Rhode Island and is already beyond the point of reason to ask for an increase. I think there is some additional Federal funding at this area generally and I think it would be a useful way to do as was suggested, not only to those public institutions which do charge tuition such as the University of Rhode Island but would remove the burden from the State taxpayer.

Senator PELL. I also think you will find that the tax structure is going to be changed due to the cases presently in California and in Texas to the effect that each State has an obligation to equally educate its youngsters. I thank you very much for your idea.

Our next speaker is Father Edward Mullen, superintendent, department of education of the Catholic diocese of Providence who has probably the biggest load on his shoulders of any of the witnesses who will be coming forward today. I look forward to hearing your statement with great interest.

STATEMENT OF FATHER EDWARD MULLEN, SUPERINTENDENT, DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION FOR THE CATHOLIC DIOCESE OF PROVIDENCE, R.I.

Reverend MULLEN. Let me begin by expressing my thanks to the subcommittee for holding this hearing in Rhode Island and for inviting me to testify. These actions indicate that the Senate of the United States is aware of the grave difficulties besetting all of private education and is concerned about them. This of itself is encouraging to those of us who grapple daily with these problems. It seems to me that the basic facts about the financial difficulties of private education, and particularly the Catholic sector, are by now sufficiently well known not to require extended treatment. Therefore, I shall omit extensive treatment of the financial difficulties of private schools including those in the Catholic sector and also the legal and constitutional issues involved and concern myself instead with an affirmative statement of the Catholic philosophy of education and the value of Catholic schools to the entire American community.

First, the rationale for Catholic schools. Why are we engaged in this enterprise which is so difficult and so expensive when most other church bodies seem well able to get along without schools? The historical reasons are well known, I think. When Catholics first began arriving in this country in large numbers in the early 19th century, they found the religious climate inhospitable. Protestantism was dominant and militant. Part of the Americanization process was conceived as a means of freeing these immigrants from their "Popish superstitions." The public schools were just getting well underway at the time and they were the prime instrument of Americanization, including the deRomanization aspect. The public schools were, and for a long time continued to be, in effect, Protestant parochial schools. I am told by some of my colleagues in the superintendency that this condition is not entirely dead yet in some parts of the country. However, it has been dead for generations in Rhode Island, as well all know. In this situation the church believed it faced a crisis. By 1884, at the Third Council of Baltimore, the assembled hierarchy established the policy which guided Catholic education for decades after. It decreed that within

2 years every parish should have a parochial school and that every child in the parish should attend the school. "Every Catholic child in a Catholic school" is still the officially expressed aim of the educational effort of the American Catholic Church. It is only within the last 10 years that we have admitted that we will never achieve this goal. Even so, we haven't yet to formulate, officially, an alternative to it.

The reason for this goal was, very simply, the preservation of the faith among the immigrants and their children. This concern was so overwhelming that academic considerations came in a distant second. This was the justification for practices that any educator would hold in abomination-enormous class sizes, untrained teachers, and often enough, terrible buildings. If academic quality had to be sacrificed for the preservation of the faith, it was indeed regretable, but nothing to get a guilty conscience about.

The parochial school was thus conceived as sort of a counterpublic school; it was never thought of as a private school. It shared the public school aspiration to educate all of the children of all of the church's people. Because it was universal, like the public school, it had to be, like the public school, compulsory. Attendance at a parochial school was a matter of church law. Only the most serious reasons could justify permission to attend the public schools, if a Catholic school were available. Of course, the church's means of compulsion were not the same as those available to the State, but the means at hand were fully used. Because the parochial school was thought of as universal and compulsory, it had to be free, again like the public schools. There were, of course, always small charges for school supplies of various kinds, but the thought of tuition was anathema because it would rule out the children of the poor.

After World War II, as we have seen, there was a great expansion of parochial school education, both in Rhode Island and throughout the country. At least here in Rhode Island this cannot be explained by a passionate desire to preserve the faith because by then no one in his right mind could conceive the public schools as being any danger to any one's faith. What then was the reason for the continued popularity of Catholic education.

The argument is both negative and positive. On the negative side the argument runs that the absence of religion from the public school curriculum in itself is a fatal defect, even though religion is not attacked and no one's faith is in any way endangered. The absence of religion does not mean that the public schools say nothing about it; it means they say it is not important. Everything of consequence in a child's life occurs in one way or another in the school environment. Schooltime is a child's business time. What occurs there is serious. Anything that does not occur there, particularly if it is excluded by some sort of policy, is obviously not important. Also, the absence of religion from the school curriculum means that it has no integrating factor. An education without religion is like a building without a foundation. Religion fulfills two rolls in the school environment, both indispensable. It is a subject among other subjects and it provides the key which enables the child to integrate everything that

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he learns in school and out of school into one coherent pattern of values, attitudes, and behavior.

With religion absent from the school, the child will either have no integrating factor in his education, or at best, an inadequate one, and in any case, he will miss the one subject which is more important than any other subject in the entire curriculum, both for his cultural enrichment and for his personal guidance. With religion in the curriculum, the child does, of course, have this integrating factor which enables him to make sense of his environment. He is also introduced into the cultural heritage of the human race in the field of religion through an increasing knowledge of the doctrines, practices, traditions, and history of his own church. With these two things going for him, the child is better able to grapple with secular aspects of schooling. He should be more secure, happier, and better motivated to do his schoolwork. Thus, the religiously oriented school still has its own positive reason for being.

The rationale is powerfully attractive to people who have lost all fear of their children losing their faith in the public schools. By way of a concrete example of how this theory becomes operative in an individual school. I include in this document as appendix A the statement of philosophy recently adopted by the Cranston-Johnston Regional Catholic School.

As the second point, Catholic schools are an asset to the community. They are obviously a great asset to the church. It may not be quite so obvious that they are also a great asset to the community. The following considerations are offered to establish the truth of this proposition. The first consideration is very easy to grasp. It is the financial impact of Catholic schools on this community. Due to the establishment of the National Data Bank by the NCEA (National Catholic Education Association), it is now possible to offer reliable figures on the cost of Catholic schools for the school year 1970-71. Appendix B contains a selection of the most pertinent statistics. We can summarize by saying that the cash outlay for Catholic schools in the State of Rhode Island in that year was $8,385,568. In addition there is the item of contributed services. That is to say the contribution that religious brothers and sisters make to the schools by receiving only a subsistence allowance rather than a salary amounted to $3,595,196. The total contribution of cash and services, therefore, came to $11,980,782. It is to be noted that this figure is extremely low because the contributed services are figured in a very conservative manner. They are figured as the difference between the subsistence allowance of the religious teacher and the salary actually received in that school by a lay teacher. No allowance is made for the fact that the great majority of our lay teachers are also offering contributed services in that they are accepting salaries which are considerably below what they could receive if they were actually teaching in public schools. The contributed services figure also does not even attempt to calculate the thousands of hours of administrative time given annually by pastors to the maintenance of their schools. This amount of money was used to educate 33,259 pupils for an average per pupil cost of $360.23.

The cost at the elementary level was $181.72; on the high school level it was $504.80. If these 33,000 pupils had had to be educated in the

public schools, they would have cost the taxpayers approximately $23 million, estimating the average public school per pupil cost for that year at $700 which I heard this morning is quite low.

A voluntary contribution of this magnitude to a public service obligation of government is something for which the community, and especially the taxpayers, should be profoundly grateful. It would seem to be wise public policy to arrange matters in such a way that this private contribution to the field of education continues to be made.

Catholic schools contribute to the community also by developing good citizens. Last year when Providence College conducted a fund raising campaign, it was pointed out that an astonishing percentage of the doctors and lawyers in Rhode Island are Providence College men. The majority of these men also received all or part of their elementary and secondary education in Catholic schools. We could run down the roster of any profession or prominent group of people in this State and find that an astonishing percentage of them are LaSalle men or St. Raphael men or De LaSalle men. It seems that in Central Falls, Sacred Heart are everywhere, Mount St. Charles graduates in Woonsocket influence all aspects of the life of that city. The same could be said for the girls' high schools. In addition, 90 percent of graduates from Catholic high schools have always attended Catholic elementary schools as well. The record of military service, political involvement, and civic enterprise that is undertaken by Catholic school graduates is indeed impressive.

There was a time when it was common to charge that Catholic schools were a bad influence on the community because they were "divisive." This charge was refuted forever, however, by the Greeley-Rossi study done in 1966. Greeley and Rossi established that Catholic school graduates were, if anything, more community minded and less prejudiced than other segments of the American population. The record shows that Catholic schools have done an excellent job of turning out loyal and patriotic American citizens.

Catholic schools are an asset to the community in their very distinctiveness. The fact that our philosophy of education is so clearly marked off from that of the public schools and also that of the independent private schools means that we contribute an important element of diversity to the American educational scene. Pluralism is an important value in the American culture and one which has been celebrated a great deal in recent years. The philosophy of education outlined above clearly establishes that Catholic schools make a definite contribution to pluralism of the American education scene.

It is common knowledge that there is much turmoil in American. public education. Among the causes for the turmoil is the great difficulty that a massive, almost monolithic public school structure has in dealing with students from many different subcultures. This difficulty is particularly acute with students from minority groups. In response to this situation, there have been numerous attempts all over the country to somehow decentralize public school administration. This is not merely an administrative convenience but also an attempt to "open up" the public schools to alternative methods of learning and to give recognition to the cultural values of many different groups. A generation ago the public schools were praised for turning out the (homogenized) American; today they are blamed for the very same thing. In the city of Providence for the last several years a great deal

of effort has gone into the attempt to make the Providence public schools respond to these newly felt needs.

In a context such as this the alternative offered by a value centered education based on Christian principles should be more attractive than ever. It is one more option available to people in a day when variety of options seems to be an ever-increasing demand. Lastly, Catholic schools are an asset to the community in terms of the quality of the education offered. Educational quality is usually measured in two ways—by input and by performance. Measurement of input means measurement of the quality of the resources that go into a school, such as academic preparation of teachers, number of teachers in ratio to the number of students, age and experience of teachers, and the like. Performance is usually measured by how well students do on certain standardized tests on which there are national or State norms, and by the percentage of students who go on to higher education.

In the past, Catholic schools have often been criticized for alleged inadequacy in some of the educational inputs, especially a too large pupil-teacher ratio and inadequate preparation of the teachers. As for the pupil-teacher ratio, in the school year 1970-71, it stood at 24 to 1 overall-16 to 1 on the high school level and 28 to 1 at the elementary level. These figures are down in each case by two from the figures for the year 1968-69 reported by Dr. Henry M. Brickell in his study of nonpublic education in Rhode Island published in 1969.

Academic preparation of teachers also shows steady improvement. In 1969, Dr. Brickell reported that 40 percent of our lay teachers had less than a bachelor's degree. In 1971, the figure stood at only 24.8 percent. This is still much too high but an advance of over 15 percentage points in 2 years' time seems spectacular to me. It is also worth noting that 13.7 percent of our teachers in the elementary schools have masters degrees and 36.6 percent of our teachers at the high school level have masters degrees. At the high school level all of our teachers have bachelor's degrees. The favorable age and experience distribution of our teachers reported by Dr. Brickell continues through 1971 with no significant change. In terms of significant indicators of educational input, therefore, rapid improvement is being made every year in spite of the very serious financial constraints under which we operate.

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Measuring educational quality from the other end, performance, also gives us an encouraging picture. Of the Catholic high school graduates in June of 1971, 60 percent of them entered 4-year colleges, 16.6 percent entered community colleges, 9.5 percent took other postsecondary training, and 1.2 percent entered the Armed Forces. Only 12.7 percent failed to go on to some form of continued education; percent of those who applied for some form of higher education were accepted. Although Catholic high schools enroll only 10 percent of the State's high school population 20 percent of the Rhode Island State scholarships went to Catholic school graduates. Finally, the dropout rate in Catholic high schools is only 7.4 percent. These figures indicate, I think, that the performance of the Catholic secondary schools in Rhode Island is outstanding.

For the last several years the State testing program has given us information on all students in the State for kindergarten, grade 4 and grade 8. By law these results are confidential and therefore can only be discussed in general terms. However, I can say that my staff and I have analyzed the returns and we are quite satisfied with the results