Catholic schools surpass public schools in Nation’s Report Card

CNA Staff, Mar 3, 2025 / 13:20 pm

Catholic schools outranked public schools in recently released mathematics and reading test scores for 2024. 

The Nation’s Report Card by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) released national scores for fourth- and eighth-grade mathematics and reading. Catholic school students in both grades surpassed public school students in both categories.

In fourth-grade math, Catholic schools had a score of 247, while public schools were ranked 237, according to the NAEP’s scoring system. In fourth-grade reading, Catholic schools outpaced public schools by 16 points. In eighth grade, Catholic schools outpaced public schools by 21 points in math and 20 points in reading. 

The data is based on mandated standardized testing given between January and March 2024. 

Notably, public school scores have not yet returned to pre-pandemic levels, while public school reading scores continue to decline.   

Catholic schools have consistently outpaced public schools in recent decades, with higher-ranking scores going back to the 1990s.  

The National Catholic Educational Association highlighted Catholic schools’ scores in a recent press release, noting that “NAEP assessments are considered the gold standard of testing.”

NCEA President and CEO Steven Cheeseman emphasized that the primary goal of Catholic education is to “form saints.”

“In Catholic schools, faith and academics are seamlessly woven together, fostering not only intellectual growth but also moral and spiritual formation,” Cheeseman said in a Jan. 30 statement. “While academic excellence is a hallmark of our schools, our true goal is to form saints and to prepare students to lead with wisdom, compassion, and integrity.”

Catholic leaders are pushing for a national school choice bill to enable students who could not afford Catholic school to attend. An unprecedented number of school choice programs have been launched in various states in recent years. The programs are designed to help low- and middle-income families send their children to private schools of their choice, including the nearly 6,000 Catholic schools across the nation.

Following a record expansion of state school choice programs in 2023, the NCEA found that more than 1 in 10 Catholic school students used school choice programs to help them attend Catholic school in the 2023-2024 school year.

Last year, reports showed that Catholic school enrollment remained stable, following three years of modest growth. The growth followed the sharpest drop in enrollment in decades in 2021 in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. The NCEA is set to release enrollment data by April.