Research conducted in the twentieth century found urban Catholic schools in the U.S. had a legacy of providing high quality educational opportunities for low-income students and students of color. In an era of declining Catholic school enrollments, urban Catholic school advocates have argued that urban Catholic school closures would deny these students one of the best educational opportunities available to them. However, there have been few attempts in recent years to synthesize research in, on, and about urban Catholic schools to see if the sector's historical legacy is still present. In this article, we systematically reviewed 80 recently published empirical research studies focused at some level on the effects, operations, and reforms currently present in urban Catholic education. We found that while positive effects of urban Catholic schools on student outcomes can still be identified, these effects are not consistently present in all urban Catholic schools and there is little evidence to suggest that the sector as a whole has enacted the social justice mission for which it is best known. In light of these findings, we conclude our review with suggestions for future research that connects urban Catholic schooling to contemporary issues present across all U.S. urban education.

Catholic schooling in the United States is suffering from a persistent enrollment crisis that has triggered the need for system-wide organizational reforms. However, most of the changes that the sector has experienced has taken place in individual schools making decisions about how to operationally sustain their individual school community. In this article, we present findings from a qualitative analysis of 26 superintendents of (arch)diocesan Catholic school systems in order to better understand why there has been an absence of system-level change in the Catholic sector in the U.S. at a time when systems thinking has started to spread throughout other sectors domestically and internationally. We show through the findings presented in this paper that many Catholic school systems in the United States do not sustain system-level change because they rely on a decentralized “system of schools” organizational form that superintendents believe limits the possibility for sector-wide organizational reform. We highlight in this paper the ways superintendents are forced to navigate these organizational and political limitations and suggest what the implications of this limited possibility for system-level change are for the Catholic sector and other similarly organized sectors.