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Steve Levy is vice chair of the day school Council of Greater MetroWest, New Jersey.

The Next Big Bet

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In North America, there are approximately 900 Jewish day schools with nearly 300,000 students. With few exceptions, these schools face significant, and in some cases, existential, challenges. Among the most prevalent of these challenges are rapidly rising costs; tuition affordability; a reliable, high quality teacher pipeline; transportation; the ongoing mental health of their students and staff; and finding ways to be more inclusive of children with learning differences. In the past 15 years, our community has made some enormous bets on creating sustainable schools through material improvements in affordability and significant investments in academic excellence, but we clearly have more to do.

Recent Big Bets 

At the recent Prizmah conference in Denver, where more than 1,000 day school educators, administrators, and supporters met, there were a few sessions that described some big bets that have been made to help an individual school or a community achieve its goals. We heard about an initiative at the Milken School in Los Angeles where the focus was on attracting and securing the best teachers possible by offering them 100% tuition remission. Another large donor talked about a multimillion dollar fund set up to increase faculty compensation at the Denver Jewish Day School. 

We also heard about Toronto’s Generation Trust, an endowment set up by the Jewish Federation, which is close to reaching its goal of $180 million (Canadian) so that it can offer community-wide middle-income families tuition assistance at its elementary and middle schools. The first of these programs was a big bet by Milken because it now provides a uniform policy for an important staff benefit rather than individually negotiated deals; it is an incentive that attracts and retains the best and brightest faculty and its annual budget is close to $2 million. The Toronto middle-income endowment qualifies as a big bet because of its community-wide size and scale, that no school could attempt on its own.

As we look at the entire North American Jewish day school landscape, in fact, we see other examples where communities or individual schools have taken huge leaps in addressing affordability. One example is here in Greater MetroWest (www.njdayschools.org) where we introduced the Tuition Max middle-income affordability program, which now supports 20% of our day school families and 23% of our students at an annual cost of about $4.5 million. We also note that recently a communitywide, middle-income program has been introduced in Seattle—at an annual cost of more than $1 million—and is being contemplated in at least one other major city. And of course, individual schools, such as Kadima Day School in Los Angeles which implemented an across-the-board reduction in tuition of 45%, Westchester Day School, the Epstein School in Atlanta, the Schechter School in Boston, the Denver Jewish Day School, the Rashi School in Boston, and Tampa’s Hillel Academy have all introduced programs with tuition caps based on income of the family.

The Next Big Bets

Looking toward the future, we are once again considering possibilities for our next big bet. Philanthropists are likely considering similar large investments.

One of the biggest challenges our schools have been facing for the past few years is transportation. Because of New Jersey’s funding, an extremely restrictive set of school bus regulations and a driver shortage, the costs to get our students to school have skyrocketed. Perhaps more importantly, the reliability of the buses has fallen dramatically. This is causing us to consider the idea of creating our own bus company, which would probably entail an initial investment of between $5 and $10 million.

Like most of our colleagues around North America, we are looking for innovative and effective ways to address the growing mental health concerns among our students and staff. Another significant challenge for almost all our schools is how to become more inclusive of Jewish students with significant learning differences. Of course, we are also constantly looking for new ways to build on our prior affordability and academic excellence programs. But perhaps the biggest bet we are considering involves the growing recognition that our teacher pipeline is drying up.

About 10 years ago, our community’s leading supporter of Jewish day schools, Paula Gottesman, asked a simple question: “Why are some of our Jewish students enrolling in the excellent private independent schools in our community?” The answer almost always came down to the quality of the teachers, which eventually led us to create Greater MetroWest’s Quest for Teaching Excellence (Quest) Professional Development program. Now in its 12th year, our community has been investing about $250,000 annually in ongoing education and training for almost 500 faculty and staff in our four schools; this includes every person that works in the school such as our nurses, our administrators and our janitorial staff. 

One of the key lessons that has been learned in the past decade and a half is that teachers determine the quality of the education at Jewish day schools. Further, we know parents will only send their children to excellent schools and thus the tuition level might be immaterial without that commitment. The Quest program has proven to be an extremely valuable investment in our people and perhaps even an incentive to retain our staff. What it does not address is the identification, recruitment and training of new teachers.

Therefore, as major philanthropists look to the next ten years, and consider which of the challenges are most pressing and most deserving of future big bets, we suggest their attention, and the focus of their resources, be brought to bear on developing and sustaining a pipeline of highly qualified and motivated teachers. And while we are not being dismissive at all about the mental health crisis that many schools are experiencing coming out of the pandemic, or the need to be more inclusive of students with learning differences, figuring out a solution that can be implemented across North America seems way beyond the scope of one foundation or even a few pooled funds.

The Teacher Pipeline 

By contrast, a large philanthropic investment could address and have a significant positive impact on the teacher pipeline. In fact, we already have some examples that philanthropists could use to structure a program with a high degree of success; The Pardes Educators Program in Jerusalem, The Jewish New Teacher Project (JNTP), and Quest. Among them, these programs have at least ten years of highly impactful experiences in training new teachers and developing existing ones.

Any initiative at establishing and sustaining a teacher pipeline will need to address three key questions:

  • How to attract new teachers to the field regardless of their experiences 
  • How to ensure teacher job satisfaction encourages longevity in excess of five years in their positions
  • How to keep these new teachers learning and growing well into their first and second decades of professional employment 

Pursuing a teaching profession, in general, has become less attractive to college students for a number of reasons, including the prospective compensation package and the declining respect that teachers engender. New teacher burnout is something that has been widely written about and almost always stems from the lack of mentoring and ongoing support. Finally, it is well documented that maintaining the highest levels of teaching excellence, professionalism and impact is a direct function of the individual’s commitment and participation to ongoing professional development.

Dreaming Big 

So where should we start? How about establishing a North American Center for Jewish Day School Educators in a community that has at least a few schools, a few thousand students and is close to major universities and seminaries, where educational resources can be tapped into and leveraged. In order to attract new students, this center would take the financial incentives currently offered at the two-year Pardes Educators program (free tuition for a master’s degree and $1,200/month in living expenses) and expand them significantly to include signing bonuses and ongoing compensation supplements for teachers that stay in their positions for more than five years. 

In addition, this center could, and should, address more than just Judaics teachers. Including secular teachers could encourage integrating Judaics into subjects such as math, history, and social studies. The Center would also provide significantly more practical student teaching opportunities as well as placement services when they graduate. Either in partnership with the Jewish New Teacher Project, or as a supplement to it, this center would also carefully plan, monitor and mentor its graduates for the first few years, ensuring a much higher level of satisfaction in the teachers’ formative years. Then, just as the Quest for Teaching Excellence program does, the center would organize, implement and oversee significant professional development for its graduates to ensure they are current and remain highly effective in their classrooms. 

This big bet would likely require significant capital/philanthropic investments measured initially in the tens of millions and a multimillion ongoing annual budget. The potential paybacks, however, could be even more significant, as a successful implementation of this idea could ensure that all North American Jewish day schools have a steady source of extremely well-prepared and highly motivated teachers, ready and able to take their institutions to new heights.

The bottom line is that the North American Jewish day school landscape is ripe with opportunities for huge philanthropic investments. We still have a long way to go to make our schools affordable for more families, and there are many projects that could be launched to increase accessibility for a wider spectrum of students. In our view, however, the “biggest bet,” the investment with the largest potential returns, is the creation and operation of a new center for Jewish day school educators. As Theodor Herzl once said, “If you will it, it is no dream.” I believe the time has come to dream and to dream big.