Just in time for Pope Francis, the Census Bureau is out with a new paper on declining private school enrollment. A significant part of the story involves Catholic schools. The paper reports that "while 5.2 million students were enrolled in 13,000 Catholic schools in 1960, only 2.3 million students were enrolled in 7,500 such schools by 2006."
The paper attributes the decline of private school enrollment partly to growth in charter schools, which, though run with more freedom from the public school bureaucracy, are nonetheless taxpayer-funded and tuition-free.
