William H. Jeynes from the University of Chicago presented his study about religious commitment and academic achievement at AERA.¹ Using the NELS data, he concluded that devout Black and Hispanic children achieve at a higher academic level than do those who are less religious. For all standard tests, all the differences were statistically significant at the .0001 level. He cited several studies that investigated relationships between academic achievement and the religious environment of the school (Chubb and Moe, 1990²; Coleman, Hoffer, and Kilgore, 1982³; Bryk, Holland & Lee, 1993⁴), but his variable of individual religious commitment has not been used. He quoted Sander⁵ who argued from his thought provoking data that Catholic schools actually produced the largest academic advantage for non-Catholic students. Jeynes hypothesized that the reason may be that the religious habits that are conducive to academic excellence would probably be already incorporated into their lives. Even so, the two studies belie conventional thinking.

Quite a different study was the qualitative investigation Brian Johnson⁶ presented at NCEA. He gathered his data about the principal succession process from a Canadian Catholic school district which had the practice of rotating principals every five years. Johnson explored the successful practices that new and experienced principals utilized in the first months of their administration. While American Catholic dioceses generally do not appoint principals for a term, and the practice of terms used by religious communities has all but disappeared, several of the study's findings may be helpful to schools undergoing transition of administrators.

Sergiovanni⁷ wrote of the principal's role in the culture of the school. In this study, the school culture is actually a "teacher culture" because of the frequent turnover of the principal. The principals' opportunity to exert influence depended upon the their ability to understand and the personal and social context. Other findings concluded that the successful principal

Mary Peter Traviss, O.P., is Director Emerita of the Institute for Catholic Educational Leadership at the University of San Francisco.

Sister Christina Heltsley has conceptualized an extraordinarily useful research study. She assessed the most popular and frequently used pieces of software games in Catholic elementary schools and did a content analyses of the top five programs. In her analyses she was looking for five important social values in the Catholic educational documents--Roman and American-- of the last several years. Seventy three percent of all the students chose the same five titles:

She reported on the contents of all five programs according to the five values identified. The article contains charts illustrating which programs underscored which values, and which programs reinforced the negative aspects of the concepts. Where in the USA is Carmen Sandiego?, for example, used male specific common nouns and pronouns 168 times as opposed to the use of female specific common nouns and pronouns 47 times.

Using the "hidden curriculum," or the silent curriculum as her theoretical rationale, which Philip Jackson maintains is far more powerful than the explicit curriculum, Sister Christina urges that all curriculum, whether hidden or explicit, must undergo consistent and rigorous examination. Communication media contains "subliminal messages that telegraph values in complete opposition to those esteemed in the Gospel." (p. 61) To neglect to do is akin to inviting strangers into your classroom and letting them teach anything.

Dr. Augenstein adds another few pages to his historical research of the Catholic school superintendents (See Lighting the Way, 1908-1935: The Early Years of the Catholic School Superintendency). In this piece he writes of the Departmental phase, during which the superintendency became professionalized. and the renowned Father Neill D'Amour of Marquette, Michigan, was appointed the first fulltime Director of the superintendents. Collective bargaining was initiated and Mary Perkins Ryan wrote her controversial book, Are Parochial Schools the Answer? Catholic Education in Light of the Council. This was the era when the Vatican Council had a profound influence on the development of Catholic education, enrollment figures declined dramatically, and the department was reorganized into the Chief Administrators of Catholic Education, embracing both schools and religious education. It was also the time when there was a shift from clerical leadership to lay leadership.

"The President-Principal Governance Model Research"
by Robert Mullen, Ph. D. President, Rock Leadership Services.

Abstract
A foundational study was conducted to examine the roles and responsibilities of the president and principal in United States Catholic high schools. A four page survey was mailed to the president and principal of each of the Catholic high schools thought to employ that form of administration. The researcher used the 1997 Official Catholic Directory to identify the schools thought to be eligible for the study.

A total of 508 surveys were sent to individuals working at 254 schools. A response was received from 91% of the schools and 84% of the individuals surveyed. Of the 425 individuals who responded, 215 presidents and 210 principals returned surveys. Schools with this model of leadership were found in all six geographic regions of the United States as defined by the National Catholic Educational Association. Over 60% of the schools were private Catholic schools; coed schools account for 49% of the total number. Schools of 750 students or more also account for 49% of the total number. Respondents reported high levels of satisfaction with the model along with high levels of perceived success of the model. Of those who responded, just over 44% had been in their position four years or less.

Presidents and principals were almost in complete agreement on a ranking of the roles and responsibilities of each position. Presidents were seen most often working in the areas of advancement/fundraising, business/financial fiduciary leadership, and acting as liaison with the governing board and the sponsoring agency. Principals most often were seen in the roles of instructional leaders of the school, educational leader, and as the primary contact with students, parents, and faculty. Presidents' responsibilities were most often reported to be in the areas of alumni relations, school marking initiatives, financial aid programs, and oversight of the physical plant facility. The principal was most often seen as responsible for curriculum development, student record keeping, student discipline, counseling, and health services.

Recommendations for further study include the need for examining the one-on-one relationship between the president and principal and its impact on the success of the model.

Roles of the President
Presidents and principals most often cited these as the roles of the president:

Presidents and principals mostly agreed on the roles that belong to the president. The particular area of disagreement was that of "recognized leader of the school." Presidents most often cited this as their role while principals saw this as a shared role.

Role of the Principal
Presidents and principals agreed that the three most important roles of the principal were:

Roles Shared Equally
Presidents and principals saw these roles as ones that should be shared equally:

In two recent presentations, Dr. Jay Greene, University of Texas at Austin, and a research associate at Harvard University's Program on Education Policy and Governance, presented research findings that suggest, contrary to popular beliefs, that private schools produce better integration than public schools. The first paper, "Integration Where it Counts: A Study of Racial Integration in Public and Private School Lunchrooms," is a description of a piece of research conducted in ten lunchrooms of both public and private schools in two American cities with large Latino populations. The names of the two cities are being withheld pending review of the data by the public school officials.

The conceptual design included the observation of 4302 students, 2864 from public schools and 1438 from private schools. Seating patterns and racial compositions were recorded. The definition of integration required that one of five students sitting near each other be of a different racial group. More than a third of public school students (36.5%) sat in heterogeneous lunchroom settings; more than half of private school students (50.3%) sat in heterogeneous lunchroom settings. The difference was statistically significant. When the factors of city, seating restrictions on the part of the school, school size, and student grade level were controlled, there was even a larger integration advantage for private schools.

Greene suggests three reasons for this important finding, namely, private schools produce better integration, which he and his colleagues subsequently tested. First, private school students come from families with higher income levels and social class than do public school students, and therefore, may mix more easily with students of other races. Second, many private schools are religious and are committed to making efforts at integration. Third, private schools usually do not draw their students from racially segregated neighborhoods. Greene concludes that in the interests of truth, we must abandon "the long held view that the traditional public school is equivalent to the ideal of the common school."

Green's paper is complete with tables, bibliography and endnotes on the web, http://PRO.harvard.edu/search.htm; after you have the site, type in "Greene."

A second paper delivered by Greene at the APSA meeting, and also available on the web, is entitled "Civic Values in Public and Private Schools," and is part of Paul Peterson's new book, Lessons from School Choice (Brookings Institute). The paper examines how well schools transmit democratic values. He asks the questions, "Do public schools actually produce students who are more publicly spirited than private schools?" "Are public schools really closer to the ideal of common schools, with superior integration to that found in private schools?" His article claims that the research evidence does not support these claims.

In fact, Greene maintains that, "on average, private schools are not only better racially integrated," but also "display greater racial tolerance and generally convey stronger democratic values than do public schools."

A major contribution of the article is Greene's development of a measure of integration that avoids the dispute of the 1980's over the appropriateness of the questions to ask regarding integration. He identifies two variables in the NELS that help measure integration, and lead to his conclusion that "private school students are twice as likely to be in these well-integrated classrooms than public school students."

Greene's other conclusions claim that private school also do a "better job of achieving racial tolerance that we hope comes with integration." He maintains that "private school students are more likely to volunteer, more likely to volunteer often, and more likely to believe that volunteering and helping others are very important things."

NELS asked school administrators to rate (1) how well they promote practice in citizenship, (2) how well they promote awareness of contemporary social issues, and (3) how well they teach values and morals compared to other schools.

The self assessments of the administrators, who gave their schools an "outstanding" on these three issues are as follows:

So while there is a general perception that public schools offer superior democratic education to their students, the research evidence does not support the perception, and the public school administrators clearly do not believe so.

The recent Private School Research Conference at the University of Dayton under the chairmanship of Professor Tom Hunt discussed the private school issues needing further investigation and elaboration and also brought to mind the Catholic School Community's relationship with research and indeed, researchers. Through the well organized conference the pages of history turned back and underscored the association between the Catholic schools and research over the past hundred years.

The Great Catholic School Debate of the late 1800's which pitted Bishop against Bishop regarding the question of the schools, was dramatically reopened in 1964 when Mary Perkins Ryan published her book, Are Parochial Schools the Answer? The volume sent shock waves through the Catholic School system at the very time that the radical changes coming out of Vatican II were unsettling many American Catholics. Michael O'Neill, commenting on the impact of the book, wrote:

The debate about the schools, a smoldering issue within the Church since it was settled so authoritatively at the Third Plenary Council in Baltimore, burst into open flame again, and raged every bit as intently as it had in the time of Gibbons and Ireland. Every week Catholic periodicals carried articles on one side of the debate or the other. Only this time, rather than an appeal to the hierarchy for a decision, there was a consistent cry for investigative research by advocates who gullibly believed that research "proved" anything. (1) They wanted research to prove that the schools were necessary, and research to prove they were not, research to answer such questions as "Are the Catholic schools 'good' schools?" "Are they worth the expenditure of money and personnel?" "Are they necessary to the Church's mission?" "Is the Church creating an elite corps within its membership?" and of course, Mrs. Ryan's question, "Do the schools really make good Catholics of the Church's young people?"

And so began the publication of serious research extoling the merits of the Catholic schools. Among these studies, Education of Catholic Americans (1966), Catholic Schools in Action: The Notre Dame Study of Catholic Elementary and Secondary Schools in the United States (1966, better known as the Carnegie Study), made the pages of Newsweek and Fortune, the front pages of the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. Andrew Greeley became the most sought after speaker in the nation on the Catholic school convention/conference circuit. And because his assertion in his scholarly High School Achievement: Public, Private, and Catholic Schools Compared (1982) that private and Catholic schools had consistently out-performed public school students was quoted so frequently, the teaching Sisters expressed surprise when James Coleman, was introduced as "not a Jesuit, not even a Catholic."

Despite the pleas of such renowned Catholic scholars as [now Bishop] William Friend, through his Office for Educational Research at the University Notre Dame (phased out in 1973), Monsignor John Tracy Ellis from Catholic University in Washington, D.C., and priest-sociologist Andrew Greeley, educational research about the Church's schools was not used to make decisions about these institutions; instead all through the 1970's and 1980's research on Catholic schools was used to support the need to keep the schools as part of the Church's mission. One National Catholic Reporter reader shared her feelings about a feature article on the Greeley book, Catholic Schools in a Declining Church (1976), by writing a letter to the editor in which she said, "Here it is NCR Day in the wasteland again, and as I trudge from the mailbox, I see Father Greeley's ascetic photo on your front page (NCR, April 2) and I moan like David, "Oh God! It is going to be another apologia-for-Catholic-Schools issue and I won't have peace for a week." (National Catholic Reporter, April 16, 1976; see also Mary Perkins Ryan's "Data, Data Everywhere," The Critic, December 1966, p. 25).

Supportive research studies were becoming popular among the members of the Catholic School community. A year after Greeley's Catholic Schools in a Declining Church, the United States Catholic Conference (USCC) commissioned Thomas Vitullo-Martin to investigate a specific segment of the Church's schools and Catholic Inner-City Schools: The Future (1977) was published. It was followed in 1982 by Inner City Private Elementary Schools: A Study by James Cibulka, Timothy O'Brien, and Donald Zewe. The latter was funded by the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights.

In 1978 the National Catholic Educational Association (NCEA) formed the National Center for Research in Total Catholic Education. The Center awarded small grants for research in Catholic Education and announced that the Center would not only make the educational community aware of the findings, but would also design ways to implement the findings. Four years later, in 1982, NCEA established the Michael J. McGivney Memorial Fund for New Initiatives in Catholic Education. The fund, built by the Knights of Columbus, was founded to award educators in the field small grants for action research as well as assist NCEA to conduct limited internal studies, some spin-offs, and to grant monies to outside researchers for exploratory research.

Investigations completed with financial aid from one of the two agencies included Effective Catholic Schools: An Exploration (1984), Sharing the Faith: The Beliefs and Values of Catholic High School Teachers (1985), Towards Effective Parish Religious Education for Children and Young People (1986), The Heart of the Matter: Effects of Catholic High Schools on Student Values, Beliefs and Behaviors (1990) and Catholic Schools Make a Difference: Twenty Five Years of Research (1992). Other funding sources for NCEA studies have been the Ford Foundation and the Saint Mary's Catholic Foundation (Catholic High Schools: A National Portrait,1985, and Catholic High Schools: Their Impact on Low-Income Students, 1986).

As the Catholic education community's skills developed in both reading research and in using the findings, three shifts began to make themselves discernible in the 1980's: the use of the data for decision making, the emergence of a large body of doctoral dissertations, and an increasing use of different methodologies appropriate to more sophisticated questions. The three areas are still being developed and expanded today, shaped by the increasing amount of data being generated by the researchers.

One of the most hopeful signs of the maturity of the Catholic school community in regard to its educational research is the use of the data to make decisions, to express a desire to conduct systematic research to evaluate the impact of Catholic education, to ascertain whether it does indeed meet its objectives, and re-direct its course on a number of major initiatives. Certainly the findings of Coleman's and Hoffer's Public and Private High Schools: The Impact of Communities (1987) , especially in regard to the importance of the "functional community" and the egalitarian ethic of religion, have stirred that desire. This research has played a critical part in clarifying the currently prominent emphasis on the Catholic identity question. The Coleman research has stimulated the operationalization of the concepts of "functional community" and "social capital" and helped shaped the important questions now being posed about Catholic identity.

The use of research as an element in decision making was long in coming to the Church and puzzling to the serious scholars in ecclesiology. At the time of the Second Vatican Council there were 4,342, 273 students, or 52.21% of all eligible Catholic children, enrolled in 9451 Catholic elementary schools, and 1,009, 081 secondary school students, or 32.11% of those eligible, registered in 1075 Catholic high schools. This educational achievement was unparalleled on the part of any religious group anywhere in the world. And yet there was only one major research effort at that time (The Education of Catholic Americans) to investigate this extraordinary expenditure of time, personnel, and money.

A second shift in the Catholic school community's potential use of research was the dramatic increase in the number of doctoral dissertations in the 1980's and 1990's. This was due in part to the establishment of special programs at Catholic colleges and universities to prepare Catholic school personnel in response to the appeal of the American Bishops to Catholic higher education to "provide Christian formation programs for educators who are evangelizers by call and covenant and mission" (American Bishops, Catholic Higher Education and the Pastoral Mission of the Church, 1981, p. 6). At first these formative programs offered only M.A. degrees, and gradually they added the doctorate and quite naturally focused the research on Catholic schools.

One of the marked changes in doctoral research produced by Catholic institutions of higher learning has been the topics investigated. Forty years ago there was very little research done on Catholic schools per se, and when there was, it reflected interests in Church and State issues, histories of Religious Communities, philosophical questions, Catholic higher education, and comparisons of religious and lay teachers (Traviss, Doctoral Dissertations On Catholic Schools, K-12, NCEA, 1986). When interest in the school as an entity in and of itself did take hold, due largely to the example of Father Andrew Greeley, topics centered on governmental aid, unions, law, boards, styles of supervision, and curricular concerns. Today there is considerable work being done in the area of the school as a formative community, pastoral leadership models, women's issues, ministerial role of teachers, and the school's role in parenting education. Parental expectations and perceptions of schools receives much attention these days as does the culture of the school, single gender education vs. coed education at the high school level, and styles of school leadership at all levels. Fortunately, investigation of values, moral, and ethical education, and how it is employed by teachers remains of great interest.

Another feature of doctoral research being employed is various forms of replication. Father Eugene Sullivan's study about priest perceptions of Catholic schools was first done at Boston College in 1981 sampling the clergy of the Boston Archdiocese, replicated by Father Carl Schipper at the University of San Francisco with another population, and by a third researcher, Thomas Steven Tachney, at Saint Louis University, with a mid-western population. The topic was investigated nationally by J. Stephen O'Brien in Mixed Messages: What Bishops and Priests Say About Catholic Schools (1987). The latter book, which added Bishops to the sample, was followed by another use of the Sullivan design by a priest from Nigeria, Michael Ojiego Okpara, Jr., in which he surveyed every priest in his diocese against the backdrop of the historical, political, and sociological history of the schools there (A Study of the Perceptions of the Catholic School by Diocesan Parish Priests and Their Assistant Priests in the Orlu Diocese, Nigeria, University of San Francisco, 1989). The findings are remarkably similar, except for the Nigerian study, but there are interesting variations.

A third observable shift in the research is the variety of methodologies being employed to collect data on the questions posed. The first pieces of research, with the notable exception of Joseph H. Fichter's case study, Parochial Schools: A Sociological Study, were almost exclusively done by survey research, a quantitative procedure. In recent years, there has been more of a balance between qualitative and quantitative research, depending on the research questions asked. Recent investigations are being done by using case studies, content analysis, participatory research, ethnographic research, survey research combined with face-to-face focused interviews and individual interviews, experimental design, and combinations of these methodologies. Catholic Schools and the Common Good (1993) is one of the best examples of this use of appropriate multi-methodologies. In addition, it is beautifully written.

More must be done in the above three areas, but the Catholic school community has made important strides. It can be proud of and grateful for its increasingly quality research. There are additional challenges ahead: the school personnel, in particular, is becoming tired of participating in research studies, answering questions, responding to validity and reliability tests, and supplying classroom situations for observing the effect of intervening variables. Schools in specific dioceses, depending on the data needed, are being asked to participate too frequently to the detriment of their educational programs. Often they see their involvement as simply helping a stranger complete a book or a doctoral dissertation. Superintendents should be front and center in enabling school personnel to see the overall research need and its value to Catholic education. They should not only encourage participation, but should publicize the studies and help schools with decision making based on their findings. If the dioceses and schools do not cooperate with the investigators, there can be no research. Leadership is essential.

The second challenge is one of finances. The Catholic school community's research agenda relies on soft money, usually grants. In rare cases is money budgeted to do research in order to have data for decision making. Despite the fact that the American Bishops wrote in 1967 ("Statement on Catholic Schools" USCC) that they acknowledged "the need for more research to evaluate our present endeavors, to project our future responsibilities, and to make a through inventory of our resources in personnel and finance" and they repeated the need for research in their 1976 letter, "Teach Them" (USCC) and again in 1990 with the publication of "In Support of Catholic Elementary and Secondary Schools" (USCC), there has been very little money regularly budgeted for research.

The third challenge is dissemination and implementation. Conferences such as the one in Dayton are needed to acquaint the Catholic school community with the collected data on important issues confronting the schools. Administrators and teachers should have the skills to implement solid research findings and to join with the rest of the Catholic community in raising their voice in shaping future plans for Catholic schools. The Private School Research Conference was a unique educational event, and it is to be fervently hoped that it will be continued next year and that an annual event will be established for the good of all private schools.

How well do Catholic schools perform their role in helping parents meet the formational needs of their children? Or in acknowledging the parents as the primary educators of their children? The Church's documents on education from Vatican II to the present day are very clear in their identification of the Catholic school as the nurturing agent and significant guide to parents. To Teach as Jesus Did (NCCB, 1972), for example, urged the schools to provide opportunities for parents to learn about child development.

In considering the role of the school as parent-educator, Teach Them (NCCB, 1976), maintained that there was a need for "more adult, parent, and family education" (p. 2). In 1991 the American Bishops again asserted, "Parents need support and help in meeting the challenges of raising children in the face of the cultural, economic, and moral pressures of our day" (p. 9).

Roman documents, too, have promoted this role for Catholic education. In 1981 Pope John Paul II included with the task of the "renewal of the Catholic school to give special attention both to the parents and to the pupils and to the formation of a perfect educating community" (#40). In 1988 the same Pontiff wrote:

"What is needed is to prepare the lay faithful to dedicate themselves to the work of rearing their children as a true and proper part of Church mission. What is needed is to constitute and develop this 'formative community' which is together comprised of parents, teachers, clergy, women and men religious and representatives of youth." (#62)

The Congregation on Catholic Education (1988) wrote, "Every school should initiate meetings and other programs which will make the parents more conscious of their role, and help to establish a partnership" (#43).

Both the American and Roman documents call for the Catholic schools to support parents and provide assistance for them in their roles as the"'primary and principal educators" (Vatican Council II, 1965, #11). Unfortunately, many of the school administrators have not had access to the evaluative research into the effectiveness of the Catholic schools in either of these two related areas.

As part of her research on the Catholic elementary school as an agent of parent formation, McCormack (1994) found that parents gave high marks to the schools in the work the schools do in nurturing the spiritual needs of the child, but did not report having received "direct formative parenting assistance from their schools" (p. 132). McCormack's research is both qualitative and quantitative; the interview data with parents is rich and revealing and could be highly beneficial material for principals and teachers in designing the help parents desire most. The voices of parents come through as authentic and loyal. Caution should be taken, however, when comparing the survey data with the focused interviews. The researcher discovered that the parents were much more honest and forthright in the focused interviews. She addressed this contrast in her study.

Another caution should be exercised in comparing data regarding decision- making, particularly the perceptions of the school administrators with those of the parents. Thomson (1990) found that there was a wide disparity between the perception of the principals regarding the involvement of parents with the schools and the recognition of their role as primary educators and the parents' perception of that recognition by the school and involvement. Other studies which supported Thomson's findings were Bereen (1976), Muccigross (1983), and Bauch (1988). All four studies reported that principals ideally believed that parents are the primary educators, but the studies also concluded that principals actually involved them only for selected aspects of decision-making. In fact, Bereen felt there was a "latent conflict" between parents and principals, and an inability on the part of some principals to resolve conflict.

While there are many implications for this research in the area of parental education and parental decision making, one of the most striking is the need to include in leadership courses for Catholic school administrators the skills for designing adult learning models for parent inservice, as well as skills needed to engage adults in participatory decision-making. Diocesan offices, too, need to include training in these skills for veteran principals. As the role of the schools change, so does the profile of the competent school leader.