

Faith, Excellence, Stewardship

So this is one of the two key summaries of what we are doing in Catholic schools in Los Angeles. It centers on  Faith, Excellence and Stewardship and the other one will center on Growth, Leadership and Innovation. It will take me a few posts to summarize all six areas. Although there is some overlap they all do require a bit of explanation.

I will begin with Faith, Excellence and Stewardship, which are not unique terms by any stretch in Catholic education but they are used to ground us in what is most essential to focus on each and every day. Just like principals and teachers, we can get caught up in the immediate fires that pop up every day and lose sight of the big picture. By having a set focus, it keeps us grounded and aimed in the right direction. I will provide a brief summary of each in the next week or so but these themes will be re-visited throughout the blog. Today I will start, as we always should in Catholic schools, with Faith.

Faith
The reason we do what we do and the reason we are what we are. Faith must be at the core of each one of our schools. As we delve into other areas of focus for our schools you will see that there is a lot of flexibility and innovation that we encourage at the school site level. This is essential if we are to grow our Catholic schools and continue to educate students in the coming decade. But with that approach to innovation it is equally essential that we maintain the core of who we are as educators - the Catholic faith as defined by Christ the educator.

When Catholic identity is strong at a school it is tangibly felt when one walks on the campus. It is so much more than a simple religion class - it defines how adults work with students, how discipline is conducted, how coaches work with athletes, and how adults interact with other adults. Ours is a redemptive faith so it lends itself perfectly to educating young students in how to behave and how to learn and grow from mistakes.

Another key aspect of Faith is that the sense of shared community and values is what creates the Catholic culture that leads to such astounding results. The great Catholic schools work to ensure that every adult on campus is focused and concerned about each child on campus. So when the third grade student is running down the hallway and making too much noise, the sixth grade teacher can lean out of her classroom and correct the student by name.

One fear that I have is that some of those in Catholic education want to downplay the faith component of their school. I have heard this most frequently from school board members and parents on the marketing teams but it needs to be said that it also sometimes originates with teachers and/or the principal. The idea is that somehow, by downplaying the role of faith in the school, it can better appeal to prospective parents. In my experience this tends to occur more frequently at higher income schools. The problem with this thinking is two-fold (well, there are many problems but I will cite two): one is that the one aspect of our schools that is exclusively ours is our Catholic faith. Other schools, most notably charter schools, have co-opted many of the aesthetic aspects of Catholic schools. So local and autonomous governance, uniforms, strong discipline, and rigorous academics are all found in many charters. But while Catholic schools have all of these aspects, they also have faith and that is something that charters can't co-opt.

The second problem with the diminishing of Catholic identity at a Catholic school is that faith is not some add-on that contributes to our success. It is the essence and primary reason for our success. If we don't have faith throughout our schools then we are simply charter schools that charge tuition and we will never win that competition.

Again, much more on this as the blog moves forward and I especially welcome your input and feedback on these topics as I am just touching on them cursorily.

Plan

The plan for this blog at this point is to focus on Catholic education and, specifically, what the ADLA is doing with regard to growth, leadership, and innovation. I will take different areas of focus and various initiatives and share about them on a regular basis. Those of you who have found your way to this blog are encouraged to comment - in my mind the main point of this exercise is to engage in an extended discussion with people who have a similar passion for Catholic schools.

I will also comment on stories and issues that arise regularly. While the focus of the blog will be on Catholic education, I will also comment on issues that are relevant in tangential ways or those that are of interest to me. I should also probably note here that the views I express in the future are always my own and should be interpreted as such.

Finally, the reason I am moving in this direction, and why I am very excited to be doing so, is because of the potential for more engagement across the country. I wrote a book published by NCEA in 2011 (interestingly enough entitled Changing the Ending, which you can find on the sidebar of the blog) that laid out many of the ideas I will be exploring further here. But because of the advent of social media (follow me on Twitter @kbaxter56) I realize that blogging is most likely a more effective means to communicate and engage with a variety of people across the country. I have been following blogs for close to a decade now but I was never really sure what I had to offer in that arena until now. This doesn't mean that I won't still try and write more books but simply that this medium can be equally, if not more, effective in wide communication with people who share my passion.

Blog Title - Why Changing the Ending?

The title of this blog comes from a Notre Dame study that was released in 2006. It was titled, Making God Known, Loved and Served and it was in response to the USCCB document that was released in 2003, Renewing Our Commitment to Catholic Elementary and Secondary Schools in the Third Millennium. The report from Notre Dame was a response to the bishops' call to support Catholic schools and it laid out a number of steps that Notre Dame, and other institutions of higher learning, could take to support K-12 Catholic schools.

It is a good document and worth reading if you haven't done so already, but the ending summary is where the title of the blog, and the motto of our work in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, comes from:

"Will it be said of our generation that we presided over the demise of the most effective and important resource for evangelization in the history of the Church in the United States? Will it be said of our generation that we lacked the resolve to preserve national treasures built upon the sacrifice of untold millions? Will it be said of our generation that we abandoned these powerful instruments of justice that provide educational opportunity and hope for families otherwise trapped in poverty? Surely not. Instead, when the story of Catholic schools is written, historians will look back on our age and marvel that against great odds, we changed the ending.”

The key to the message is that all of the faithful need to commit to the vision. Catholic

schools cannot just be a resource that Catholic educators want to see continue. They have to

be viewed by the Church at large as a vital ministry of the parish and there has to be a

commitment to seeing them continue to not only survive but thrive.