What are other ways in which Catholic schools are different than public schools?
A. The two are different in such things as purpose, funding sources, legal rights, and testing. Public schools have an exclusively civic purpose whereas Catholic schools serve both a civic purpose and a religious one. Public schools are funded by tax-payer dollars, Catholic schools primarily by tuition. The legal basis that supports public schooling is constitutional law. Catholic schools respect constitutional law but it is not the legal basis for Catholic schooling; contract law is. That is, what the school and parents agree to—their contract on behalf of the student—is what defines Catholic schooling. The Catholic school draws up the contract (i.e., the tuition understanding and the handbook) and the parent accepts the terms thereof. This contract forms the legal basis of a broad and benign relationship of educational partners (i.e., school and home). A third difference is testing—standardized testing. Catholic elementary schools use the results of standardized testing to diagnose a
