He is neither old nor a priest nor particularly attached to time-honored traditions. At 35, John Eriksen, one of the nation’s youngest Catholic-school superintendents, offers a ruthless assessment of parochial education. “The biggest threat that urban Catholic schools face is nostalgia,” he says both of districts nationwide and of his own diocese of Paterson, N.J. A Notre Dame and Harvard graduate fluent in Spanish and Arabic, Eriksen is part of the next generation of Catholic leaders in search of new ways to halt decades of student attrition. “We’ve been running these schools in a way that might have worked 30 or 40 years ago but doesn’t work now,” he says.<\/p>\n
Of that, there is no doubt. Nearly 1 in 5 Catholic schools in the U.S. has closed its doors this decade. To non-Catholics, this may not appear to be something worth worrying about. But parochial schools are one of the largest (if not the largest) alternatives to the American public-education system, and their steady decline inordinately affects urban low-income minorities who would otherwise be left at the mercy of public schools that have proven incapable of educating them.<\/p>\n
Many Catholic schools, however, are following in the steps of their public brethren and trying to survive by changing the way they do business….<\/p>\n