Perceptions of Catholic Schools by Bishops & Priests

According to O'Brien, "Greeley found evidence that some pastors and future pastors were not supportive of Catholic schools. The [present] question was whether that finding was still true ten years later" (p. 53). In his role as Executive Director of the Department of Chief Administrators for the National Catholic Educational Association (NCEA), O'Brien prepared a lengthy survey which was mailed to each of the 273 bishops of the Church as well as to a random sample of 660 priests (every 57th name listed in The Official Catholic Directory (1985) beginning at a randomly selected point) out of a total population of 37,572 (p. 116).

The survey was divided into two parts, the first specially constructed to obtain specific information about the bishops and priests and their vocational background,

. . .
-9 present the author's survey results and conclusions. While the results are plainly stated, the presentation is very confusing and suffers from a lack of organization. Because most of the survey results are presented in percentages, substitution of the percent sign ("%") for the word "percent" would make the text considerably less cumbersome; indeed, the percent sign was used in almost all instances where a numeric figure was placed parenthetically. Particularly distracting, however, was the author's decision to place information which is in some way secondary to the general results in a "screen"--a block of text overprinted with a fairly dark gray. This treatment was designed to identify material which was essentially a subset of results, but the effect upon the reader was exactly the opposite--drawing attention to the "screened" text instead of allowing it to be isolated, disregarded, and/or omitted. The text also suffers from a large number of glaring typographical and grammatical errors (misspelled words, subject-verb agreement etc.) which causes the reader to have to re-read many important statements more than once to fully understand what is being presented. These problems could be corrected in a thoroughly edited
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Approximate Word count = 1256
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)

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