While I am no longer a practicing Catholic, I am the product of a Catholic education. There was a time when Catholic elementary and high schools provided a superior education in return for a nominal tuition. They had a near free labor force in the nuns and brothers who taught in the schools. Were it not for the efforts of a mother who spent hours teaching me after she had already worked eight hours, the Sisters of Saint Joseph in elementary school, and the Salesian and Franciscan Brothers in the two high schools I attended, my life would be substantially less than it is.

Unfortunately, the number of people becoming nuns and brothers started declining in the Sixties and was in free-fall by the end of the Seventies. That source of cheap labor dried up and Catholic schools must now hire lay teachers and pay them market-based salaries. That drives up tuition to the point of being unaffordable for the families of those children who would most benefit from a parochial education that is un-influenced by outside political forces and concentrates on a traditional education.

A property tax rebate program (I dare not write "school voucher") would do much to assist parents who opted to place their children in parochial or private schooling.