Lost Classroom, Lost Community: Catholic Schools’ Importance in Urban America by Margaret F. Brinig and Nicole Stelle Garnett. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. 202 pp., $48.00.

In Lost Classroom, Lost Community: Catholic Schools’ Importance in Urban America, Margaret F. Brinig and Nicole Stelle Garnett set out to understand how the precipitous loss of urban Catholic schools over the past several decades has affected the social order and social cohesion of the neighborhoods in which these schools once served as community anchors. Fittingly, they begin their exploration with a history of Catholic schools in the United States, from their fledgling and contested beginnings in the nineteenth century to their height in the mid- to late twentieth century. In this condensed but informative historical account, Brinig and Garnett rightly conclude that much of the development of Catholic schools relied on an unsustainable model of a mission-based American Catholic Church aiming to educate ethnic Europeans in Catholic schools staffed by legions of religious sisters who taught for little to, at times, no salary