Welcome back to the Ten Blocks podcast.

This is Brian Anderson, the editor of CityJourning. Joining me on today's show is a new contributor to the magazine, Nicole Stelle Garnett. Professor Garnett is the John P. Murphy Foundation Professor of Law at the University of Notre Dame, and she's the author of two books, ordering the city, land use, policing, and the restoration of urban America,

which came out from Yale University Press in 2009, and more recently, Lost Classroom, Lost Community, Catholic Schools' Importance in Urban America,

which is published by the University of Chicago.

She's written a terrific essay for the

summer 2020 issue of the magazine, which is back from the printer any day now. It's called

Why We Still Need Catholic Schools. Professor Garnett, thanks very much for joining us.

Thanks so much for having me, Brian.

You open your piece with a story about a well-known Catholic school network in Memphis, Tennessee,

called the Memphis Jubilee Schools, and it had a really impressive record of serving lower-income kids in that particular city. In 2018, though, church leadership announced it would be closing this network of schools, primarily because of financial

reasons, and reopen the following year as secular charter schools. This decision you note in

your essay is part of a kind of growing trend, a nationwide

trend in education. Could you elaborate a bit on what's going on with Catholic schools and charters?

Right. So I think there are a variety of different trends that are intersecting in the story of the Memphis Jubilee Schools.

The first is just a dramatic constriction in the Catholic sector over the last.

It's been declining since the 70s, but over the last 10, 15 years, even more steeply Catholic school closures.

Every year, there are stories of, you know, several hundred more closing.

And these closures generally have been concentrated in urban neighborhoods where the schools

sort of heroically hung on and served the poor, urban children, disadvantaged children,

minority kids. So that's one sort of story that there's just been a lot of Catholic school

closures, and those closures have not exclusively by any means, but been a lot primarily focused or located in the urban areas and the

kids that are affected disadvantaged.

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