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Project

Contrasting Challenges Facing Catholic Schools: Essays on sub-Saharan Africa and the United States

Ensuring that by 2030, all children complete free, equitable, and quality primary and secondary education is one of the goals adopted by the international community under the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) or Agenda 2030. While the Millennium Development Goals emphasized the completion of primary education, a stronger emphasis has been placed on learning apart from schooling under the SDGs, starting from preschools and going up to secondary completion and beyond.

Catholic and other faith-based schools have an important role to play to achieve the SDGs. Yet the role of Catholic schools often remains ignored in policy discussions, and support provided by states to Catholic schools is typically limited despite their comparatively good performance. The aim of this collection of papers is first to better document the contributions of Catholic schools globally, and next to suggest how challenges and opportunities for Catholic schools differ in developing countries, and especially in sub-Saharan Africa, in comparison to developed countries such as the United States.

While Catholic schools in the United States face a challenge to maintain their enrollment, their students perform reasonably well on standardized test scores, at least in comparison to public schools. Learning could be improved, but most students do learn while in school. By contrast, even if students in Catholic schools in sub-Saharan Africa perform well in relative terms in comparison to students in other types of schools, they often do not perform well in absolute terms given the massive learning crisis that affects the developing world. Furthermore, because of high levels of poverty and out-of-school children in many low-income countries, even if Catholic schools are not much more expensive for parents than public schools, the schools still have difficulties in reaching the poor. Overall, Catholic schools in low-income countries face major challenges in ensuring that children master simple foundational skills, which is less the case in the United States, where the main threat is a long term decline in enrollment.

In this context, the aim of this collection of papers is to better document the contribution of Catholic schools globally, with specific attention given to developing countries, and in particular sub-Saharan Africa, so that contrasts become apparent. The focus is on enrollment trends, the ability of the schools to reach the poor, budget savings for states, the contribution of the schools through educational attainment to earnings and human capital wealth, and the achievements and challenges of the schools in selected regions and countries. In addition, given the particular challenges faced by Catholic schools and their students in the current COVID-19 crisis, analysis of the impacts of the crisis and potential responses is also conducted both for the United States and for sub-Saharan Africa.

Date:16 Mar 2020 →  16 Mar 2024
Keywords:Catholic schools, United States, Africa, Primary education, Secondary education, Poverty, Human development
Disciplines:Primary education, Secondary education, Religion and society
Project type:PhD project