Enrollment in U.S. Catholic K–12 schools has fallen from 5.6 million in 1965 to 1.8 million today, and many once-thriving schools have closed. Families’ inability to pay tuition, changing religious attitudes, a shortage of qualified Catholic professionals available to teach, and the clergy sex abuse crisis have all contributed to the downturn.

Assistant Professor Andrew Miller, who conducts Catholic education research, says he is convinced that changing that trajectory requires a twofold process: clarifying the purpose of a Catholic education—to work toward social justice and bring people closer to each other and God—and finding new models to prepare excellent lay teachers and leaders. “We must have an intentional curriculum that’s aligned with the mission and focuses on developing the whole child,” he says. “We need to know how to hire teachers, prepare them, and sustain their professional development.

“I want to engage in these kinds of critical questions ... so that these schools can thrive long term,” says Miller, who—before he joined the Lynch School faculty—attended Catholic elementary and middle schools, earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Notre Dame and a doctorate in curriculum and instruction from the Lynch School, and worked for the Archdiocese of Boston’s Catholic Schools Office for two years.

Miller is developing several studies on leadership preparation and formation models in Catholic education. One, which he’s conducting with former Lynch School classmate Michael O’Connor, Ph.D. ’17, aims to highlight Catholic school educators around the country who are doing exemplary work, for example, by assessing whether schools serving low-income students are effectively preparing them for college or jobs. Miller and O’Connor, who is the director of the Providence [R.I.] Alliance for Catholic Teachers, are using a conceptual framework they have developed to guide this and future research.

Another study, conducted with Stonehill College Associate Professor and Lynch graduate Elizabeth Stringer Keefe, Ph.D. ’18, will examine how Catholic schools are training teachers and leaders to support students with cognitive or physical disabilities.

Miller is teaching Ethics and Equity in Education this fall and will turn it into an online course for Lynch’s online M.Ed. in Educational Leadership and Policy program. This spring, he plans to teach Theories of Leadership and create an online version of a course about his passion: Transforming the Field of Catholic Education.