ccording to the myth, you were in serious trouble if they sent for Brother Al.

Brother Al was a big guy: six feet tall, one-ninety, enormous gut. He knew hot to handle the tough kids, the Italians from the Bronx who were shipped off to New Rochelle to spend four years with the Salesians. Brother Al would come into the room and say, "Stand up, Voltaggio," and Voltaggio would go with him. And the next thing you heard was BAM, Voltaggio crashing into a locker. There would be a bit of silence and then next thing you heard was BAM, Voltaggio crashing into another locker farther down the hall. Brother Al took him up and down the corridor like that—BAM slap his face BAM jerk his necktie BAM mess up his hair. Every once in a while, a senior took a swing at the good Brother, but for the most part you shut your mouth and took it because that was considered part of the education. A little bit of rough stuff never hurt anyone.

From the safe distance of adulthood, most initiates will tell you that, yes, the stories are true and, yes, the rough stuff might have warped a few kids along the way but, no, it certainly hasn't done them any permanent harm, had it? Pressed further, they will enumerate the crimes—nonconformity, leadership, vanity, stubbornness, flippancy, disrespect—that provoked the more complex rituals of humiliation (humiliation being one of the traditional hallmarks of a Catholic education). So, we see a frail, bespectacled Kathy being lowered into a cardboard shipping carton that once held a refrigerator. We see David, a beefy tackle on the football team, kneeling at the blackboard with his nose pressed to a chalkdrawn circle. We see the class clown, Louis, tethered to his desk by his necktie, which has been neatly stapled to the desktop. Pam (whose mother is a Presbyterian) kneeling before her peers, blubbering her way through the Act of Contrition, holding an empty chicken-pot-pie pan under her chin to catch the tears. Lastly we hear but do not see Voltaggio being pushed and shoved against the hallway lockers—BAM BAM BAM—by Brother Al.

Teachers, administrators, students, parents, almost anyone familiar with the Catholic schools today will say it isn't that way anymore. Then, they'll express genuine bewilderment that the image still endures "that's a myth from the 1930s and 40s," says George Elford, former director of research for the National Catholic Education Association (NCEA) and now director of the Northeastern Regional Office of Educational Testing Service (ETS). "I'm sure there are a few white- knuckle schools around, but people should forget that stereotype because it simply doesn't depict what's going on in the catholic schools today. They have changed in many many ways."

Elford is right, of course. The largest private schooling system in the nation (accounting for 65 percent of all private school enrollments and 6 percent of total U.S. enrollments) has undergone a profound transition in the last sixteen years, falling with remarkable speed and then rising with remarkable energy, all the while shedding some of its musty trappings, redefining its mission and, in a modest way, polishing up the image it presents to a secular public long suspicious or even downright hostile to Catholic schools. In better times, this odyssey would only be of passing interest to anyone not involved. But with public schools heading into an era of crisis that is sure to last many years, that fall and rise of the Catholic schools bears study, for it offers insights into the ways that institutions can and cannot expect to transform themselves.

In 1965, with enrollments at an all-time high, the Catholic schools in the United States went into a tailspin. Within a decade almost 3,500 out of 13, 484 schools were forced to shut down. From a high of 5.4 millions students, the school population dropped by 2 million. Among private schools the Church retained its top ranking in terms of enrollments, but its chare of the total private school population dropped from 87 to 65 percent. At the same time, the financial bedrock of the schools, the contributed services of religious personnel, began to erode as clergy left the religious life in record numbers. As a result, the ratio of lay to religious teachers began to rise. In 1955, lay teachers were still a rarity. By 1968 they comprised 43 percent of all full-time teaching staff. Last year, they outnumbered religious personnel by a margin of 73 to 27 percent. Despite the abysmally low salaries traditionally paid to lay teachers, the change in staffing ratios created a staggering new financial burden.

According to Richard J. Burke, NCEA's financial consultant to the Catholic schools, "the cost of a Catholic education has shot up at a disheartening pace. In 1969, it cost about $200 per pupil to run the elementary schools for 3.4 million kids. Nine years later the number of students had dropped to 2.4 million and the price had gone up to $548. The figures for 1980-81 aren't finished yet, but I expect the per pupil cost will be about $660,"—a 300 percent-plus increase in 11 years.

The ongoing financial crisis was demoralizing. Eleanor Ford, the first woman to run a major Catholic school system, recalls that when she took over New York City's schools in 1972, many Catholics were predicting the demise of parochial primary and secondary education. "Many people felt we were just duplicating services already offered by the public schools, so why not put the resources elsewhere? One reporter told me I had probably been selected for he job because a woman would make a more suitable undertaker for the schools than a man. I told him, 'Undertakers need not apply for this job. As long as there's one parent willing to support Catholic education, the system will survive.'"

Ford was right. In 1972, even as closings reached an all-time high—509 schools, about 4.8 percent of the national today—clergy and lay leaders at all levels of the system were vigorously attacking the two major problems that plagued the Catholic schools: money and motivation.

The first step was to adopt more sophisticated management techniques. In 1969, NCEA established a national data bank, the first service of its kind, to collect and disseminate comprehensive statistical data on trends and patterns in the Catholic schools.

"After the data bank was set up, NCEA began to offer financial counseling to the schools," says Burke. "They started to run seminars on financial management, and it made a big difference." Parishes across the nation began to carefully coordinate school closings and consolidations in financially troubled areas, to plan aggressive fundraising drives with alumni, and to rely more heavily on the voluntary services of parents.

The hard times prove that the managerial overhaul worked. Between 1965 and 1972, roughly 20 percent of the schools closed, but starting in 1973, the closings slowed dramatically. During the 1980–1981 school year only eighty-one schools, eight-tenths of one percent of the national total, shut their doors. More importantly, enrollment declines have slowed down to the point where they're now in line with the decline in the number of school-age children in the United States.

Motivation proved a more complicated matter, one that took longer to resolve. Until the early 1960s, few Catholic parents questioned the raison d'être of the schools. The parents were expected to send their children there. The children were expected to absorb a no-frills brand of education. The education was supposed to prepare them to g on to a Catholic college or, more often, to take their places as conforming citizens of Church and State.

But this vision of the schools, acceptable as it was in conservative, ethnocentric urban parishes, came under fire as Catholics moved up from the working class and out to the middle-class suburbs, with their generously funded public schools and relaxed attitudes towards child-rearing. The Catholic schools seemed to lag behind their public counterparts, offering a narrow range of academic courses laced with stale doctrine and taught in an unimaginative style that was thought to be needlessly punitive and mean-spirited.

The big skid that began in 1965 brought all these issues into focus. Suddenly American Catholics were asking questions that hadn't been asked for hundreds of years. Why do the schools exist? What should they teach? How and in what spirit should the most valued qualities of Christianity be communicated to people who have been raised in a relentlessly modern world?

The Second Vatican Council, which had convened in 1962, provided some answers. In that historic gathering, called by Pope JohnXXIII, the bishops of the world committed the entire Church to a new and controversial agenda. No longer was the institution to be primarily concerned with self-propagation and protection of the faith. Instead, Catholics were called upon to look outward, to devote themselves to the defense of human dignity, social justice, racial equality and the eradication of the causes of war. This theme of social justice repeats itself in the Church documents that have addressed educational issues in American Catholic schools. It is the centerpiece of a popular curriculum guide used by parochial schools throughout the country and a common seminar or workshop topic at gatherings of Catholic educators.

When sociologist James Coleman released his controversial Public and Private Schools this past spring, the Catholic schools enjoyed a moment of vindication. His study—a report card on the performance of American high schools, based on data collected from 1, 016 public, sectarian and nonsectarian private schools-confirmed the feeling among Catholic educators that they were on target with their reforms. Coleman concluded that students at both Catholic and other private schools achieve at higher levels than their public school counterparts; that in Catholic schools, the achievement levels of black students are closer to those of whites, and the achievement level of Hispanics are closer to those of non-Hispanics, than in public schools; that Catholic school students spend more time doing homework; that their level of school spirit is higher; that Catholic students and administrators are more likely than their public school peers to perceive discipline in their own school as being fair and effective.

Coleman's findings also tend to support a growing belief that urban clacks, Catholic and non-Catholic, have found in Catholic schools an educational and environmental refuge from the chaos and deterioration of neglected inner-city public schools. According to NCEA statistics, between 1971 and 1981, black enrollments increased from 5.1 to 8.8 percent of the Catholic school population. In Coleman's study, another startling pattern emerged: At high and low income levels, and among Catholics and non-Catholics alike, "blacks with the means to do so enroll in Catholic schools at rates that are generally higher than rates for other groups," Hispanic and white Catholics included. And to no one's surprise, he found that the private schools—of which Catholic schools comprise nearly two-thirds—"provide a safer, more disciplined and more ordered environment."

Public educators, who predictably protested both Coleman's methodology and his findings were perhaps most painfully stung by his conclusion: "The evidence is strong that the Catholic schools function much closer to the American ideal of the 'common school,' educating children from different background alike, than do the public schools."

ut through all the years of self-examination and change, the Catholic schools still defended and fortified one of the oldest and most fundamental prerogatives of their existence—the right to teach values to the young. Ironically, at the same time, public educators were finally acknowledging what the Catholics had claimed all along, that there is no such thing as a values-free education; that the public schools' laissez-faire approach to values formation simply made the educational experience values-random. Students emerged into adulthood shaped by hodge-podge of forces that had neither been interpreted nor evaluated.

It is, of course, in this realm that the public is most rightfully suspect of the Catholic schools: Are the schools educating children to be good Catholics, loyal to a narrow set of beliefs and behaviors? Or are they educating children to be good Christians—in the classic sense of that word—who feel a deep and lasting responsibility to the human race?

As unlikely as it may seem, in 1981, the answer to both of these questions is "yes." And the explanation is that, despite t heir ultimate fealty to Rome, the Catholic schools in this country are now and always have been organizationally decentralized, financially self-supporting, independent and diverse. Not even the most clear-cut teachings of the Vatican can trickle down to the classroom level without being transformed first by the biases of the intervening bureaucracy, then by the spirit of the particular school, and, finally, by the personal vision of the classroom teacher. For example, nothing could be more straightforward than Church doctrine on sexuality—abortion, birth control, homosexuality, premarital and extramarital sexual relations. So no one is surprised when a mid-seventies graduate of a suburban Catholic high school says that his "contemporary issues" class had a discussion about abortion—after viewing a slide show replete with enlarged pictures of bloody aborted fetuses. But one might be taken aback to learn that a black student, a recent graduate from an inner-city high school, took a course on women's issues that included samples of birth control devices and pamphlets on where to get more information.

Similarly, nothing could be more doctrinally explicit than the Church hierarchy's commitment to racial justice in the schools. In Boston that commitment expressed itself during the controversy over the city's program of busing to achieve desegregation. In 1974, Boston's Humberto Cardinal Medeiros suffered a predictable loss of local Catholic support when he announced that the Catholic schools were not to be used as a haven for whites fleeing the public school, and to this end ordered that enrollment levels be kept constant at all Catholic schools in the affected area until the conflict had subsided. Yet, in Holyoke, Massachusetts—where a city-wide busing program was ordered and where the diocese followed a controlled admissions policy meant to discourage white flight—an uproar arose last spring when the board of a parish elementary school defied diocesan policy and loosened its admission guidelines despite strenuous objections from the principal, members of the faculty, and some parents.

Outsiders suspicious of the Catholic schools are only dimly aware that the structure of the schools is flexible enough to permit such conflicting interpretations of the same doctrine. They find it hard to understand why the school should exist at all if not to promote uniformly a set of narrow-minded values, free from the dangers of open discourse and the corrupting influence of a pluralistic "real world."

There are still millions of Americans who relish that old-fashioned and simple-minded image of the Catholic schools. Chief among them are Catholics themselves, who tell and retell their tales of crime and punishment not because those stories represent the whole of the Catholic school experience, but because they validate one's claims to an exotic childhood; because they illuminate one's own attitudes toward authority; and because Catholics, from the Buckleys and Haig to the Berrigans and Drinan, from Mary McCarthy to Mary Gordon, inevitably define themselves through their relations to authority.

The longstanding negative image of the Catholic schools also has historical roots in the virulent anti-Catholic biases of Protestant-dominated Colonial America; in the indigenous hostility to Catholics during the European immigrations of the nineteenth century; and in the secular state's reflexive hostility to perceived infringements on its self-proclaimed authority, in this case the right to control the form and content of a child's education.

In one sense, the lingering negative image does more harm to the public schools than the Catholic schools. The latter have faced their crisis, emerged slimmer and smarter, and now go about their mission with a new sense of purpose. But among public educators, the traditional wariness of the Catholic system prevents them from acknowledging what Coleman learned, that the Catholic schools must be doing something right. If the public schools seriously hope to master the future—filled as it appears to be with school closings, funding cutbacks, staff morale problems, and ever-growing disciplinary chaos—they might look to the Catholic school as a model of what to do, and not to do, when educating the young. <