This Choice Is Pretty Much A 'no-brainer'

National School Choice Week begins Sunday – just a week before 2018 Catholic Schools Week. I made a brief jaunt around the Internet before beginning this column, and it only took a few minutes to confirm my view that choosing Catholic schools is pretty much a “no-brainer.”

Many of you reading this already know that. Let’s all work together, especially over these next couple of weeks, to share that news.

From here, one of the most important advantages of Catholic education is its consistent focus on our faith as a foundational element of life … from conception to natural death. I have stated in this space before that I “fell away” from practicing for more than a decade, through the 1980s and into the 1990s. I have no doubt that my 12 years of Catholic school helped eventually lead me back home to the Church.

Catholic school also expanded my family. Being an only child, my classmates became siblings of sorts. I believe that explains why we still stay in touch through social media and other vehicles. We share good news and bad; we ask for and offer prayers for ourselves, our families and each other. We talk about events that occurred during the presidencies of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford like they occurred last week, Nixon, then Ford, were in the White House when we were classmates.

From a practical standpoint, there also are strong reasons to choose Catholic education; here is an example. During that jaunt around the Web, I found a story from a few years ago that reported on research done by Michael T. Owyang and E. Katarina Vermann at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

They reported: “After controlling for individual and job characteristics, private high school graduates earn 2.6 percent more than their public school counterparts. This increase, however, is not statistically significant. In contrast, Catholic high school graduates earn a statistically significant 13.6 percent wage premium…. This result could indicate that there are significant differences in unquantifiable aspects of school quality that could affect earnings later in life.”

In my opinion, those “unquantifiable aspects of school quality” relate directly to things I talked about at the top of this column. Our Catholic school teachers and staffs inevitably impress upon students the need for their faith to shine. When it does, those students persevere throughout their lives. They all face struggles; we all face struggles. Those who pray and persevere, realizing God is with them every step of the way, are the ones who stand out.

The theme for the 2018 Catholic Schools Week is “Catholic Schools: Learn, Serve, Lead, Succeed!” Diocese of Evansville Catholic schools educate and help students grow in mind, body and soul. They provide students with all of the tools they need to succeed in this life – and enjoy eternal life with God.

Let’s all share that news.