A Catholic Alternative

T he failure to educate poor minority children has remained an intractable problem, unsolved after almost 40 years of sustained federal efforts, despite the creation of the U.S. Department of Education in 1979. Arne Duncan, President Barack Obama’s choice for education secretary, has a big surprise coming: the problem he inherits is about to get exponentially worse. In short order, President Obama’s education team will be buffeted by three converging forces poised to overwhelm America’s K-12 school system: the swift decline in revenues available to fund public schools; the unsustainable cost of K-12 education as currently delivered; and the economic collapse of the Catholic parochial school system.

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