How should leaders “sustain the legacy” of urban catholic schools? An exploration of catholic school and system leader perspectives
| Date | 06 January 2025 |
| Pages | 77-93 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JEA-09-2023-0230 |
| Published date | 06 January 2025 |
| Author | Andrew F. Miller,Maria Moreno Vera,Kierstin Giunco |
How should leaders “sustain the
legacy” of urban catholic schools?
An exploration of catholic school and
system leader perspectives
Andrew F. Miller
Department of Educational Leadership and Higher Education,
School of Education and Human Development,
Boston College Carolyn A and Peter S Lynch,
Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, USA, and
Maria Moreno Vera and Kierstin Giunco
Department of Teaching, Curriculum, and Society,
School of Education and Human Development,
Boston College Carolyn A and Peter S Lynch, Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, USA
Abstract
Purpose –Diocesan systems of Catholic schools in the USA have been trying to make urban elementary schools
more sustainable in an era of declining enrollment. This paper sought to better understand how system and
school leaders conceptualize what it takes to “sustain the legacy” of these schools.
Design/methodology/approach –We conducted a qualitative analysis of interview data collected from 44
Catholic system and school leaders, comparing leaders’ perspectives about what they believed urban Catholic
school principals should be doing to contribute to sector reform initiatives.
Findings –Wefound system and school leaders agreedprincipals should take responsibility for “sustaining the
legacy” of urban Catholic schools, but they disagreed about the ultimate purpose of sustaining these schools.
These disagreements shaped the decisions each group believed principals should prioritize.
Originality/value –Wedemonstrate in this paper that a systemic reform lens is useful when attempting to make
sense of whether or how certain conditions within diocesan systems as currently designed may account for
ongoing and persistent organizational crises within the Catholic sector.
Keywords Urban education, Catholic education, School leadership, Systemic reform
Paper type Research paper
Diocesan systems of Catholic schools in the USA have been attempting organizational and
instructional reforms to keep urban Catholic schools open in increasingly competitive PreK-12
environments (Goldschmidt and Walsh, 2013;Scanlan, 2008). Influenced by empirical
findings suggesting some urban Catholic schools produced better and more equitable
outcomes for students than urban public schools (e.g. Bryk et al., 1993), stakeholders have for
the past 40 years consistently called on leaders and educators to identify ways to “sustain the
legacy” of geographically urban Catholic schools in these diocesan systems (Garnett, 2020;
O’Keefe et al., 2004;Porter-Magee, 2021). Throughout this same period, diocesan systems of
schools have experienced a prolonged organizational crisis driven by declining student
Journal of
Educational
Administration
77
No external funding was received to assist the data collection, data analysis, or writing of this article.
The authors would like to acknowledge the support of the Urban Catholic Teacher Corps of Boston
College and the Sustaining the Legacy 2020 research study in the data collection process.
Statement of researchethics: The empirical data collection presented in this manuscriptcompliedwith
ethical standards in the conduct of research with human participants, evaluated and approved by the
Boston College Institutional Review Board in the Office for Research Protections, in accordance with 45
CFR 46 2 &4 (IRB protocol number 21.085.01e-18, initially approved 2/2/23, most recent amendment
approval 02/02/2023).
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
https://www.emerald.com/insight/0957-8234.htm
Received 26 September 2023
Revised 28 February 2024
28 June 2024
17 October 2024
4 December 2024
Accepted 7 December 2024
Journalof Educational Administration
Vol.63 No. 1, 2025
pp.77-93
©Emerald Publishing Limited
e-ISSN:1758-7395
p-ISSN:0957-8234
DOI10.1108/JEA-09-2023-0230
enrollment trends and there is little evidence over the past two decades to suggest that
attempted reforms in geographically urban Catholic schools have helped to reverse these
trends (Miller et al., 2022;NCEA, n.d.). Yet to this point, there has been insufficient research
examining organizational conditions leaders experience when attempting reforms or how
leaders understand the relative successes and failures of these reforms.
There has, though, been a concerted effort among researchers in the USAto understand
systemic reform efforts being pursued by educational leaders in other sectors (Mehta and Datnow,
2020). These researchers have found evidence of systems developing coherent ways to implement
reforms across multiple schools (e.g. Peurach et al., 2019) and have examined the organizational
conditions contributing to successful implementation (e.g. Coburn, 2016). One of the conditions
this research suggests is essential to achieving stated reform goals is having leaders across a
system agree about the roles and responsibilities with which individual school leaders should be
tasked as they pursue reforms in their individual schools (e.g. Honig, 2006;Spillane et al., 2022).
Therefore, we sought to examine how system and school leaders overseeing urban Catholic
elementary schools perceived the work they believed school leaders needed to do to “sustain
the legacy” of these schools. In this paper, we present a new qualitative analysis of data
collected from interviews with school and system leaders across multiple dioceses in response
to the following research questions: (1) How do the Catholic system and school leaders
conceptualize the roles of the urban Catholic school principal? (2) How, according to the
Catholic system and school leaders, should principals conduct the work of “sustaining the
legacy” of urban Catholic schools? We highlight that the Catholic system and school leaders
agreed individual principals should play a central role in “sustaining the legacy” of urban
Catholic schools but disagreed about the specific roles urban Catholic school principals should
adopt. We detail the differentconceptualizations each group had for the kind of principal they
believed would be effective and how these different conceptualizations shaped the kinds of
decisions they believed principals should be making. We suggest these findings reveal
incoherence in diocesan approaches to systemic reform, which may help explain why US
Catholic educators have had difficulty implementing “legacy sustaining” reforms.
Framing the study
“Sustaining the legacy” of urban catholic elementary schools
The nearly 6,000 Catholic schools in the USA, loosely organized into diocesan systems,
educated approximately 1.6 million students in 2023–2024 (NCEA, n.d.). Despite a long
history of researchers drawing comparisons between individual Catholic and public schools,
there are notable differences between the centralized “school system” model associated with
large urban districts (e.g. Mehta and Datnow,2020) and the decentralized“system of schools”
model associated with most diocesan systems (Miller et al., 2023). For example, a “typical”
diocesan system tends to encompass the geographical boundaries of multiple school districts.
Many of these systems contain: schools in rural, suburban and urban settings; schools with
different governance structures (e.g. those run by boards of trustees, those sponsored by orders
of men and women religious and those overseen by parish priests); and individual schools
serving different socioeconomic and racial/ethnic communities consistent with the residential
patterns of a particular diocese’s broad geographic region (NCEA, n.d.).
Diocesan systems have tended to prioritize local/school-level control over educational and
operational decision-making rather than assert centralized decision-making over this wide
range of schools (FADICA, 2015;Goldschmidt and Walsh, 2013). This decentralized
approach has reinforced two widespread perceptions among Catholic school stakeholders: (1)
individual Catholic school leaders have more autonomy over things like curriculum,
personnel, budgeting, mission alignment and student support compared to their public school
peers (e.g. Neumerski and Cohen, 2019); and (2) this increased school-level responsibility is
what drives the relative success of Catholic schools compared to other public schools serving
similar students (e.g. Bryk et al., 1993).
JEA
63,1
78
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