tour de force

C. is taking John Sexton's "The Supreme Court and Religion." Last week the class read Wallace vs Jaffree, which includes this passage from Justice Rehnquist's dissent:

For example, a State may lend to parochial school children geography textbooks that contain maps of the United States, but the State may not lend maps of the United States for use in geography class. A State may lend textbooks on American colonial history, but it may not lend a film on George Washington, or a film projector to show it in history class. A State may lend classroom workbooks, but may not lend workbooks in which the parochial school children write, thus rendering them nonreusable. A State may pay for bus transportation to religious schools 10 but may not pay for bus transportation from the parochial school to the public zoo or natural history museum for a field trip. A State may pay for diagnostic services conducted in the parochial school but therapeutic services must be given in a different building; speech and hearing "services" conducted by the State inside the sectarian school are forbidden, Meek v. Pittenger, 421 U. S. 349, 367, 371 (1975), but the State may conduct speech and hearing diagnostic testing inside the sectarian school. Wolman, 433 U. S., at 241. Exceptional parochial school students may receive counseling, but it must take place outside of the parochial school,12 such as in a trailer parked down the street. Id., at 245. A State may give cash to a parochial school to pay for the administration of state-written tests and state-ordered reporting services, but it may not provide funds for teacher-prepared tests on secular subjects. Religious instruction may not be given in public school, but the public school may release students during the day for religion classes elsewhere, and may enforce attendance at those classes with its truancy laws.
WALLACE, GOVERNOR OF ALABAMA, ET AL. v. JAFFREE ET AL. APPEAL FROM THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE ELEVENTH CIRCUIT No. 83-812. Argued December 4, 1984-Decided June 4, 1985. (110-111).

All of these inconsistencies could be easily resolved with vouchers and tax credits! update: In an ideal world, that is. Not inside the actual world we live in.

update 9/29/2012: Rehnquist compiled the list above to support his argument that the Court's 1971  "Lemon test"^* had resulted in unprincipled and inconsistent decisions.

...[T]he wall [of separation between church and state] idea might well have served as a useful albeit misguided analytical concept, had it led this Court to unified and principled results in Establishment Clause cases. The opposite, unfortunately, has been true; in the 38 years since Everson [1947] our Establishment Clause cases have been neither principled nor unified. Our recent opinions, many of them hopelessly divided pluralities, have with embarrassing candor conceded that the "wall of separation" is merely a "blurred, indistinct, and variable barrier," which "is not wholly accurate" and can only be "dimly perceived." Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U. S. 602, 614 (1971); Tilton v. Richardson, 403 U. S. 672, 677-678, (1971); Wolman v. Walter, 433 U. S. 229, 236 (1977); Lynch v. Donnelly, 465 U. S. 668, 673 (1984).

^* Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U. S. 602, 612-613 (1971)

and see:
the Establishment Clause
Free Exercise Clause
Wallace vs Jaffree
the Lemon test
Lemon v. Kurzman 
Lemon test

Justice Rehnquist lists "unprincipled" and "inconsistent" decisions
Justice Rehnquist on school prayer and the Constitution
Jefferson's "wall of separation"
Justice Burger's dissent in Wallace v. Jaffree
Benjamin Cardozo on metaphors in law

more is less

What a Texas town can teach us about health care: Costlier care is often worse care.

McAllen [Texas] has another distinction, too: it is one of the most expensive health-care markets in the country. Only Miami—which has much higher labor and living costs—spends more per person on health care. In 2006, Medicare spent fifteen thousand dollars per enrollee here, almost twice the national average. The income per capita is twelve thousand dollars. In other words, Medicare spends three thousand dollars more per person here than the average person earns.

[snip]

I gave the doctors around the table a scenario. A forty-year-old woman comes in with chest pain after a fight with her husband. An EKG is normal. The chest pain goes away. She has no family history of heart disease. What did McAllen doctors do fifteen years ago?

Send her home, they said. Maybe get a stress test to confirm that there’s no issue, but even that might be overkill.

And today? Today, the cardiologist said, she would get a stress test, an echocardiogram, a mobile Holter monitor, and maybe even a cardiac catheterization.

“Oh, she’s definitely getting a cath,” the internist said, laughing grimly.

[snip]

Between 2001 and 2005, critically ill Medicare patients received almost fifty per cent more specialist visits in McAllen than in El Paso, and were two-thirds more likely to see ten or more specialists in a six-month period. In 2005 and 2006, patients in McAllen received twenty per cent more abdominal ultrasounds, thirty per cent more bone-density studies, sixty per cent more stress tests with echocardiography, two hundred per cent more nerve-conduction studies to diagnose carpal-tunnel syndrome, and five hundred and fifty per cent more urine-flow studies to diagnose prostate troubles. They received one-fifth to two-thirds more gallbladder operations, knee replacements, breast biopsies, and bladder scopes. They also received two to three times as many pacemakers, implantable defibrillators, cardiac-bypass operations, carotid endarterectomies, and coronary-artery stents.

[snip]

Rochester, Minnesota, where the Mayo Clinic dominates the scene, has fantastically high levels of technological capability and quality, but its Medicare spending is in the lowest fifteen per cent of the country—$6,688 per enrollee in 2006, which is eight thousand dollars less than the figure for McAllen. Two economists working at Dartmouth, Katherine Baicker and Amitabh Chandra, found that the more money Medicare spent per person in a given state the lower that state’s quality ranking tended to be.

[snip]

That’s because nothing in medicine is without risks. Complications can arise from hospital stays, medications, procedures, and tests, and when these things are of marginal value the harm can be greater than the benefits. In recent years, we doctors have markedly increased the number of operations we do, for instance. In 2006, doctors performed at least sixty million surgical procedures, one for every five Americans. No other country does anything like as many operations on its citizens.

[snip]

I talked to Denis Cortese, the C.E.O. of the Mayo Clinic, which is among the highest-quality, lowest-cost health-care systems in the country. A couple of years ago, I spent several days there as a visiting surgeon. Among the things that stand out from that visit was how much time the doctors spent with patients. There was no churn—no shuttling patients in and out of rooms while the doctor bounces from one to the other. I accompanied a colleague while he saw patients. Most of the patients, like those in my clinic, required about twenty minutes. But one patient had colon cancer and a number of other complex issues, including heart disease. The physician spent an hour with her, sorting things out. He phoned a cardiologist with a question.

“I’ll be there,” the cardiologist said.

Fifteen minutes later, he was. They mulled over everything together. The cardiologist adjusted a medication, and said that no further testing was needed. He cleared the patient for surgery, and the operating room gave her a slot the next day.

The whole interaction was astonishing to me. Just having the cardiologist pop down to see the patient with the surgeon would be unimaginable at my hospital. The time required wouldn’t pay. The time required just to organize the system wouldn’t pay.

The core tenet of the Mayo Clinic is “The needs of the patient come first”—not the convenience of the doctors, not their revenues. The doctors and nurses, and even the janitors, sat in meetings almost weekly, working on ideas to make the service and the care better, not to get more money out of patients. I asked Cortese how the Mayo Clinic made this possible.

“It’s not easy,” he said. But decades ago Mayo recognized that the first thing it needed to do was eliminate the financial barriers. It pooled all the money the doctors and the hospital system received and began paying everyone a salary, so that the doctors’ goal in patient care couldn’t be increasing their income. Mayo promoted leaders who focussed first on what was best for patients, and then on how to make this financially possible.

No one there actually intends to do fewer expensive scans and procedures than is done elsewhere in the country. The aim is to raise quality and to help doctors and other staff members work as a team. But, almost by happenstance, the result has been lower costs.

“When doctors put their heads together in a room, when they share expertise, you get more thinking and less testing,” Cortese told me.

[snip]

The Mayo Clinic is not an aberration. One of the lowest-cost markets in the country is Grand Junction, Colorado, a community of a hundred and twenty thousand that nonetheless has achieved some of Medicare’s highest quality-of-care scores. Michael Pramenko is a family physician and a local medical leader there. Unlike doctors at the Mayo Clinic, he told me, those in Grand Junction get piecework fees from insurers. But years ago the doctors agreed among themselves to a system that paid them a similar fee whether they saw Medicare, Medicaid, or private-insurance patients, so that there would be little incentive to cherry-pick patients. They also agreed, at the behest of the main health plan in town, an H.M.O., to meet regularly on small peer-review committees to go over their patient charts together. They focussed on rooting out problems like poor prevention practices, unnecessary back operations, and unusual hospital-complication rates. Problems went down. Quality went up. Then, in 2004, the doctors’ group and the local H.M.O. jointly created a regional information network—a community-wide electronic-record system that shared office notes, test results, and hospital data for patients across the area. Again, problems went down. Quality went up. And costs ended up lower than just about anywhere else in the United States.

Grand Junction’s medical community was not following anyone else’s recipe. But, like Mayo, it created what Elliott Fisher, of Dartmouth, calls an accountable-care organization. The leading doctors and the hospital system adopted measures to blunt harmful financial incentives, and they took collective responsibility for improving the sum total of patient care.

The Cost Conundrum
by Atul Gawande
June 1, 2009
The New Yorker

When the needs of the patient come first, medical care costs less.

Judging by the amount of money charter & parochial schools spend to educate children, compared to the amount public schools spend to not educate children, I'd say that principle will turn out to be true of schools, too.

Jeanne Chall on decline at the top

The 1970s and 1980s brought additional reasons for discontent. The first was the continuing decline of scores on the Scholastic Achievement Tests (SATs), the decline having begun even as early as the 1960s. Another cause for growing concern was the low achievement particularly among poor and minority children on the National Assessment of Educational Progress [NAEP]. Since 1969, NAEP (also known as "The Nation's Report Card") has conducted periodic assessment of the academic performances of fourth, eighth, and twelfth graders in a range of subjects. At first it was thought that the SAT score decline resulted from growing number of low-income students taking the SAT for the first time. Later, it was found that the absolute decline in scores was even greater among the most able students (Chall, 1989). After years of debate as to whether SAT scores had significantly declined, the College Board changed its standards (permitting a "pass" with lower scores.)

Recommendations to improve educational achievement varied widely. Some championed a stronger focus on open education--calling for greater emphasis on student motivation and interest--while others called for more instruction-centered solutinos--higher educational standards and greater rigor. The most influential of the many proposals at the time was A Nation at Risk, the Report of the National Commission on Excellence in Education (NCEE, 1983). Its proposed solution was largely teacher-cntered: a more rigorous curriculum, reintroduction of traditional courses of study, and more-difficult, challenging textbooks.

Other proposals for teacher-centered solutions appeared during the late 1980s and early 1990s. In a series of studies that compared achievement in public schools with that in private and parocial schools, Coleman and Hoffer (1987) found that students in private and parochial schools tested higher on academic ahievement than those in public schools. The investigators attributed the differences to the heavier focus of the private and parochial schools on teacher-centered practices such as the use of discipline and assigning homework and grades.

The Academic Achievement Challenge: What Really Works in the Classroom
by Jeanne S. Chall
p. 41-42

in a nutshell:

• Jeanne Chall's 1989 study of the 16-year decline in SAT scores (1964-1980) found the largest decline in scores amongst the top students
  

• A Nation at Risk recommended teacher-centered classrooms and the "reintroduction of traditional courses of study"
  

• Coleman and Hoffer found that classroom discipline and teacher-centered instruction were the reasons why private & parochial school students did better than students in public schools
  

Until tonight, I hadn't made the connection between classroom discipline and direct instruction.

Of course, it's obvious that if you're in favor of the latter, you're in favor of the former. You have to be; you can't do direct instruction without classroom discipline.

But it hadn't occurred to me that if you're opposed to "drill and kill" you might also be ambivalent about teachers maintaining law and order inside the classroom.

pick one

Lynn G and I watched the debate between Lisa Graham Keegan & Linda Darling-Hammond two nights ago, and now you can, too. The last 6 minutes are worth the time.

The debate was terrific, I thought, though the fact that curriculum and pedagogy, the twin issues that have driven my own family from the public schools, were barely mentioned goes quite a ways towards explaining to me why I've become an "Independent." I put "Independent" in quotation marks because I wasn't planning to become an Independent and don't consider it a badge of honor to be one. I am a believer in two-party politics, as a matter of fact; I just don't happen to have a party to believe in.

Of course, having become a person without a party and a parent without a public school, I'm thinking maybe now's the time to morph from small-l libertarianism to the real thing.

But I think I'll hold off on that. I can't be a libertarian; I have to carry on supporting NCLB if only to be the one parent in all of leafy suburbia who does.^* It's my job.

Speaking of leafy suburbia, on the video you'll hear Linda Darling-Hammond giving a shout-out to Scarsdale superintendent Mike McGill and his strategic use of resources or some such. That is horsepucky. The secret to Scarsdale Mike McGill's success is tutors. Lots and lots and lots of tutors.

And don't you forget it.



^* Me, and the hardy band of commenters and readers around these parts.

Independent School Governance 101

In the post What Is A Private School: Segmenting the Market, I promised more about governance in an independent school. I was prompted to do so by the post
A private public school, or a public private school?, The Crimson Avenger asks some questions about governance:

If you lay out explicitly what you believe and what you strive to accomplish, you can say to your parents and your community members: This is a private institution; you do not have to participate. However, if you do, you have to understand that the guiding principles of this school will remain constant: they will not change, and it is this vision that you are buying into. Within this framework, which is set in stone, our stakeholders have a real voice in how we accomplish these ends, and we have boards set up that you can join, and that hold sway on the operations of this school.

If you do this – and make sure your boards make decisions on good data – you can have a public model of a private school.

What do you think – am I wrong about how public schools operate like private institutions? Am I wrong that a private school can be democratically run by its stakeholders?

The Crimson Avenger was responding to Allison's May 12 comment,

I'd like to add what I know about not-for-profit schools' governance. (A version of this post was written in response to the abrupt closure of a for-profit chain of specialty schools, CEDU. You can read the whole sorry CEDU story here)

How are for-profit schools different than not-for-profit schools? What's the difference between an independent school and a proprietary school?

Some of the features of independent schools are similar to public schools, some are different.

Accreditation—
All California schools, public and private, that want to be accredited undergo a multi-year evaluation process administered by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC). I bs.

Association Membership—There are several regional and national associations of independent schools. The National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS), The Association of Boarding Schools (TABS) the California Association of Independent Schools (CAIS) and the Pacific Northwest Association of Independent Schools (PNAIS) are the four most important to the CEDU groups. The CEDU schools were not a member of these groups.

Governance—Most independent schools are governed by its Board of Directors, who are all unpaid volunteers dedicated to the school. NAIS publishes several handbooks and resources to guide independent school trustees in their work; all of the following is drawn from those sources.

Many schools use “Directors” and “Trustees” interchangeably, so the “Board of Directors” or the “Board of Trustees” means the same body. The Board is the legal governing body of most non-profit organizations. While the Board is not the owner, it holds the non-profit corporation, its assets, liabilities, and mission, in trust for the public. In the case of schools, for parents, students, future students, and the community at large.

The Board of Trustees of any independent school has nine basic roles:

1. The Board defines the mission of the school and clarifies its philosophy


2. The Board establishes or affirms policies within which the mission can be fulfilled. These policies govern the day-to-day operation of the school in all areas of board concern: legal issues, financial matters, definition of additional authorized programs that the school will offer (e.g. summer camp, child care, etc.)


3. The board is accountable for the financial well-being of the school, including capital assets, operating budgets, fund-raising, and endowment.


4. The Board selects a Head to administer the School, and, having appointed him/her, they provide support and formal periodic evaluation of his/her performance.


5. Working through the Head, they ensure that all laws and regulations are being followed, and that day-to-day operations are consistent with Board policy and the school’s Mission and philosophy.


6. Working with the Head and representatives of the School's constituency groups (staff, parents, alumni, friends of the School), they take the leadership role in a process of on-going strategic planning and self-study. They formally adopt from time-to-time long-range plans and provide a structure for their implementation.


7. The Board assumes a key role in fund raising for the school.


8. The Board serves as ambassadors for the school, promoting its good name and letting the public and constituency groups know about its success stories.


9. The Board guards the privacy and confidentiality of the matters they decide.

A strong and healthy Board of Trustees does not:

1. Attempt to manage the day-to-day operations of a school themselves. A healthy board has exactly one employee: the Head of School. This means among other things that any individual Board Member has exactly zero input into admissions decisions, hiring and firing decisions, any disciplinary actions the Head or the faculty may take and so on.


2. Interfere with the Head's job of managing the staff. This means if someone (say a faculty member) comes to a Board Member with a complaint about another faculty member, the Board Member’s duty is to direct the complainant to the Head of School.


3. Attempt to evaluate the educational program. While individual Board members may have some expertise in educational or administrative matters, the Board as a whole is has delegated the educational program to the head. The Board defines the kind of school it wants, and hires the Head to turn the dream into reality. The Head hires and supervises the staff that actually works with the students.


4. Criticize the school, its programs, its faculty, or its leadership structure outside of Board meetings.


5. Break the confidentiality of the Board decision-making process.

How do boards decide if a matter brought before them is an issue appropriate to themselves, or should be dealt with by the administration?

Board issue	Administrative/staff issue
This issue affects the entire organization (example: how much financial aid to allow for in budget)	This issue affects only individuals (example: which student gets how much financial aid)
This issue establishes new policy. (example: deciding to add a program such as summer enrichment)	This issue is an implementation of policy (example: planning this year’s summer enrichment program)
This is an issue dictated by law (example: nondiscrimination policy)	This is an issue not dictated by law (example: uniform-wearing policy)
This issue is brought to the Board by the administration (example: administration requests board develop a policy on appropriate use of a new technology )

Board membership criteria: traditional vs. new

There are two phrases that used to be popular to describe service on any non-profit board: “Give, Get, or Git”—give money generously, get other people to give generously, or get off the board—and “Choose Board Members who have two of three Ws: Wealth, Wisdom, or Work.”

The new adage is that independent schools need the 3 Rs: those who can (beyond their specific expertise) contribute significantly in Raising students, Raising image, and Raising money.

What Board service entails: Most independent school expect Board Members to give generously in several different areas.
Giving of Time: The Board plans for itself general business meetings, informational meetings, and one or more “retreats”, focused on a single issue. Trustees are also expected to attend important school events such as graduation. The average number of hours per month varies on the individual trustee, but certainly an average of eight hours per month is a conservative estimate.

Giving of Money: Every trustee is expected to make a generous annual donation to the school, according to his or her individual financial circumstances. In some instances, that may mean giving $100 per year; for others, which may mean over $100,000 per year. Also, every trustee is expected to help in fundraising by encouraging other people to give money or time to the school.

Giving of Support: Every trustee is expected, outside of the Board meetings, to speak only of the school’s strengths and hopes. The discussion of weaknesses and disappointments is reserved for discussions between Board members.

Giving of Confidentiality: Every trustee is expected to keep board matters and discussions confidential.

How does somebody get to be on a Board of Directors? Almost all independent schools have "self-perpetuating" boards. That is, the Board finds new members for itself, through a strategic screening and selection process.

What the bylaws say about board service: Most schools are governed by a legal document, the bylaws, which are written and adopted by the founding board. As the school matures, the bylaws are amended. Most schools specify a minimum and maximum number of directors, the duration of their terms of service, and how many terms they may serve consecutively. Many independent schools have other limitations, such as restricting the number of current parents who may serve. Almost all schools specify that trustees serve as volunteers, without being paid for their time or services.

There are advantages and disadvantages for any independent school to having current parents in the majority on the board. In general, the disadvantage is that current parents are naturally very concerned with the school as it is today or this year, while the true role of the board of trustees should be focusing on the school as it will be in the next decade. The National Association of Independent Schools suggests that a healthy board consist of less than 60% current parents.

The Board Recruitment process:

Healthy independent schools have a process whereby the Board:

• Identifies what skills and strengths are represented on the board currently
• Identifies what skills and strengths will be needed in coming years
• Identifies people who are already committed to the school who will meet the school’s needs
• Identifies people in the community who are not yet familiar with the school, but who meet its needs, and take steps to make the school attractive as a volunteer opportunity.

The group within the board responsible for board recruitment then selects a “short list” of people that would be good board candidates, and finds out if they are ready, willing and able to serve. From that “short list”, a slate is presented to the whole Board for election to the Board. The election is usually unanimous. The election of new board members typically takes place at the Annual Meeting, in the spring.

palisadesk on school improvement and the Catholic school

A year ago I went to a large conference on school improvement (the focus was on using test results and assessment to determine instructional priorities, action plans, etc.). There were a number of presentations from schools that had made significant progress. My principal and I went and chose to attend presentations on low-income, high-diversity urban schools, since we figured that would be most relevant to our situation. We both noticed that nearly all of the presentations (teacher and principal teams presented what they had done and details of their implementations, etc.) were from Catholic schools.

What stood out was not so much the specifics of what they did, but the commitment of the faculty. They were clearly dedicated and willing to go more than the extra mile in a way that would be unusual in a public school, even one with very competent and caring staff. Whether it was their faith per se, or more of an ethos of service, it was quite strikingly different from what one would encounter in a public school, even a good one (and I have worked in a few).

Now of course these were "success stories," and it does not follow from this that every Catholic school is similarly graced with highly committed staff, but the factor of shared vision is probably an important one that should not be underestimated, and is difficult to replicate in a diverse public system, where many values are simply not shared.

saving Catholic schools

Seton Hall’s Epics program — the acronym stands for Educational Partners in Catholic Schools — is one of about 20 similar efforts by Roman Catholic colleges and universities. Taken together, the initiatives have placed several thousand teachers in urban Catholic schools, and collectively they comprise a sort of religion-based version of Teach for America.

One major difference, besides the religious component, is in national visibility. Teach for America has become a virtual brand name on elite college campuses and a coveted item on graduate-school applications and corporate résumés. Programs like Epics have received far less public acclaim, and yet they are vital to the almost literally lifesaving role that Catholic schools play as an affordable alternative to chronically failing public schools in many low-income areas.

[snip]

In 1970, more than half the teachers and administrators at Catholic elementary and secondary schools were unpaid clergy members. As of 2008, Ms. Helm said, clergy members account for about 5 percent of teachers. At the same time that nonwhite and often non-Catholic pupils are increasingly seeking out Catholic schools, the number of such schools in cities has been shrinking in the face of rising costs and insufficient revenue.

St. Patrick’s, where Mr. Encarnacion teaches, offers an archetypal example. The school, which runs from prekindergarten through eighth grade, is actually a merger of three schools. Roughly two-thirds of its 440 students are black Protestants. Of 26 full-time teachers and administrators, one is a member of the clergy.

Offering Teachers Incentives; and a Chance to Live Their Faith
by Samuel G. Freedman

We've had sad news here. The Catholic school down the hill from the high school is closing.

I hate to see these places go.


Catholic Schools and the Common Good

Concerned Parent on Catholic schools

I recently visited a K-8 Catholic school to find out more about their program and five years ago my eldest child attended a Catholic kindergarten. I attended Catholic school from grades 2-7. These experiences are my frame of reference.

Things are clearly quite different than when I attended Catholic school. For starters, when I was in school, almost every teacher was a nun. You just don't see that anymore.

The principal of the school I just visited seemed pleased that the diocese had recently (in the past couple of years) required the school to amend their curriculum to conform with our state standards. Prior to that, Catholic schools were more concerned with meeting national expectations of learning for all Catholic schools. I don't see this change as a positive, however. Our state standards are woefully low (comparing results of the CMT to the NAEP makes clear just how low they are). Projecting forward and over the long haul, this is really not a good thing for Catholic schools.

The other red flag was the pride in their Lucy Calkins style "writer's workshop" approach to teaching writing. They do teach grammar in every grade K-8 and offer Honors English for students who are capable.

The math, on the other hand, was still much more traditional than anything in our public school district. It's neither Singapore nor Saxon, but it's not Everyday Math or Investigations either. They have honors algebra available in eighth grade. They have a significant percentage of the graduating eighth graders place out of algebra at the high school level. That's definitely something.

The other silver lining: I did observe the order, respect for others, respect for self, discipline and self-assured, smiling faces I remember from my own Catholic school days. I contrast this with the disorder, disrespect, and stress I recently observed at a visit to a magnet school in our county. I believe that children thrive in a structured environment because it feels safe and predictable. I still believe this learning environment/school culture element is an important aspect of most Catholic schools today.

I also think that that this type of school culture is what makes schools like KIPP, Green Dot, Stuyvesant, and others so successful.

the Catholic schools of the 60s

Great, committed teacher/adviser/mentors, high standards, a focused curriculum, a culture of achievement, and plenty of hard work by students well aware that real consequences attach to their performance--what more does a successful school need? Yes, I'm talking about the Knowledge Is Power Program and Amistad, the Academy of the Pacific Rim and Stuyvesant, and others of today's super-schools. But I'm also talking about the Catholic schools of the 1960s and my own time at Phillips Exeter Academy, where by senior year I was awakening at 3 a.m. to study. It paid off, for me and lots of others. (I was able to skip my freshman year at Harvard.) But it was sink or swim--and those who treaded water were sometimes invited not to return for the next semester.

Lessons Learned

Are the Catholic schools of the 60s definitely gone?

Do we know?