The setting up of the Courtyard of the Gentiles by Pope Benedict XVI has provided the Catholic Church with an official forum for dialogue with atheists. The intellectual energy surrounding this initiative can be harnessed to focus on how the contemporary Catholic school addressed its responsibilities to the Catholic community while offering a good…

Catholic schools in the United States and abroad face numerous financial, cultural, and structural challenges due to contemporary education policies and economic trends. Within this climate, research about Catholic education is often conducted and leveraged in efforts to serve schools' most immediate needs. To be certain, research aimed at…

There is a clear understanding that leaders of faith-based educational institutions shape the school community's culture in ways that assist in faith formation. This implicit and explicit focus on faith formation and an alignment with the broader mission of the Catholic Church is foundational to contemplative leadership (Schuttloffel, 1999,…

Professional development provides a means to build capacity among school personnel when it is delivered as part of a systematic, long-term approach to school and teacher improvement. This research examines a sustained, diocesan-wide professional development model, called the ACE Collaborative for Academic Excellence, that aims to build capacity…

School success is a complex and abstract notion. Asking questions about what is meant by school success is important, since the ways in which educators and administrators define school success tends to guide their practice, and may have implications for current and future policy initiatives. This qualitative case study explores how one publicly…

Catholic education has been in a state of substantial decline since 1965. In order to help sustain the ministry of Catholic schools, one approach that several dozen dioceses have embraced is the K-12 consolidated Catholic school system. This study investigated the organizational structures within consolidated school systems, factors that led to…

Catholic schools in the United States are faced with the looming challenge of declining enrollments. One possible strategy for dealing with this problem is to institute multi-grade classrooms where students from two or more grades are combined in one classroom with one instructor. In this article, the authors examined one urban Catholic school's…

The contemporary challenges facing Catholic schools and Catholic school leaders are widely known. Effective and systemic solutions to these mounting challenges are less widely known or discussed. This article highlights the skills, knowledge, and dispositions associated with mission driven and data informed leadership--an orientation to school…

The educational achievement gap is a critical social justice issue. Catholic and Marianist conceptions of social justice in particular call people to work with others in their spheres of life to transform institutions in order to further human rights while promoting the common good. Drawing on key elements of Catholic teaching on social justice,…

Improving education for students in K-12 urban settings remains a slow-paced and difficult task, with many successes in student learning being episodic at best. The disconnect between government mandates to improve schools and persistent societal issues of poverty and inequity act to increase stress on teachers and educational leaders working in…

The Catholic Higher Education Collaborative (CHEC) is committed to fostering effective partnerships that generate innovative responses to the critical current condition of Catholic schooling. Beginning in 2008, national CHEC conferences were organized by member institutions to energize the movement and begin a national conversation aimed at…

These proceedings include selected presentations on Catholic identity by six participants of the 2011 Catholic Higher Education Collaborative (CHEC) Conference on Catholic Identity at The Catholic University of America (CUA). The conference, jointly sponsored by CUA and St. John's University, is the fourth in a series of five national conferences…

This article presents the results of a survey conducted in 2010 of over 3,300 administrators and teachers in Catholic elementary and secondary schools nationally about their understanding of the meaning of the term "Catholic identity." The survey was conducted in the fall of 2010 in anticipation of a national conference on the Catholic identity of…

This paper shows that a lack of explicit and clearly stated intentions regarding the development of Catholic students' ecclesial agency through their schooling leads to potential problems as they experience and imagine themselves as lay persons in the Church. While the question of "ecclesial agency" applies throughout all Catholic schooling and…

Researchers have found that self-concept in students fluctuates during times of change, such as the physical transition between elementary school and junior high. Since Catholic school students typically do not have the physical transition or social network changes in junior high, it was hypothesized that their self-concepts would not fluctuate.…