Recall that last week we reported on the abysmal performance of the government/teachers union-run schools across the country. Here’s a quick recap of the latest disastrous test score results:

The good news is that Catholic schools generally stayed open during the pandemic while the public schools shut down. As a consequence, there were NO net test score declines in the Catholic schools, which already had superior results.

As education experts Michael Hartney and Corey DeAngelis note, it wasn’t rocket science:

There’s no secret sauce to the Catholic school advantage in mitigating learning loss. The typical parochial school starts its learning day earlier, focuses on the basics, and most of all were much more likely to encourage and provide in-person learning throughout the pandemic.

What’s more, most of the urban Catholic schools that mitigated learning loss were just as likely (if not more likely) to be saddled with older facilities, less money, and disadvantaged students than public schools in poor urban locales and tony upscale Democratic districts.

Hey! We have a crazy idea: if we really care about the children, why don’t the inner cities just take the tens of billions of dollars they spend on their failed schools, and just contract out all the schooling to the Catholic schools?