Can Decentralized School Systems Pursue Common Ends? An Analysis of Urban Catholic School and System Leaders’ Perceptions of Reform

Abstract

There has been little research examining how decentralized Catholic diocesan systems have worked toward their stated system-wide goal of keeping urban Catholic schools sustainable. Through a new qualitative analysis of interviews with Catholic school and system leaders, we demonstrate in this article how leaders agreed about the issues preventing urban Catholic elementary schools from becoming operationally sustainable but disagreed about potential solutions to this problem. Our findings indicate these leaders believed decentralized systems constrained their ability to pursue coherent system-wide reforms. We connect these findings to broader calls for decentralization in large urban systems attempting to pursue educational equity initiatives.