Sol Stern writes eloquently of how Catholic schools continue to provide good education to poor inner-city kids, many of them non-Catholic.

The tuition Catholic schools must charge is a fraction of what public and charter schools spend per pupil, but it is a reach for many inner-city parents. Unfortunately, while conservative and liberal philanthropists pour money into public and charter schools, Catholic schools are closing, due mainly to lack of financing. Yet many of the billionaires showering funds on the public and charter schools are finding that they are not getting results. See “Back to School for the Billionaires” (“They hoped their cash could transform failing classrooms. They were wrong.”)

Stern describes the careful, phonics-based reading instruction he saw at St. Aloysius School in Harlem. What a contrast to the whole-language approaches which are depriving kids of real reading skills and fostering dyslexia to boot, inasmuch as the children are being taught to memorize words and not to read from left to right. Moreover, Stern points out how St. Aloysius’s traditional educational values and shared spiritual mission, as well as its freedom to educate boys and girls separately, are foundational to its proven success. Its students continually outperform more lavishly funded public schools in the area, saddled with aggressive secularism and probably still staggering in one way or another under the noxious influence of John Dewey and his unfortunate reign at Columbia Teachers College. As the billionaires find that “money alone can’t repair the desperate state of urban education,” they might see their way to aiming their flowing spigots at places like St. Aloysius.