All the offensive stars and top QB's together simply cannot win unless they enjoy the benefit of consistent defense. Top offensive units can't score every series they have the ball. When they have to go one, two, three and kick on a few consecutive series, a good defense keeps the game in place so they can eventually execute their skills and get a shot at scoring. Without qualified defense the point spread (on the scoreboard, not in the betting books) gets too wide and the QB has to resort to too many "big play" approaches. At this point in time the Giants have been able to muster a very representative defensive line. The Jets still have to do some screening to establish one. The linebackers on both clubs are the real defensive strength. As to the secondaries, traditionally manned by top athletes with real skills, both teams' secondaries will need a strong rush by the front four. You sense that the defensive secondaries are still not quite what the coaching staffs would like them to be. Back on offense, the Giants have a very strong factor going for them in their excellent tight end, Bob Tucker. He is one of the better tight ends I have seen in my time and with the defense using so many variations of zones, he is a premium to have. Without getting clinical, you will notice some teams are beginning to throw more to the tight ends. I am surprised this wasn't implemented years ago as zone (area) defenses began to appear more fre quently. A tight end like Tucker has an opportunity to get into various open areas against any kind of zone. Looking at the two coaches, I point out that I know more about Walt Michaels than about John McVay. I coached against Michaels when he played (and he played very well) and when he coached. Walt is knowledgeable, committed, sound, and possesses a strong coaching background, starting with his work under Paul Brown, whom I consider one of the best to learn from. Walt is an excellent defensive coach with flexibility of thought and the ability to adapt a defense to the type of people he has, unlike a number of other coaches. This ability is evidenced by the resurgence of Barzilauskas at defensive tackle, so highly rated a few years ago but not effective since then. The blame can be attributed to the former defensive coaches who tried to get Barzilauskas to play the finesse game, that of "reading" or "keying" (reacting to the moves of the offensive linemen), instead of utilizing his great size, strength, and aggressiveness on the enemy line by penetrating into offensive areas. Michaels has him back playing that way. Walt is also wise in establishing a running-offense mentality without precluding the pass game. This helps of fensive linemen feel better mentally and physically by giving them an opportunity to "fire out" or "blast" at the opposition defense. I haven't had much exposure to John McVay. He has impressed me by clearly defining his objectives, expressing them, and implementing them. Too often coaches merely give lip service to their theories. John appears inclined to open up the Giant offense, with the use of more "play action" passes. This says something to me: It helps the young Giant QB's slow the pass rush with the running fake, and I am sure they are aware of what it can do to certain defenses. Both managements seem to have recognized the errors of the past and have hired football-oriented men to operate the clubs and to rebuild through the draft and by playing young people. When they didn't: Sherman's Giant coaching record was 57-51-4. As a onetime coach and a full-time fan, I have tended to steer clear of preseason predictions. Back in 1963, I think it was, we were playing the Cleveland Browns out there in a crucial game. They'd beaten us in New York with Jimmy Brown having a big day. So before the game I said to my coaches, "Let's get the hell out of here." A coach doesn't do any good in those last few minutes. So we went out on the field and we looked up at that big scoreboard and I said, "Let's throw in $25 apiece and see which of us picks the most winners in the league today." There were seven or eight of us, all professional coaches, and do you know, the best any of us got was three winners out of the whole league? Having prepared my defense, I will now go out on a limb and predict both the Giants and the Jets will be improved and respectable ball clubs this season but that both will have a difficult time making the playoffs. 97-528 077 pt. 12 10 it wasn't the request for money that But CORE and the parents refused to be printed; could it be confirmed? Reluctantly, yes. The amount, gathered "over a period of years," was $9 million. The donors were anonymous, and would stay that way. But the purpose, said the spokesperson, was no secret. "Overwhelmingly," the money went to keep schools going that would otherwise have had to close. Cooke's sharing of dollars contradicts well-established precedent. Always in the past, parochial schools have survived by their own efforts or not at all. If bingo and bake sales didn't bring in enough to supplement school tuition and Sunday collections, that was the beginning of a sure end. More significant than the innovation itself, however, is the judgment it revealed. Five years ago only a bishop willing to trust in incantations (which Ff Gg Hh Ii Jj K doesn't describe Cooke) would have did the pastor of the parish, Father Robert Stern, who originally backed the CORE proposal. Even under parish control the school had not been all that sectarian in religious education. Stern described the archdiocesan religion curriculum as "more Christian than specifically Catholic." Communion and confirmation classes were taught after school hours to those who wanted to come; black studies and sex education were taught under the rubric of ethics and values. In any case, Stern points out, more than 80 percent of the parents had no affiliation with the parish. The reason they desperately wanted the school to continue (to the point of picketing the chancery office) was not that the school was Catholic; it was because "they see it as secure, reliable, and academically superior. And it gives them a choice, which is something they don't have in most aspects of their lives." Despite parental pleas and the picketing. Terence Cooke turned down the CORE request. It can be presumed that for the school-known now as CORE Though he wouldn't go the last mile risked hard-garnered capital on the future of Catholic education. Nuns were leaving their classrooms in herds; costs were shooting up; enrollments sagged dangerously; and morale was bad. Today the figures speak otherwise. Of the 368 Catholic grade and high schools that operated last year in the New York archdiocese, all but five will be alive and functioning this yearand (except for Our Lady of Victory School) most of the students in the failing ones are already enrolled in other Catholic schools. Between 1971 and 1972, grade-school enrollment dropped a dismaying 6.2 percent; between 1975 and 1976, only 2.5 percent. Applications to Catholic high schools actually went up this past spring. Terence Cooke's school policy does not fully explain these developments. Despite his infusions of cash, it costs parents more than ever before to patronize Catholic schools. Even in poor neighborhoods, in schools that certainly shared in Cooke's largess, average tuitions are $350 a year, and they can run as high as $600 per family-and higher still for children who aren't Catholic, or who come from outside parish boundaries. Of the 18,421 students enrolled in the 47 inner-city Catholic grade schools in Manhattan last year, 14,369, or 78 percent, were from minority groups: blacks, Hispanics, Orientals, American Indians, "others." In 64 of the 77 innercity parochial schools in Manhattan and the Bronx, the archdiocese describes the school populations as 50 percent or more "culturally deprived," meaning, in almost all cases, certifiably poor. In 36 of the 64, the proportion goes above 85 percent. What the parents of these pupils have to pay has to be hurting them. Yet it is basically their decision, not the cardinal's, that keeps the schools in action. 66 ...Of 18,421 students in the 47 inner-city Catholic grade schools in Manhattan last year, 14,369 were from minority groups..." By tradition, it might be assumed that these are parents fighting to pass the faith on to their children. Not so; many aren't even Catholic. The diocese estimates that 77 percent of all their pupils come from Catholic families, but there's reason to believe that such numbers wildly overstate the Catholic proportion. "You never tell the chancery office the truth in such matters," says Chicago's Father Andrew Greeley, a sociologist whose research has uncovered similar conditions in other U.S. cities. clear why: maybe a surfeit of religion inoculates the future adult against the abuses of religious authority. There is a prima facie case against the thesis that Catholic schools do a good job of educating children; by current standards, it seems, they cannot afford to provide even minimal education. Last January, Monsignor Feeney reported to the National Catholic Education Association a 1975-76 enrollment of 104,361 in the 268 elementary schools of the archdiocese. He also reported total operating costs for these schools tors would be hard to get. It is still clear, however, that by parochial-school standards the Board of Education is lushly funded. The raw cost ratio between the two systems is nearly six to one. Allowing for contributed services, for the cost of services supplied to parochial-school students out of the public-school budget, and for the difference between grade-school and high school costs, it comes out that the parochial-school child is educated at a cost one quarter to one third the cost of educating the same child in a public St. Charles Borromeo: Teaching the basics. It seems appropriate at this point to declare my own bias, since much of the balance of this piece rests on personal observation and judgment. I spent sixteen years undergoing Catholic education, four more years dispensing it in a Jesuit high school. Because it shaped me, down to my use of semicolons, I have a prejudice in its favor. But since the process also inflicted certain unforgiven scars on my psyche, I have a bias against the system as well. According to Professor Thomas Vitullo-Martin of Teachers College, Columbia, recent research indicates that, especially in low-income areas, Catholic education has strong positive impact on academic and career success. Other studies show that, throughout the country, it has relatively slight effect on religious practice and belief. There is even some evidence that students who spend enough time in Catholic schools emerge better armored than their Catholic friends in public schools against such intellectual offenses as the present pope's birth-control encyclical. It isn't school. According to Professor VitulloMartin, the gap is greater in some other cities where for every $1 the parochial school spends on one child the public system spends $8. Street life: The world as seen from a classroom window at St. Brigid's School.. at $48,245,404.22, leading to an annual per-pupil cost of $462.29. I could not get a strictly comparable figure from the New York City Board of Education; the best they could come up with, after rooting through misplaced files, was a per-pupil cost for the whole system. The figure is hold your wallet$2,647. Both per-pupil-cost figures are open to question. Public-school teachers have told me, for example, that the "average daily attendance" is, in fact, an inflated figure which includes sizable numbers of pupils who are long gone; this means the real school population is lower and the per-pupil cost higher than the official figures. In analyzing the Catholic cost figure, some allowance has to be made for contributed services. Salaries are lower not only for nuns (30 percent of the teaching staff) but also for lay teachers. In many schools women parishioners serve as teachers' aides without pay; in some, men do custodial work for free. Hard data on the effect of these fac What about performance? What Victor Solomon discovered about the educational effectiveness of Our Lady of Victory is not rare; it's standard, not only in New York City but across the country. Comparison of standard test scores reveals that children in Catholic inner-city schools generally score higher on these tests than do children in public schools in the same neighborhoods. Before I began my research, I thought I knew, partly from logic, partly from my own experience, why parochial pu pils excel. I reasoned that Catholic schools can teach because they can keep order, and they can keep order because they can get rid of their problems. Then I visited St. Bernard's School, a gray, cavernous structure on West 13th Street. "I haven't dismissed a child in fourteen years," said Sister Mary Alphonsus Crimmins, the school's principal. "There is no corporal punishment here. We do not keep children after school." Sister Alphonsus is 70 years old, wears the traditional habit and thick glasses, has been a nun 54 years, and is energetic enough to tire an interviewer. The way pupils approached her while we talked made her entirely credible when she explained her system: "What we have is discipline without fear. Watch the children; they come and kiss me on the street. And we have the parents with us. They want what we want." Her desk was piled with test scores just back from Science Research Associates (SRA), a national testing agency that serves the archdiocese. Sister picked up a stack at random and let me copy the SRA scores. I noted composite results for reading, language arts, math, etc., on tests taken by a class of seventh-graders in the sixth month of the school year. The national norm then was 7-6; a child scoring 8-6 is handling seventh-grade materials with the facility of an eighth-grader at the same point in the school year; a child scoring 6-6 is a year behind. These are the first fifteen scores I listed: 12-9, 10-1, 9-2, 8-4, 7-7, 10-5, 7-2, 6-6, 9-1, 10-1, 6-1, 6-7, 9-4, 10-4, and 11-7. In the meantime Sister Alphonsus chatted on happily about her reading lab, her library (4,200 books), her teaching methods (eclectic), the sciencelab equipment, the field trips, the karate club, and about Arnold Falcone, the eighth-grader who had just taken first prize in a citywide essay contest. Well, if the school doesn't kick out problem kids or flunk out slow learners, maybe it doesn't let them in-selective admission? Hardly. St. Bernard's sits between Eighth and Ninth avenues in the midst of warehouses, meat-processing shops, and factories. The school office lists 87 percent of the student body as culturally deprived"; 89 percent, according to the school, are Hispanic; some speak little English when they arrive. Yet the school doesn't ask for Title I (tax-paid) remedial teachers; it doesn't have enough students far enough below grade level to qualify. "Why don't you cheat a little?" I asked. "I understand it's been done." Sister Alphonsus grinned. "I can't do it. It's my background." I talked next with Sister Elaine Owens at St. Brigid's. Her school lives in a small, graffiti-smeared building on East 7th Street across from Tompkins Square. Ninety-seven percent of the pupils come from minorities most are Hispanic; 99 percent are "deprived." Sister Elaine didn't have this year's SRA scores on hand yet, but in last year's tests no class averaged more than two months below national norms. "...The schools I visited were all wildly different from one another -in looks, atmosphere, ideas about education and Catholicism..." On the phone, Sister Elaine always sounds exhausted; in person, she's lively and relaxed. She is 36, of Irish and Lithuanian descent, and has been principal of St. Brigid's for ten years. In that time she has taken in a number of students who couldn't make it in public school. She, too, has yet to dismiss a student. I asked her about "Tom," a boy who was headed for a publicschool disciplinary class or special school when he was brought to St. Brigid's. He had thrown a movie projector during a film in his school's auditorium. Why was he taken in? "It was a hunch, really. Well, no, I liked the kid. He was gutsy. He knew what he liked and didn't like, and he'd say it. And he had a sense of humor. I think his trouble was that he'd got slotted with a bunch of acting-out kids." St. Brigid's is a haven. The kids don't look culturally deprived to me. They look happy and purposeful. They ask confidently for what they want, they move around without confusion, they smile when smiled at. I wouldn't need test scorces to know it's a successful school. I asked Sister Elaine why. To her, small is beautiful in schools. "You know, with Puerto Ricans it's a special cultural thing; the children just cannot get oriented in the big schools. When they're little they're just very terrified and lost." With a small school, principals and teachers know a lot about every child and about the child's family. Sister Elaine picked up a class roster and commented on the family situation of each of the 34 children in the class. Thirteen of them she dismissed as "stable" or "okay." The rest of the list was terrifying: "Father O.D.-ed. The mother left the home when the child was three days old. The grandparents are doing their best. Very poor." "This family is stable, but the mother is in a very deep depression. Just got out of Bellevue. They're going to Puerto Rico this summer to see if it will help." "The mother's a junkie. Grandmother's a lovely old lady. I can always tell when the kids have been with the mother-they're dirty and sleepy." "Both parents drinkers. The kids are undersized and nervous." "This child's dreadfully asthmatic -it kills you." "These two got married at sixteen and now they have four boys, one in second, one in first, one in pre-kinder St. Charles Borromeo: No graffiti in sight at this large Catholic school in Harlem. not much like St. Brigid's or St. Bernard's. It's a big rectangular box on West 142nd Street, so spick-and-span (not a graffito in sight) that it looks almost out of place in the neighborhood. I got there just after the school day closed. The halls were waxed and polished. The rooms-except for a few where children in neat uniforms were still working-were totally in order. Discipline at St. Charles is tight, as far as I can learn, and there is a strong, explicit emphasis on religion, though four out of ten children are non-Catholic. A few days earlier I had talked with a Protestant mother whose son is now enrolled in the school and whose daughter had become a Catholic while a student there. "I didn't mind," she said. "I'm happy to be a Baptist, but she's a big girl now, that's her choice. And I certainly respect Sister Irene." Sister Irene Ryan is a new principal, a little shy about talking with reporters but clearly a strong woman with settled views. She is sure the school is fulfill ing its mission. The enrollment includes The point of my investigations was to try to find out why the schools work. One reason is autonomy. The New York Catholic schools I visited all were wildly different from one another-in looks, style, atmosphere, ideas about education, and (not least) attitudes toward Catholicism. This heterogeneity comes about because the Catholic school system is not a system at all but a rather loose confederation of highly independent units. There is no giant bureaucracy to force them into uniformity. At the superintendent's office I got one sheet of paper listing the names, titles, and staff relationships of all the professional educators who work directly under Monsignor Feeney-all 25 of them. Since there are about 150.000 pupils in the New York Catholic schools, there is one central-office administrator for every 6,000 students. Consider that the New York City public-school system enrolls about 1,055,000 students, and that (as the papers keep reporting) there are 4,000, 5,000, or maybe more people in the system |