CATHOLIC schools in the US "work astonishingly well" and "work precisely because they are Catholic", according to Father Andrew Greeley, professor of sociology at the University of Chicago.
Writing in the current issue of Doctrine and Life, Father Greeley, a best selling novelist, says most US educational researchers accept this following the "magisterial" work of two University of Chicago researchers, Mr James S. Coleman and Mr Anthony Bryk, in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
They found in 1988 that those who had attended Catholic schools, compared with their counterparts in public schools, scored higher on support for the equality of women. They were also more likely to describe themselves as "liberals" or "moderates".
They were more likely to have "high levels of psychological wellbeing" and to have a "benign view" both of God and of others. They had "greater awareness of the complexity of moral decisionmaking and were less likely to have drifted away from the church".
They were also more likely to "say that intense sexual pleasure had increased their religious faith".
In terms of academic achievement, Father Greeley says the evidence "shows that, beyond any doubt, those who attend Catholic high schools do better in standardised tests in their senior year than those who attend public high schools".
Moreover, "the success of the Catholic schools seems to be especially concentrated among those who are, in one way or another, disadvantaged - educationally, emotionally, socially, economically.
"Indeed, the greatest success of all is among those who have multiple disadvantages - poor, young people from broken families who have been disciplinary problems and have not done well in earlier years of education, for example."
Father Greeley says US Catholic schools' academic success, especially with the disadvantaged, "seems to be rooted in a special Catholic perspective on the nature of the human person and of human community, a perspective that has not been eliminated by the turbulence in contemporary Catholicism".
Father Greeley says it would be very interesting to do comparative research on Catholic schools in the US and Ireland.