"I'm going to ask him if he has ever taken a selfie and what is his favourite ice-cream," says Allison Reyes, an eight-year-old at Our Lady Queen of Angels, a Catholic primary school in East Harlem. She is one of six pupils selected to meet Pope Francis when he visits on September 25th. "His visit to the school is like gold," says Father Joseph Corpora, of the University of Notre Dame's Alliance for Catholic Education. The pope's presence should also draw attention to the paradox of Catholic schools: they are both highly successful, and starved of pupils. Children at Catholic schools do better than the neighbourhood public schools in standardised tests despite spending thousands of dollars less per student. Almost all their pupils graduate from high school and 86% then go on to attend a four-year college. They are especially good at teaching minority children: Catholic-educated black and Latino pupils are more likely to graduate from high school and college. Yet despite their academic success, the number of Catholic primary schools has fallen by half since 1965, when Catholic schools had 6.5m pupils. Today the total is less than 2m, which means a lot of empty desks.
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