Onomastics. Onomastics is the study of names and naming. You could also describe onomastics, so I am told, simply enough as "name sensitivity." Some people are rather insensitive in this area. You could try insulting them by calling them hicks or micks. They pay you no mind. Other folks are quite sensitive. You may refer to them as "Miss" or "Mister," thank you. Some people no longer hear the implications of the phrase "nonpublic" as in schools (I cannot think of any other word in English that is commonly described or defined as "nonpublic" anything except for our very own schools—hmm). On the other hand there are other people out there who more often than not take the expression "nonpublic schools" as a not so subtle slur.

When we talk about Generic Naming of our schools, we have entered into the field of Onomastics. This present essay represents the third installment of our little study of how we should go about giving generic names to schools that used to be called "parochial" and "private" in a time of different name sensitivity. We are not saying that our forebears in earlier days were less sensitive to generic naming in any way. No. All we're saying is that different times bring on different sensitivities to names. Languages are forever restless and changing.

Onomasticians tell us that a word gets promoted up to a NAME by a person or a group who wishes to claim it as their own property—that is, to appropriate it—for some reason of distinction, that is, to distinguish the person or group from other persons or groups. The person or group usually identifies with some aspect or quality of the word that is thereby promoted to a NAME. Interestingly, when words are promoted to names, the names sometimes take on a spiritual and even religious significance. Starting with Adam and Eve, up through Abram/Abraham and hundreds more, the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures make common use of this sense of elevation through naming. We will have more to say on this later.

As we said, names are always changing, almost imperceptibly at times. For example, when I was growing up, it was important to identify oneself as "Roman Catholic." Today most Catholics in America just refer to themselves as "Catholic." The "Roman" part nowadays is implied.

Overlap. One of the most important things we have to understand about generic naming is that almost all generic names come with a certain amount of "overlap." It is particularly important that we understand overlap if we ever want to come to some agreement about a generic name for our schools that means something.

Some of you have relayed your concern that some public schools are becoming "schools of choice." If we called ourselves "schools of choice," so the argument goes, wouldn't that seem to overlap into the arena of public schools that are charter schools or magnet schools or open enrollment schools? Aside from the fact that these public schools already have the generic name of "public" and the specific names of "charter," "magnet" and "open enrollment," we should realize that public school officials only describe such schools as "schools of choice" (and that usually in some of the more theoretical literature). Public schoolers do not NAME any of their schools as schools of choice!

There is a good reason for this. Public schoolers do not want to offend the rest of the public schools--the vast majority of them--by generically naming the charters and magnets as "schools of choice." Later on in this essay we will see in a note from George Corwell of the New Jersey Catholic Conference how public schoolers feel quite free to describe our own schools as "schools of choice" when they want to put our schools down in the public forum of debate about government funding. (This is indeed "wondrous strange" that our adversaries can call us something that is altogether truthful and descriptive and noble, in fact, but we ourselves may be reluctant to so call attention to one of the most noteworthy and outstanding aspects of our schools).

Back to overlap.... It should be clear to most of us that the designation "public" as used to refer to public schools is indeed a clear-cut case of overlap. Dr. Catherine Hickey, Superintendent of Schools of the Archdiocese of New York, likes to make the point to public officials that "the public schools should not be construed as synonymous with the public." The "public" is a good deal wider than the outreach of the public schools. Here in New York State our religious and independent schools of choice serve 480,000 students. That's a lot of the public! That's a lot of parents and students and families who should never in any way be allowed to be referred to as nonpublic anything!

But nobody would or should question the public schoolers right to call themselves whatever they want to call themselves. Yes, they are government schools in every way, shape and form. But the word "public" is more euphemistic than "government" or "state" schools. The word "public" is so euphemistic, in fact, that in the United Kingdom the upper class schools like Eton and Winchester and Rugby very early on captured the usage of "public schools" for themselves. The other schools, both religious and non-denominational (see that negative again, though here the roles are reversed), are called "state schools." Almost all generic names have overlap. Can anybody get more over-lapping than General Motors or General Mills? Now there’s a broad generic for you. And how about General Dynamics? That sure covers a lot of territory, the whole lot in fact.

Should anybody object to the dictum of Chemistry that water is the "universal solvent?" I can imagine someone pointing out that some forms of metal alloys or plastics are 100% insoluble in water, and that therefore water is not the "universal solvent." That’s why Aristotle argued that science considers things that happen "for the most part." Water is indeed the universal solvent, for the most part. Generic words and phrases work in much the same way.

Recently here in New York City Mayor Giuliani cut off municipal funding support for WNYC, our link to the National Public Radio "network." In order to survive, WNYC was forced to raise funds from the "public at large" and go it on its own. WNYC is no longer government-funded. Did WNYC thereby change its name and affiliation with the National PUBLIC Radio network? No, it did not. There are all kinds of ways of looking at the word "public" and defining it.

We could learn a lot here from how our nationwide professional sports organizations have learned to designate themselves generically. In baseball the "National League" came first in the late 1800’s. So how did the next league challenge them? Not to be outdone, the new league called itself the "American League." Similarly first there was the National Football League that was then followed by the American Football League. "American" and "National"--these were two words that competed for the same goal, the attention of the American public. (In Ireland, by the way, the Catholic and other religious schools are all called the National Schools).

Most overlap is intentional—it speaks to aspiration and to outreach. There is perhaps no clearer example of intentional overlap than in the original self-naming of Catholics! The earliest folks to call themselves "catholic" (or universal) all hugged close by to the Mediterranean Sea! But they intended to be catholic and they had the imagination and the temerity to so NAME themselves. ("O what a falling off was there," proclaimed the ghost of King Hamlet).

Wouldn't the phrase, "Schools of Choice," compete with the phrase, the "Public Schools," for the attention of the American public?

Overlap is pretty much the law of life and languages. Neat boundaries are probably more the exception than the rule. If we want neat, we can continue to refer to "public" and "nonpublic."

Likewise, words are as restless as the sea, always changing the shorelines of denotations and connotations. How many editions has Merriam-Webster's put out by this time anyway? Fixity is not what words and names are about. If we want fixity, we can continue to use the words "private" and "parochial."

But if we sincerely want to capture some of the life and truth and reality of our schools as generically considered, we can get more imaginative, page through our thesauruses, realize that the lists of words that refer to schools have definite limits, and then propose something we can all settle on and be happy with.

The Litany of Choices. In the last essay we listed a number of choices that are encompassed on a regular basis in Schools of Choice:

parents choose to send their child to a certain school;

parents choose every month to pay the tuition;

parents choose a particular religious and ethical education;

parents choose to maintain the upkeep of the particular school;

earlier parents chose to build the school in the first place;

teachers choose to teach at a particular school;

students choose to do their best on a daily basis.

But we omitted a major choice in the last essay:

in many dioceses the Ordinaries choose year in and year out to subsidize the schools in order to keep them in existence, especially in the inner city areas of our nation. Needless to say, these subsidies represent no small Choice in itself, and are often enough met with some degree of controversy from the average middle-class folks in the pew.

Choice versus Assignment. The various School Board elections taking place these weeks across the land should remind us that one of the major debates that takes place in the public school arena centers around the issue of zoning and districting. That's because students and teachers in the public schools by and large are assigned to schools according to these zones and districts. The elections often represent the last chance that public schoolers have to effectuate some semblance of choice about where their children will go to school.

To repeat, once again, our schools are Schools of Choice. In this instance the public schools are Schools of Assignment.

Just "telling it like it is." As Bob Teegarden of the California Catholic Conference puts it: "For so many public schoolers, choice just isn't one of their options."

Correspondence from Jerry Tobin, Esq. You will find attached a letter from Jerry Tobin, attorney for Cusack and Stiles which does a lot of work for the Archdiocese of New York. Earlier Jerry worked for the US Catholic Conference. Jerry’s father and grandfather acted as the "legal beagles" for the NYS Catholic Conference going back to the 1800’s. So Jerry’s been around….

Jerry reviewed for our benefit the language used by the Supreme Court over the last few decades. You will notice that Jerry points out that the first usage he could find of the phrase "nonpublic" came in the Lemon Decision. That was 1971, just six years after the passage of the landmark Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. You will also note that the Supreme Court got away from using the "nonpublic" language—quite a significant point—and now refers to our schools as "sectarian" and "religious." Jerry goes on to say that the phrase "schools of choice" enjoys the benefit of being "neutral" which is good from a legal point of view. I thank Jerry for taking our concerns over language seriously and for bringing this Supreme Court angle to our attention.

George Corwell’s Correspondence. Dr. George Corwell is the Education Director of the New Jersey Catholic Conference. George and I have served on USCC’s Federal Assistance Advisory Commission for several decades now. George has sent us two very welcome missives on these issues.

Corwell Memo #1: In his first memo George says: "The effort to come up with a suitable replacement term for our schools is indeed a significant one. Why should it not be part of the CACE (Chief Administrators of Catholic Education) this fall? It is too important to neglect."

George goes on to say that he is concerned that the phrase "schools of choice" could "insult" some Catholics who send their children to public schools by choice. "As a temporary compromise I prefer the broad use of "independent schools" (as noted by Jack Clark) [Diocese of Allentown]." Actually Jack Clark proposed "independent and religious schools" but not a further generic word to gather in those two. So George seems to be suggesting that we accept "independent schools" for the broader generic between "religious" schools and "independent" schools. And if I get George correct, the schools that now go by the name of "independent" would share both the specific and the generic name at the same time, or maybe he would want them to go back to "private" as the more generic? Whatever, as Bob Dole would say. You will remember that on these pages we explained how Joe McTighe of CAPE (Council of American Private Schools) holds that the word "private" is the generic between "independent and religious schools of choice." That is, CAPE considers the word "private" in its title to encompass both "independent" and "religious" schools (see Part II).

I hope I didn’t lose too many of you on that last paragraph. The reason I belabored these differences of opinion is to try to get you, the readers, to feel "in the thick" of this discussion and debate. We all agree that SOMETHING has to be done about the negative "nonpublic," but we have legitimate disagreements about what to replace it with. Toward that purpose I am also attaching a copy of my page in Roget’s Thesaurus which covers descriptors for schools—just to jog some minds out there…. AND to make the point that, as wonderful and as sophisticated as our beloved English language is, it is still limited to only a certain amount of words that can be used to describe and NAME schools on a generic basis!

Corwell Memo #2: You will find this Memo attached at the back of this essay. George relates how a public school union adversary called us "names" as we used to say as kids. He said our schools were "schools of choice." I have to tell you I loved it when I read George’s Memo. You remember that Psalm with the famous Latin words, "Ex oribus infantium?" "Out of the mouths of babes…." Well this may be a case of "Ex oribus inimicorum"—"Out of the mouths of our adversaries…." You will see how George ends his note rather plaintively, with the rumination: "I am not sure whether this helps us or hurts us…."

I think we may be missing something here about naming. We mentioned earlier that in the old days, the Biblical days, names often attained spiritual and religious significance. Perhaps it’s a sign of our secularized times that we ourselves, who come from such rich religious traditions, have allowed the common name for our schools—in parlance that covers the worlds of law, politics and education—to be reduced to a very lowest common denominator, a negative.

It’s gotten to the point where we seem to have settled into a comfort zone of referring to ourselves by this negative. We give great comfort to our adversaries by this kind of passivity. It’s as if our adversaries somehow were going to get the last word in how we called ourselves. Worst of all it’s as if we had gotten steeped in that same leveling-down secularizing process ourselves. When adversaries can spit out the phrase "schools of choice" as if it were suddenly something unworthy and un-American, well then who better to restore the value of that phrase and concept than people who would claim it and treasure it with the extended phrase, "Schools of Religious Choice?"

To put it another way, if we want to elevate the public debate in this country about matters of parental choice in education, perhaps we could do this in no better way at this point in time than to identify our schools as embracing that very value—Schools of Choice and Schools of Religious Choice!

Our Adversaries. What do our adversaries really want from us anyway, besides shutting down all our institutions? I sometimes think that in their dreamlives they imagine that we should NOT STAND FOR ANYTHING. Maybe they would dream out loud that our nonpublic schools would teach Non-controversial Religion. We’d be polite, inoffensive and say nothing extraordinary. We’d be known for the Great Sounds of Silence that would emanate from our leadership. Blessed are the nobodies for they went without a peep and nary a squawk.

Making an Announcement. I got up to say a few words to our Catholic School Network Parents Federation out of Rockland County a few weeks ago. There were about 120 of them there that evening sitting at their dinner tables. I told them how we were in the process of doffing the negative terminology of referring to our schools as the nonpublic schools. I told them that we were working on other options, and that among those options was Schools of Choice. Well, my colleagues and friends, before I could go on to say another word I had to halt because I received an ovation, quite a surprise to me, you can believe me. It was as if I gave THEM a new name! It’s good to give our supporters something meaningful to stand for and cheer about.

NCEA Button. I’ve been wearing a button off and on the last few months. I found it in the Superintendent of Schools Office, perched over Sr. Dorothy Flanagan’s desk. NCEA must have put it out a few years ago for one of the conventions. The button has two messages: "Catholic Schools" and "Schools of Choice." So this is nothing new. It’s just something we seem to be afraid to call ourselves out loud. Sometimes some of us sense an tremendous tolerance for hanging on to the status quo in some of the highest places of Catholic education in America today. Let it not be said that on the verge of the new millennium we handed on to the children of our future a droopy attitude towards the generic naming of our schools.

Sr. Carol Cimino’s Newsletter. I am also attaching the front page of Sr. Carol’s latest newsletter to the schools of New York State. I am especially thankful for her article, "Matters of Principal: What’s in a Name?" because Sr. Carol can say in a few hundred words what it takes me many pages to get across. Many of you who have heard Sr. Carol give talks around the nation can see here how her vaunted clarity begins with her writing—concise and precise.

Further Thanks. I am sorry I didn’t get to name and attribute so many of you who have been encouraging me to continue this little campaign to get a set of decent generic names for our schools. I thank you first for your sense of debate and indeed also for your wonderful support. You know who you are.

What’s in a Name? Sr. Carol Cimino, SSJ

Jim Mahoney, from the Archdiocese of New York, has begun a discourse on the nomenclature that we have used for almost 35 years, namely, the term "nonpublic."

He sees several problems with this term, which started enjoying broad usage in 1965, when we joined forces with the Jewish Day schools, Lutheran and Greek Orthodox schools to negotiate over our inclusion in the newly minted Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965.

Mahoney states, "In hindsight, we should never have accepted such a definition-by-negation." Indeed, the term "nonpublic" does several things:

1. It sets up "public" as the standard against which to be defined.
2. It says what we are not, rather than what we are, and offers acceptance of verbiage which we, in these politically correct times, have refused to use. For example, we don’t sanction the term "nonwhite" or "nonmale." Why, then, accede to "nonpublic"?

To use the word "private" sets up a whole set of impressions which, for many of our schools, would be unacceptable. To use the word "parochial" is to apply a set of legal ramifications which, again, are not acceptable to many of our schools. The word "Catholic" usually refers to a school’s governance structure, not its essence.

All of us not operated by government, are, however, "religious and independent schools of choice." Even though this does not roll trippingly off the tongue, it would seem to be preferable to "nonpublic."

"Schools of choice," moreover, reflects a couple of other ramifications:

1. Parents choose to accept the school’s philosophy and ethos; it is not imposed from government, but rather by consensus of the school community.
2. Parents choose to support the school financially; tuition and other methods of gaining income are not imposed by law, but by contract between the school and the parent.

do so, because parents choose to send their children to us. Moreover, not only are we "schools of choice," but "choice schools" by the mere fact of our success. Psychologists tell us that our use of language reflects our way of thinking. Let’s give some thought to what we call ourselves; are we schools that are not something, or are we schools that are? Let the debate begin!

George A. Phillips William P. Hurley* George J. McCormack Frank C. McLaughlin, Jr. Gerald C. Tobin** Thomas C. Mackasek Thomas A. Conniff Dianne S. Landi Kathleen M. McCormack		Cusack & Stiles llp Attorneys at Law 61 Broadway, Suite 2100 New York, NY 10006-2894 Telephone (212) 480-0400 Telecopier (212) 943-8534		Lawrence X. Cusack (1919-1985) Meredith N. Stiles, Jr. (1922-1995) _______ John J. Grandefeld Joseph M. Rigolio*** John J. Lynch Counsel _______ William J. McCabe _______ * Also Member of FL Bar ** Also Member of NJ and DC Bars *** Also Member of NJ Bar

                                                Re: Considerations on Generic Naming


Dear Jim:

Thank you for your latest reflections on the "nonpublic" name. It was very informative. If, (or perhaps, when) the nonpublic nomenclature is dropped for "schools of choice"or some other appropriate name, history will show who orginated the idea.

I also appreciate the free advertising in your last piece. You captured my thoughts well. I only elaborate on them here briefly:

(1.) I support the change in name. Being referred to in the negative is never advantageous. I think the progress of the "pro-life" movement has been the result, in no small measure, of the fact that it has seized the high ground with its name. Who can be against "pro-life?" However, before I would change the "nonpublic" name, I would suggest it be determined why we ended up with the name in the first place so we do not make the same mistake twice.

(2.) As you indicated in the first memorandum, it appears that we accepted the non-public nomenclature when our students began receiving governmental assistance. All the pertinent laws, whether state or federal, had referred to public schools. Since we were not public, we were nonpublic. Apparently, there were only two choices.

(3.) At the time I do not think we opposed the name because it was an improvement over previous appellations. I went back and reviewed the Supreme Court decisions in some of the earlier school aid cases. In those our schools were referred to as: catholic parochial schools or church schools (Everson); private schools or religious schools (Allen). In fact, only with Lemon did I note the use of the term "nonpublic." That case also used the term "church-related." Nonpublic also appeared in Nyquist. Interestingly, more recent cases, such as Zobrest, steer clear of the use of nonpublic. The Court now often refers to "sectarian" and "religious"
to refer to our schools.

(4.) What is to be made of this? While my review is admittedly nonscientific, it would seem from the cases that, in the earliest days of the school aid issue, not much thought was given to what our schools were called. The schools were what they were: parochial and religious. However, as governmental aid became more important, there was a movement to emphasize the secular side of the schools as opposed to the religious. As we know, that effort had mixed results in the Supreme Court. Nonetheless, the "nonpublic" name stuck. Recently, in Supreme Court cases there has been less an emphasis on the secular function versus the religious.
However, the Supreme Court has not had a major school aid case (apart from Agostini) in a while.

(5.) My take on this would be that, from a legal view point, the name we call ourselves is not going to be the determining factor. But, when dealing with governmental aid issues, it is better to emphasize the secular side of our schools as opposed to the religious. The phrase "schools of choice" is neutral. To distinguish our schools from other schools, they could be referred to as "schools of religious choice". However, I would steer away from "religious schools" or "religious schools of choice" which emphasize the religious side.

I hope the above is helpful. If you wish to discuss the matter further, please call feel free to call.

Sincerely yours,

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Gerald C. Tobin