is there a ratings system for catholic schools similar to public school ratings?”
The term public school has two distinct (and virtually opposite) meanings depending on the location of usage: * in the United States, Australia and Canada: A school funded from tax revenue and most commonly administered to some degree by government or local government agencies. This usage is synonymous with its British English equivalent, state school. (See also: Public education.) * in the United Kingdom[1] and a few other Commonwealth countries: A traditional privately operated secondary school which requires the payment of fees for its pupils, and is quite often a boarding school. This usage is common in the United Kingdom (although can be ambiguous in Scotland). These schools, wherever located, often follow a British educational tradition and are committed in principle to public accessibility. Originally, many were single-sex boarding schools, but most independent schools are now co-educational with both boarders and day-pupils. This usage is synonymous with preparatory school in A
Catholic education in Chicago began simply enough on June 3, 1844, with a boys’ school at the rear of St. Mary’s Church at Madison Street and Wabash Avenue. Newly appointed bishop William J. Quarter embarked on an ambitious program to provide Roman Catholic immigrants with an entire system from grammar grades through college. St. Mary of the Lake University, the first institution of higher learning in Chicago, was dedicated on July 4, 1846. Wracked by conflict after Quarter’s death in 1848, the university and its seminary department survived only until 1866. Much more successful were the parish-based grammar schools and convent academies that came to be a distinguishing feature of the urban landscape. Parochial schools not only eventually met the needs of diverse ethnic and racial groups—Irish, Germans, Poles, Czechs and Bohemians, French, Slovaks, Lithuanians, African Americans, Italians, and Mexicans—but they were primarily the creation of Catholic nuns, often immigrants themselves,
