Archives: Partnership News

This Father’s Day, we celebrate all the dads out there – biological, honorary, spiritual, and more – especially our three fathers of the Stand Together program at St. Thomas Aquinas School in Cleveland’s St. Clair-Superior neighborhood.

“Ricardo Richmond, Alex Afzal and Jeffrey Allen are the backbone… They regularly come into the school to serve as role models, supporters, and mentors for the kindergarten through eighth grade students there. All three also have children of their own at the school,’ WKYC writes.

These amazing fathers hope that the idea of Stand Together not only grows within the St. Thomas community, but also expands to other schools and neighborhoods in the greater Cleveland area.

Read more at our very own Partnership Post blog post here, and watch the whole WKYC news segment here.

Mike Petrilli, the president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, hosted Kathleen on the Education Gadfly Show to talk about the debate over religious charter schools. Mike and Kathleen’s segment lasts for the first eleven minutes, followed by Amber Northern’s “Research Minute” for the remainder of the episode. Petrilli and Porter-Magee discuss the potential questions and concerns of introducing religious charter schools from both a religious liberty standpoint and practical lens.

Listen to the whole Education Gadfly podcast episode here, and from earlier in the month, check out Kathleen’s full Flypaper article, “3 reasons why religious charter schools should give us pause.”

Frederick Hess launched his new book, The Great School Rethink (Harvard Education Press, 2023) this month, and he kicked things off with a panel discussion featuring our very own Kathleen Porter-Magee, along with Ian Rowe (AEI), Cade Brumley (Louisiana State Superintendent of Education), and Christina Grant (DC Superintendent of Education).

“Dr. Hess discussed how the pandemic was a moment of “punctuated equilibrium” that offered a chance to rethink long-held assumptions and practices in education,” Greg Fournier wrote. During their talk, the group focused on how we can particularly change up schooling within the areas of time, teaching, technology, school choice, and schools’ partnerships with parents.

Watch the full panel discussion HERE on AEI’s site.

“When it comes to K–12 education policy, the post-Covid period has become, more than almost anything else, the era of school choice. This success has opened new avenues for its growth and confronted choice supporters—particularly Catholic school supporters—with an important decision. Should we focus our energy on breaking down the lines between public (charter) and private school choice programs, or strive to put private school choice programs themselves on a more equal footing?”

Our superintendent, Kathleen Porter-Magee, dives into the potential issues related to bureaucracy, liberty, and coalitions could arise with the introduction of religious charter schools – which is currently a hot topic being discussed within the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City and Diocese of Tulsa. The two dioceses “applied to the state for a charter to open what would become the nation’s first religious charter school, St. Isodore of Seville.”

Read Kathleen’s full Flypaper article here.

News12 celebrates that the Partnership’s Immaculate Conception school has served families for 170 years and will continue to do so. 

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In the wake of the Archdiocese of New York announcing the closing of 12 schools and the mergers of four more, Notre Dame law professor and Manhattan Institute senior fellow Nicole Stelle Garnett asserts, “it doesn’t have to be this way.”

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Ray Domanico, director of education policy at the Manhattan Institute, asserts that even amid the Archdiocese of New York announcing the closure of 14 schools this spring, “examples of Catholic school revitalization do exist.” He notes that they are “helped along by lay and religious leaders dedicated to the notion that Catholic schools serve unique religious and civic missions,” and he cites Partnership Schools among those examples.

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This winter, Partnership Schools Superintendent Kathleen Porter-Magee joined the Notre Dame Law School’s Religious Liberty Initiative in Rome to explore the challenges facing Catholic schools around the world. As organizers note, “The Catholic Church is the largest non-state provider of education in the world. Catholic schools educate 65 million children globally, and enrollments are increasing dramatically, especially in the Global South.”

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Happy National School Choice Week! Today, New York Daily News published an article written by the president and CEO of the Children’s Scholarship Fund (CSF), Darla M. Romfo. She highlights the importance letting parents choose their children’s schools, using multiple examples throughout the New York metropolitan area to support her case and promote school choice awareness – including a nod to Partnership Schools.

Romfo writes, “On another recent visit to Sacred Heart School in the Highbridge section of the Bronx, we were reminded of the unique culture these schools can cultivate when they can address the needs of the whole child — body, mind, and soul. This particular school is one of seven Catholic schools in the Bronx and Harlem run by Partnership Schools, which charges families an all-in amount of $1,250 per year, per student — a far cry from the city’s high-end private schools, where tuitions can top $60,000.”

Read Romfo’s entire article here.

“As Partnership School’s Kathleen Porter-Magee pointed out, if Catholic schools were a state, they’d be the highest-performing state in the nation. They’d also be the most cost-effective state—by a long shot.”

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