Researchers and policymakers have attempted to understand the factors that have prolonged sustained organisational crises faced by contemporary Catholic schools in the U.S. The most common explanations have been that Catholic schools have become inaccessible to families because of their cost or that Catholic schools have not successfully demonstrated to new consumers their value proposition. We offer a different analysis in this paper, suggesting Catholic schools have not found scalable success in recent years because stakeholders and practitioners have been trying to revive an organisational form that can no longer exist given shifting institutional and political dynamics in U.S. educational policy and the U.S. Catholic Church. We argue that a nostalgia for the mid-twentieth century peak years of U.S. Catholic schooling ultimately constrains Catholic school practitioners and stakeholders from moving the field forward. We conclude this article offering some suggestions that may indicate a new way forward for the field.
Burke et al. (Mon,) studied this question.