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3 Investing in Promising New Models There is a considerable consensus today that the traditional Catholic school run by the local church is unsustainable in many places. “Putting all power with the pastor is great when the pastor is amaz- ing and has the desire and capacity to be intricately involved in the day-to-day operations of the school,” says Joe Womac of the Specialty Family Foundation in Los Angeles. “Unfortunately, this parish model no longer reflects reality, with many pastors being stretched too thin and lacking the capacity to be 36 meaningfully involved in running a school.” What’s needed, he says, are new governance models. Investor and donor Tony de Nicola agrees that without changes in the way schools are managed “we’ll continue to face the same challenges.” When The Philanthropy Roundtable asked Catholic-school donors about barriers to the sector’s growth, 69 percent named “diocesan bureaucracy.” The experience of the GHR Foundation of Minnesota will be familiar to many donors. “The GHR Foundation had been funding Catholic schools for a number of years and putting in a lot of money,” explains Meg Gehlen Nodzon. This included a $1 million grant to the local diocese for scholarships and other purposes. Nevertheless, “schools were still financially unstable and ran the gamut, academically, from highly effective to questionable.” Changing times require a new approach to organizing Catholic educa- tion, argues John Eriksen, former superintendent of schools for the diocese of Paterson, New Jersey. “Dioceses feel that in order to control their schools they need to manage all schools. That’s a mistake. I would much rather see dioceses bid out the management of these schools to other operators.” At its core, governance is about who has power. The ultimate author- ity over a Catholic school usually resides with the local bishop. His degree of involvement, however, ranges widely. Bishops are allowed to delegate responsibilities of running schools, and often do. Many regions have a secretary of education, vicar general, or superintendent of local Catholic schools. The commonest arrange- ment has been for priests to delegate operational responsibilities to school principals. The only responsibilities that cannot be delegated relate to the religious and moral teachings of the school. Changing the way Catholic schools are organized, operated, and gov- erned means overturning more than a century’s worth of practice. “There are certain things you have to break to fix the system: old mindsets, old staffing models, old ways of governing schools, old ways of being held accountable,” says Casey Carter of Philadelphia’s Faith in the Future. The next generation of healthy schools “is going to look very different from schools and approaches of the past.” Understandably, many priests and bishops are hesitant about altering longstanding customs and formulas. But resistance seems to be softening. Unprecedented new arrangements for governing the Catholic schools that have been put into place in prominent locations like New York City and Philadelphia are speeding the pace of change. Catholic School Renaissance 37 INVESTING IN PROMISING NEW MODELS Since 2009, Notre Dame’s Alliance for Catholic Education has hosted a series of meetings among bishops to discuss the revitalization of Catholic K-12 schooling. The resulting conversations have helped open minds about system updates. ACE’s John Schoenig sees “growing receptivity among bishops to new models. The paradigm has shifted fun- damentally in these six years.” Changing the way Catholic schools are governed means overturning more than a century’s worth of practice. The question is no longer whether Catholic schools should be run differently; it’s about how. “There’s strong understanding about the con- cept of alternative governance,” says Schoenig. “Now the bishops are considering details and degree. There are different ways we can do this, different approaches to authority, different organizational structures. We’re discussing all of the possibilities.” The explorations have extended far beyond talk—new approaches are now being tested, honed, and expanded from coast to coast. And bishops aren’t the only ones in these conversations. Donors, school administrators, teachers, lay leaders, and many others are involved. By insisting on updated structures and helping to pay for them, donors can have a powerful influence on this crucial transition. Fostering change within traditional governance structures “I want to work within the system as an agent for positive change collabo- rating with the bishops and their staffs,” says philanthropist Tony de Nicola. “This is what I do with companies I own through private equity. I work with CEOs to make them better.” Donors who are in that camp may want to encourage school admin- istrators to share information and resources in loose consortia. This step appeals to some because it is less disruptive than the governing change we’ll consider in the next section. Yet it still offers chances to improve management and sustainability by getting schools to cooperate. Consortia vary. Some support a small number of schools in a small geo- graphic space—like the Consortium of Catholic Academies, a nonprofit created to provide administrative, curricular, and financial support to 38 four schools in Washington, D.C., that collectively educate about 800 students every year. It dates to 2007 when plans were announced to convert seven of D.C.’s 14 Catholic schools into charter schools (see the “Catholic-school conversions” section later in this chapter for more on this topic). Four of the remaining schools were reorganized under the CCA umbrella. Other consortia link schools across geographic boundaries. For example, the Mid-Atlantic Catholic Schools Consortium shares seven activities—including procurement, leadership development, and joint advocacy—among members stretching from D.C. to Baltimore to Wilmington, Delaware. The Greater Milwaukee Catholic Education Consortium was formed in 2007 by the deans of the five Catholic uni- versities in Milwaukee and supported by a startup donation from the Stollenwerk Family Foundation. Its mission is to support and revitalize the Catholic schools in that city by marshaling academic resources and expertise from the adjoining Catholic colleges. Donor John Stollenwerk, former owner of Allen Edmonds Shoes, explains the program’s genesis: “Cardinal Dolan [then Archbishop of Milwaukee] and I came up with idea of putting the five Catholic col- leges and their incredible resources to use for the benefit of Catholic schools. Each college puts some money into it, according to size, and then they charge a small fee for the program. It wasn’t hard to get the colleges involved. They saw the need, and also an opportunity to work with teachers pursuing post-graduate degree programs.” The Milwaukee consortium behaves much like a consulting firm. It helps develop teacher and principal skills, bolsters fundraising, marketing, and public relations, and strengthens management. It also provides schools with expertise and resources when new needs pop up—like vocational skills training, or anti-bullying instruction. The consortium holds large workshops, sponsors intimate conversations, and consults on site. The work of the Catholic School Consortium in Los Angeles has been driven almost entirely by philanthropy. In 2008 the Specialty Family Foundation invited 13 schools to join together to strengthen their development, marketing, and outreach activities. Nine schools took up the offer. Each received a three-year grant of $250,000 to hire a staff member to lead development, and to meet monthly with his or her peers from the other schools to share ideas and challenges. The consortium now unites two dozen schools, and the scope of their work has expanded. For example, nine of the member schools Catholic School Renaissance 39 INVESTING IN PROMISING NEW MODELS recently joined forces to hire an accounting firm to handle all of their books. Three schools partnered with a local university to align their teacher professional development. The goal of the program is to build the competence of schools to the point where no ongoing support from Specialty is needed, and where “a sustainable, vibrant, rigorous Catholic elementary school will be available to every Los Angeles area child who seeks to attend regardless of ability to pay.” The consortium, which spun itself into an independent 501(c)(3) in 2014, is making a difference for many of its participants. Two schools “are absolutely night and day different over a five-to-seven year period,” reports Joe Womac of Specialty. “At least three additional campuses were good schools that have become great, maintaining both excellence and financial health. These schools prove it can be done in the inner-city.” Fostering change by transforming governance A new generation of school networks—sometimes called “private-school management organizations”—has gained attention for leading groups of Catholic schools toward greater success. These organizations offer the benefits of the consortia just discussed—like knowledge trading and shared services—but go much further to create common operating prac- tices built on shared leadership and mission. Unlike consortia, creating these managed networks of schools requires an all-new kind of gover- nance and control. Every network has a central office that standardizes budgeting, hir- ing, fundraising, procurement, curriculum, and building acquisition and management. This frees up principals to focus on instruction, and reli- gious leaders to focus on spiritual and moral guidance. This arrangement has in several instances produced chains of schools that are financially sustainable and academically excellent. The question is no longer whether Catholic schools should be run differently; it’s about how. To make this new structure work, a diocese must be willing to devolve most school governing authority to the private school man- agement organization. Though still quite new, PSMOs are already diversifying into different types. In some cases a bishop grants operating 40 A Minneapolis center of excellence A group of lay leaders, funders, principal.

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