National School Choice Week: Catholic Schools & Jewish Rye
PUBLISHER’S NOTE: It’s National School Choice Week. Because of the overwhelming political influence on Ocean State lawmakers, teacher unions have blocked virtually every attempt to allow parents to have more choices, or education freedom, when it comes to selecting the most appropriate schools for their children.
Private, Catholic, and home schools present a compelling alternative to the failed public schools in our state … yet compromised state lawmakers simply do not care.
Below is a pertinent commentary by a renowned national pundit. Click here for compelling video from a Rhode Island based school choice event.
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Originally published by William McGurn in the Wall Street Journal, Jan. 27, 2025
You don’t have to share the faith to love their role in the parent revolution.
Long before DEI became a thing, a Brooklyn-based Jewish bakery offered its own playful take on diversity in a now-iconic series of subway ads.
The ads featured a variety of people—a Native American man, a robed choirboy, a white cop, a black child—all enjoying sandwiches over this now-famous tag line: “You don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s real Jewish rye.”
That ought to be the message of Catholic Schools Week. The 4,731 Catholic grade schools and 1,174 secondary schools now celebrating do a superb job educating their students—with the National Catholic Educational Association reporting 99% of their high-school students graduating on time and 85.2% going on to four-year colleges.
Now may be their moment. Covid literally brought home to ordinary moms and dads what their kids were being taught in public schools.
They also saw how resistant those schools were to any accountability—Attorney General Merrick Garlandeven sicced the FBI on parents who showed up for school-board meetings.
But while the teachers unions cheered on the school closings, Catholic school students were in their classrooms.
The contrast launched a parents revolution.
Most of the hard-won gains have been at the state level.
Where five years ago not a single state offered universal school choice, today 12 states offer it, with the NCEA reporting that 13.7% of Catholic school students are there because of a choice program.
For the first time in nearly a quarter-century, Catholic school enrollment in 2023 increased slightly, to 1.7 million students.
And on the menu for 2025 are school-choice proposals in Texas, Idaho, New Hampshire, North Dakota, South Dakota, Tennessee and Wyoming.
Corey DeAngelis, a senior fellow at the American Culture Project, points out that this is a winning issue for Republicans.
Mr. Trump won the parent vote by 9% in November and the Catholic vote by 15%.
“The GOP has officially emerged as the parents’ party,” Mr. DeAngelis says. “The performance of the nation’s Catholic schools during the pandemic helps explain why.”
But there’s also ferment in Washington. Anthony de Nicola is a successful Wall Street executive who serves as chairman of the Invest in Education Coalition. He believes choice for every child requires some federal action.
“It is past time for the federal government to support the growing demand from parents to provide access to even more parental choice,” Mr. de Nicola says.
“Not only would this help established alternatives that have proven their worth—like the inner-city Catholic schools—it would encourage new models and unleash Elon Musk-like innovation and transformation of America’s education system.”
For years Mr. de Nicola tried to get a tax credit for contributions to private scholarships through in New York. He was stymied by the blue state’s politics.
Today, Invest in Education is pushing for the Educational Choice for Children Act.
It offers a 100% nonrefundable tax credit for private donations to nonprofit scholarship-granting organizations. It is more evidence of the fallout from Covid.
America’s experience with the pandemic demonstrated that Catholic schools, with far fewer staff and less resources, were far more flexible and innovative than their public counterparts.
The NCEA says that more than 90% of Catholic schools stayed open during the pandemic.
They kept in-person learning alive while also keeping staff and students safe from Covid.
In 2022, the National Center for Education Statistics released the first post-pandemic set of national achievement scores for fourth and eighth graders.
It showed the large declines for public-school students in both math and reading.
But Catholic schools showed no declines in fourth- or eighth-grade reading, or in fourth-grade math. Eighth-grade math scores at Catholic schools declined less than at public schools.
Most Catholic schools at the primary level are known as parochial schools because they are run by local parishes.
The name is ironic, though, because there’s nothing parochial about these schools. Instead of being run for the benefit of the teachers, they adhere to the now-radical notion that they should be run for the children they serve.
Catholic schools aren’t the only ones who deliver: There are charter schools, home schools, private schools and countless variations of all three.
But Catholic schools work, and have worked for some time. Although it isn’t fashionable to say, their success might have something to do with treating every child as created in the image of God.
Non-Catholics looking for a school to which they can trust their children appreciate that. Today 21% of all Catholic school students aren’t of the faith.
Whatever their religious differences, these parents want children to realize their potential and be good and productive citizens. They see the Catholic school system as the place where that can happen.
“You don’t have to be Catholic to appreciate its schools as a model of accountability and results,” Mr. DeAngelis says.
“That’s why they are at the heart of the parent revolution.”
William McGurn is a member of The Wall Street Journal editorial board. He previously served as Chief Speechwriter for President George W. Bush.

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