Inside Jewish Day Schools: Leadership, Learning, and Community

By Alex Pomson and Jack Wertheimer

A perfect guide to those wishing to understand the contemporary Jewish day school.
 
This book takes readers inside Jewish day schools to observe what happens day to day, as well as what the schools mean to their students, families, and communities. Many different types of Jewish day schools exist, and the variations are not well understood, nor is much information available about how day schools function. Inside Jewish Day Schools proves a vital guide to understanding both these distinctions and the everyday operations of these contemporary schools.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brandeis University Press
• Release date: Jan 12, 2022
• ISBN: 9781684580712

Book preview

The Mandel-Brandeis Series in Jewish Education

Sharon Feiman-Nemser, Jonathan Krasner, and Jon A. Levisohn, Editors

The Mandel-Brandeis Series in Jewish Education, established by the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Studies in Jewish Education, publishes scholarly monographs and edited volumes of compelling research on Jewish educational settings and processes. The series is made possible through the Mandel Foundation.

For a complete list of books that are available in the series, visit brandeisuniversitypress.com

Alex Pomson and Jack Wertheimer

Inside Jewish Day Schools: Leadership, Learning, and Community

Inside JEWISH DAY SCHOOLS

Leadership, Learning, and Community

ALEX POMSON AND JACK WERTHEIMER

BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY PRESS

WALTHAM, MASSACHUSETTS

Brandeis University Press

© 2022 by Alex Pomson and Jack Wertheimer

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Designed by Eric M. Brooks

Typeset in Calluna by Passumpsic Publishing

For permission to reproduce any of the material in this book, contact Brandeis University Press, 415 South Street, Waltham MA 02453, or visit brandeisuniversitypress.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

NAMES: Pomson, Alex, author. | Wertheimer, Jack, author.

TITLE: Inside Jewish day schools: leadership, learning, and community/Alex Pomson and Jack Wertheimer.

DESCRIPTION: First Edition. | Waltham, Massachusetts: Brandeis University Press, [2022] | Series: The Mandel-Brandeis Series in Jewish Education/Sharon Feiman-Nemser, Jonathan Krasner, and Jon A. Levisohn, editors | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: This book takes readers inside Jewish day schools to observe what they actually do. Many different types of Jewish day schools exist, and the variations are not well understood. Nor is much information available about how day schools function. This volume is conceived as a guide to those wishing to understand the contemporary Jewish day school—Provided by publisher.

IDENTIFIERS: LCCN 2021033869 (print) | LCCN 2021033870 (ebook) | ISBN 9781684580699 (Cloth) | ISBN 9781684580705 (Paperback) | ISBN 9781684580712 (eBook)

SUBJECTS: LCSH: Jewish day schools.

CLASSIFICATION: LCC LC715 .P66 2022 (print) | LCC LC715 (ebook) | DDC 371.076—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021033869

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021033870

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Contents

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION. Inside the Black Box

PART I. Lower and Middle Schools

1. Progressively Maintaining the Middle: Hillel Torah Day School, Skokie, Illinois

2. A Forward-Looking Community School: Hillel Day School, Detroit, Michigan

3. The School as a Gateway: Brandeis Marin, San Rafael, California

4. Nurturing Students’ Reflectiveness and Wellness: The Pressman Academy, Los Angeles, California

5. Doing More with Less: Akiva School, Nashville, Tennessee

PART II. High Schools

6. Recentering the Centrist Orthodox Day School: Rav Teitz Mesivta Academy, Elizabeth, New Jersey

7. It’s All in a Name: The Anne & Max Tanenbaum Community Hebrew Academy of Toronto, Toronto, Canada

PART III. K–12 Schools

8. How a Day School Transforms Itself: Hebrew Academy (RASG), Miami Beach, Florida

9. The Yeshiva as Teiva (Ark): Yeshiva Darchei Torah, Far Rockaway, New York

CONCLUSION. Vital Jewish Day Schools

Appendix: Day School Sectors by the Numbers

Glossary

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

We acknowledge with appreciation the advice and encouragement graciously offered by a number of individuals. Over the years, Mem Bernstein and Arthur Fried have displayed their confidence in the value of our research and writing in numerous ways. We, like so many others, have been recipients of their gracious support and thoughtful advice. At the inception of this project, Yossi Prager proved himself an advocate of our work and also a trusted critical reader. Before choosing our nine schools, we conferred with a number of well-placed connoisseurs of day school education, some working in schools and others at foundations with a strong interest in Jewish education. Their guidance steered us well and stimulated our thinking. We thank Rachel Abrahams, Jonathan Cannon, Sharon Freundel, Moshe Krakowski, Ilisa Cappell, and Tali Aldouby Schuck. Wendy Rosov and the team at Rosov Consulting supported this project from its inception. Wendy was an incisive thought partner and strong advocate for the work from beginning to end. Pearl Mattenson read, and helped improve, first drafts of most of the chapters. As readers of an early draft of this book, Jane Taubenfeld Cohen and Elliott Rabin offered clear-eyed and constructive feedback and suggestions, which helped us improve our manuscript. Neal Kozodoy helped us reshape the Introduction. Special thanks to Sharon Feiman-Nemser for her trenchant response to the book manuscript and also to Jon Levisohn and Jonathan Krasner, her coeditors of the Brandeis University Press series on Jewish Education.

Our greatest debt is to the heads of school, board members, administrators, teachers, students, and community supporters of the nine schools in our sample. Their warm hospitality, openness to our many inquiries, and special efforts to accommodate our schedules transformed the process of our gathering information about their schools into a joyful and often eye-opening experience. Their generosity in opening their schools’ doors has provided us, and our readers, with an unusually deep view into the universe of Jewish day school education at the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century.

Introduction

Inside the Black Box

Jewish day schools have sparked a good deal of controversy virtually since their inception. Though they differ from one another in important ways, they share the commonality of being all-day educational settings, which, with a few exceptions, enroll only Jewish students—and that exclusiveness has spurred a good deal of debate. To some observers, including one of the most prominent Jewish educators during the first half of the twentieth century, such schools insulate their students from their gentile peers: What we want in this country is not Jews who can successfully keep up their Jewishness in a few large ghettos, wrote Samson Benderly in 1908, but men and women who have grown up in freedom and can assert themselves wherever they are. A parochial system of education among the Jews would be fatal to such hopes.¹ As late as 1954, when Commentary magazine published a positive appraisal of the then-expanding day school movement, a shocked reader wrote that such an education makes for arrogance and creates a lack of genuine understanding of the differences among people, fostering instead a spirit of exclusiveness and snobbishness.² More recently, the journalist Peter Beinart wondered whether earlier generations were correct—that full equality in an overwhelmingly Christian country is, in fact, reliant on Jewish willingness to participate in a common system of education?³

Yet for others, Jewish day schools serve as unparalleled settings for immersive and intensive Jewish education. Jewish day schools, wrote one champion of such schools, offer students access to Judaism’s unique tools for human thriving—and Jewish tradition has some powerful tools.⁴ Nor does that immersion in Jewish study come at the expense of other commitments to the general well-being of society, proponents of day schools contend. They once called us segregationists, un-American, East European, wrote the head of an Orthodox movement that is the largest single promoter of day schools. But now the day school has proved itself. The community has seen that its graduates do not necessarily become rabbis or fiddlers on the roof, but are doctors, lawyers, and space scientists who also happen to be conscious and proud of their identity as Jews. A national consultative body studying Jewish education concluded its work in the early 1990s by depicting Jewish day schools as "arguably the most impactful [sic] single weapon in our arsenal for educating Jewish children and youth."⁵

Though such debates have persisted since the establishment of the first day schools in America, they have become more restrained in recent years, perhaps because day schools have proven their mettle. But many parents and also Jewish communal leaders have raised other concerns. Some parents worry privately that their children would be disadvantaged if they attended a Jewish day school. They fear that these schools can’t possibly provide the most rigorous academic opportunities available at many independent schools and some of the best public schools. They simply lack the resources, including the funds to hire the best teachers—or so some believe. Nor, it is claimed by others, can Jewish day schools offer the vast range of extracurricular options—clubs, sports teams, art, music and dance programs—available in other types of schools. Will our children be shortchanged? they wonder. Not surprisingly, given the intense preoccupation with getting their children into the most prestigious universities and colleges, parents also worry whether Jewish day schools, especially high schools, serve as effective launch pads to gain admission to the best-regarded institutions of higher learning.

An additional concern focuses on the dual curriculum offered by Jewish day schools: Will attention to two very different types of study lead to a dilution of both? Every kind of day school offers some Judaica instruction; many also devote school time to prayer. In some schools, half the day or more is devoted to Judaics; in many others, between 10 and 40 percent of class time is set aside for engagement with Jewish texts and culture. How, parents wonder, can such an arrangement possibly compete with a school offering only general studies?

Not least, parents are concerned about the value proposition: the average cost of tuition in Jewish day schools is nearly $23,000 annually per child.⁶ Some of the most expensive schools, mainly in New York City and Los Angeles, charge twice that sum or more. Not for nothing do some parents committed to a day school education refer, only half in jest, to day school tuition as a highly effective form of birth control. Even upper-middle-class families with school-aged children may have to defer family trips and the purchase of luxury goods if they are to meet the steep costs. Naturally, they ask themselves whether the outlay is worth it. What are they getting for the steep tuition fees?

These questions have implications not only for individual families making decisions about where to enroll their children; they also have large implications for Jewish communal life. This is because day schools offer an unparalleled Jewish education to young people: no other educational vehicles can match day schools as providers of skills and content learning in Jewish studies. Day schools therefore serve a critical role in preparing the next generation of Jewish leaders and active participants. When it comes to debates about the best means by which Jewish individuals and Jewish communities might flourish, some of the fiercest disagreements are centered on the potential contribution of day schools.

To understand Jewish day schools and address the issues thus far posed requires a perspective grounded in real schools, not abstractions. Simply put, without understanding how these schools function—what the school day is like and how students spend their time—it’s difficult to evaluate their value and impact. Accordingly, this book takes readers inside Jewish day schools to observe what they actually do. It will become apparent immediately that many different types of Jewish day schools exist. Those variations are not well understood. Nor is much information available about how day schools function. As one of us put it in a different context, The Jewish day school remains a black box, what happens inside hidden from view.⁷ Even alumni who graduated fifteen or more years ago have little knowledge of what actually happens in day schools currently (unless they enroll their own children).

The operative term here is currently. Most Jewish day schools go about their business today in radically different ways than they did even a generation ago. They think about learners very differently, they relate to students differently, and they bring different types of resources to bear as they work to educate students and their parents.

This book therefore is conceived as a guide to those wishing to understand the contemporary Jewish day school. It informs readers about how styles of pedagogy have shifted dramatically in both general and Jewish studies. It examines where new technologies, including digital learning platforms, are present in these schools—and where they are not. It attends to the resources brought to bear when schools seek to guide the social and emotional development of students. It explains how Jewish studies function: what is taught, how the curriculum has shifted, and how schools find ways to integrate material from Jewish and general studies. And it makes evident how these schools provide a range of extracurricular options to help students demonstrate their talents in sports, the arts, Jewish self-expression, and caring for others.

Capturing twenty-first-century Jewish day schools in action, then, is one goal of this book. A second goal is to identify important challenges facing these schools—and how they respond to those challenges. In doing so, our purpose is neither to portray Jewish schools as overwhelmed by difficult realities nor to idealize how superlatively schools have mastered all the challenges they face. No school is perfect, and none we examine in this book has figured out how to address all of its challenges flawlessly. Rather, this book portrays how a sample of imperfect yet well-managed schools address issues that tend to beset many other Jewish day schools. In this sense, the book speaks to educators interested in learning about other day schools and to members of school boards and other stakeholders seeking to place their own school into a wider context.

Even as our primary focus is on what happens inside Jewish day schools, every school we studied has a profound impact on the lives of people it touches. Jewish day schools shape students, their families, and their communities. To be sure, we have only limited information on the long-term influence of such schools on the adult lives of their alumni,⁸ but we have learned about their immediate impact as reflected in the behavior of students toward one another, family conversations, and the place of the school in the Jewish lives of parents. Every school also plays a social role, both as a setting where parents meet and befriend peers and as an institution making an impact on its local Jewish community. Every school is embedded in a wider communal context and helps shape its local environment.

The Jewish Day School Sectors

Why were these schools established in the first place? A brief historical overview is in order. Though a handful of Jewish day schools existed in the nineteenth century, the movement to establish such schools, especially on the high school level, is a phenomenon of the decades since World War II. During the war years, the organization Torah U’mesorah was founded with the explicit aim of planting Orthodox Jewish day schools in every American city with a critical enough mass of Jews. Initially the goal of these schools was to serve as a fortress or bulwark against the ravages of assimilation. Some came to regard them as institutions for training a Jewish elite who would serve as the future leaders of the community. But in time, Orthodox schools saw their mission as ensuring the continuity of Jewish life and culture.

Several distinctive school sectors emerged in the Orthodox world, with a key demarcation based on how general studies and, more broadly, contemporary American culture was perceived. In the Haredi sectors, sometimes called the ultra or right-wing Orthodox, the mores and cultural outlook of modern societies were regarded as a threat to Jewish life. Hasidic schools, founded by various sects tracing their origin to late eighteenth-century Eastern Europe, conduct most of their classes in Yiddish or a variation of what some have called Yinglish—Yiddish with sprinklings of English words. Most of the school day is devoted in Hasidic schools to the study of Jewish texts. Boys and girls are educated in separate buildings, usually at some geographic distance from each other, and the two genders are exposed to different Judaica curricula. Yeshiva schools (whose participants are referred to as Yeshivish) are organized similarly, though they tend to be somewhat more open to incorporating general studies into the school day; their language of instruction is English heavily laced with Hebrew, Aramaic, and Yiddish terms, and they are more open to their students going on to higher education, provided it takes place at carefully selected colleges or night schools. By contrast, Modern Orthodox schools tend to be coed, even if many separate boys and girls during Jewish studies classes. They intentionally prepare students to function in the broader society, with the result that virtually all go on to attend schools of higher education, including graduate schools. An intermediate grouping of Centrist schools provide strong general studies classes but educate boys and girls separately and urge graduates to choose colleges with large populations of other Orthodox Jews and preferably continue to live at home.

The postwar era saw the creation of non-Orthodox day schools. Arriving on the scene later than their Orthodox counterparts, schools under Conservative auspices (usually called Solomon Schechter day schools to honor the leader who placed his impress on the Jewish Theological Seminary and the Conservative movement), and then in considerably fewer numbers schools under Reform auspices, opened their doors during the second half of the twentieth century. Both types of schools are coed, seek to deliver a rigorous Jewish and general studies academic course of study, aim to compete with the best of American public and private schools, and are guided by the ideology of their religious movements. They were joined by community day schools unaffiliated with one of the streams of Judaism and generally aspiring to offer a pluralistic education respectful of all varieties, including secular Jewish identification. In recent years, community day schools have overtaken the combined Conservative and Reform sectors numerically. Once perceived as settings solely for the minority of Jews who identified as Orthodox, Jewish day schools came to be understood during the last quarter of the twentieth century as a viable option for Jews of all types.

If, as appears likely, roughly two hundred day schools had been established throughout North America as of 1960, by the second decade of the twenty-first century, close to one thousand all-day Jewish schools dotted the combined U.S. and Canadian landscapes.⁹ According to the most recent national census of Jewish day schools in the United States, 906 operated in the 2018–19 school year, and collectively they enrolled some 292,172 students from early childhood through high school programs.¹⁰ Canada’s roughly 57 Jewish day schools and yeshivas enrolled slightly fewer than 18,000 students in the 2018–19 school year. Collectively, in the recent past, Canadian day schools enrolled 43 percent of Jewish school-aged children for at least nine years, twice the proportion as in the United States.¹¹ In both countries, then, in any given year, roughly half of school-age Jewish children receiving a formal Jewish education are enrolled in a day school. (Since students in various part-time settings tend to be enrolled for fewer years than their day school peers, overall the majority of young non-Orthodox children still are enrolled in a supplementary program, receive private tutoring, or are exposed to no Jewish education.)¹²

Some explanation of this dramatic expansion is in order. In Orthodox circles, enrolling children in Jewish day schools became de rigueur by the fourth quarter of the past century. Modern Orthodox Jews embraced day school education as a necessity during the postwar decades. They were concerned about ensuring their children would attain high levels of Jewish literacy, wary of powerful assimilatory forces in society at large and convinced that day schools would prepare their offspring for full participation in civic, economic, and cultural life of their North American communities while also providing the tools for them to engage actively in Jewish life. For those living in more insular Orthodox enclaves, day schools were an integral part of the landscape into which they aspired to socialize their children. And indeed, the largest growth in schools and student populations has been in the Hasidic and yeshiva sectors—those most focused on Jewish textual studies and skeptical of the value and impact of general studies.

For parents outside the Orthodox camp, day schools have held the allure of offering their children a grounding in Judaica, along with general studies. Added to this, schools under Conservative, Reform, and communal auspices became more attractive options during busing experiments in public schools, when parents concluded that public education in some localities was inferior, when independent school options were deemed viable, and when affluence encouraged some parents to give day schools a second look. Some Jewish subpopulations also have been drawn by particular qualities of non-Orthodox day schools; for example, Israelis in the United States appreciate the Hebrew language and Israel studies offerings of day schools; some secular Jews want their children to learn about their Jewish cultural heritage; parents of different denominational outlooks value the exposure of their children to the range of Jews and Jewish expression on display in pluralistic day schools; and not least, some parents are attracted by the warm atmosphere, attention devoted to each student, and wholesome environment that day schools provide.

Setting Priorities

As they shape their educational environment, day schools are faced with a host of difficult choices, as will be made amply clear in every chapter of this book. Like most other schools, they must grapple with limitations of time, resources, and personnel. How, for example, might the finite number of precious hours with students best be spent: in classrooms, assemblies, informal school settings, or outside the school building? Given constrained financial resources, how should a day school balance its investments in new technologies, curricula, staff positions, plant facilities, and scholarships for students? And as many schools struggle with high personnel costs, should they prioritize the hiring of mission-appropriate teachers or import shlichim (emissaries) who bring a touch of Israel and the Hebrew language to the school, both of which may prove costly?

Jewish day schools, moreover, encounter additional dilemmas. Many schools conceive of their mission as addressing not only the needs of their own students but also those of the wider Jewish community. Ideally, they endeavor to aid every family wishing to enroll children, regardless of financial circumstances. That, of course, places great burdens on schools to raise scholarship funds. It also requires balancing the school’s communal mission to enroll students regardless of their academic abilities and their aspiration to serve as elite academic institutions. To accomplish the latter aim, they will have to admit students selectively and limit enrollment to only the most talented students. Similar difficult questions arise concerning the inclusion of students with learning or emotional disabilities. Especially in the current environment when parents expect schools to pay close attention to their children’s academic achievement, emotional well-being, and social skills, schools, as we shall see, now must address concerns that barely registered a few decades ago.

Fulfilling their religious mission also poses dilemmas for day schools. Some schools are pressed to exclude families whose levels of Jewish religious practice do not conform to the stated ideology of the school community. In Orthodox schools, some parents lobby to have their children placed in classes with schoolmates whose religious observances at home are identical to their own. They seek as much religious homogeneity as possible. But that excludes students who may be brought closer to observance through their exposure to the school’s teachings, certainly another religious mission some schools set for themselves. In community day schools, by contrast, some parents chafe under school policies regarding Jewish observances, such as limiting lunch food brought to school by children to items with kosher certification and insisting that birthday parties may not be held on Shabbat, the Jewish Sabbath. A school’s infringement on family practices may be deeply resented. How to navigate religious differences is a source of perennial tension in many day schools.

This raises an additional concern: Will classes teach about Jewish religious practices prescriptively or descriptively? Valuing their autonomy and fearful of day schools turning their children into religious fanatics, some parents fret that a day school education will border on indoctrination. Parents may worry that their children will become too Jewish or make demands on parents to incorporate more Jewish rituals into home practices. Some fear that their children will judge their own levels of Jewishness as inadequate. As they work to allay those concerns, schools struggle not to adopt a completely neutral stance toward Jewish living, for if they do, what message does that deliver to students about the mission of the school?

In a further challenge, day schools also contend with tough questions about the content and delivery of their general and Jewish education. More than in the past, parents expect day schools to offer high-level academics in general studies. They do not want their children shortchanged. Schools, as we will see, are investing heavily in cutting-edge curricula for STEAM classes (in science, technology, engineering, art, and math) and language arts, and the hiring of high-quality teachers in those fields. They are opening robotics labs and makerspaces (a place in schools where students develop creative projects, often collaboratively, using tools and materials physically and virtually available to them) for children to learn how to translate their learning into handcrafted material objects. Schools are mindful of diverse learning styles, and they invest in ways for different kinds of learners to absorb material and give expression to what they have learned. Introducing new educational methods incurs heavy costs to purchase new online curricula and pay for continuing education for the teaching staff. Choosing which disciplines to upgrade first often becomes a juggling act because budgets are limited.

Jewish studies subject matter poses its own set of challenges. Traditional religious instruction was not learner centered. Teachers served as the sage on the stage, systematically uncovering layers of meaning in sacred texts. In more advanced settings, students studied together in pairs (Hevruta), thus taking some ownership of their learning. With day schools having embraced more progressive pedagogies over the past few decades, schools must decide whether to convey material in one fashion during general studies classes and a completely different style in Jewish studies classes. In the former, problem-based learning and design thinking are gaining ground, as is blended (or technologically assisted) learning. Students are encouraged to discover answers at their own pace. In Jewish studies classes, even the most fervent supporters of new methods among parents may be uneasy about abandoning centuries-old study methods. And even when the decision is made to teach Judaic materials differently, online resources are not nearly as advanced or available as for general studies courses. Moreover, Jewish studies teachers who themselves were educated using the older methods may resist embracing new approaches. When and how to revamp Jewish studies pose dilemmas for schools.

Finally, the teaching of Hebrew language perennially raises challenges. Because the language has evolved over the long course of Jewish history, modern Israeli Hebrew is a vastly different language from the tongue spoken during the biblical era or the Middle Ages. The study of Jewish sacred texts requires familiarity with earlier registers of Hebrew, while reading and speaking modern Israeli Hebrew is an entirely different enterprise. Deciding on which register to emphasize is still another challenge day schools face, one made even more complex because those who seem best suited to teach sacred texts may have little competence to teach modern Hebrew. Should a school hire a separate teaching staff for modern Hebrew as opposed to the Hebrew of sacred texts? Many schools do precisely that, a decision that incurs heavy financial costs.

All of the schools included in this book are faced with the range of challenges outlined here. How they resolve these questions varies considerably and makes for the distinctive culture of each school.

The School Sample

Several considerations went into the process of assembling the nine-school sample highlighted in this book. We endeavored to include schools that have not been the subject of much study by others and eschewed the usual suspects in favor of lesser-known but also strong schools. Geography too was an important consideration. Our nine schools are scattered in different parts of North America: two are in the Greater New York area, though outside the city, where the largest concentration of Jewish day schools is found. Another two are in the Midwest; two are in the South; two are on the West Coast; and one is in Canada. They also differ considerably in the size of their enrollments, with one school enrolling fewer than one hundred students, while the largest educates almost twenty-five hundred students. A deliberate decision was made to include a day school that alone serves the Jewish population in its city, even as others are located in areas where they face stiff competition from neighboring Jewish day schools. As readers will note, some schools offer only elementary and middle school grades, if that; others are K–12; and a few others are stand-alone high schools.

Our nine schools were selected too with an eye to providing a broad representation of the ideological spectrum. Only one of our nine schools can be classified as Haredi, although more than half of all students enrolled in all-day Jewish schools are in Hasidic or yeshiva schools. Access to Hasidic and Yeshivish schools is a major impediment facing observers of Jewish education: such schools tend to be wary of outsiders and not to value the work of academic researchers. At a different end of the spectrum, we chose not to include a school under Reform auspices because there are only eleven and they are similar to many community day schools. The different permutations of modern and Centrist Orthodoxy are represented by three schools. One of our schools is a Solomon Schechter lower and middle school, and four are pluralistic community schools.

We are acutely aware that day schools, like schools in general, are not static. During the writing of this book, two heads of schools we studied departed, as have an even greater number of administrators and teachers. Since then, schools have continued to evolve in their programming. As this book neared completion, the coronavirus epidemic of 2020 hit, forcing schools to shift classes online and limit in-person learning. The portraits we present are snapshots in time that date to the period between spring 2018 and fall 2019. Yet even as the nine schools we studied evolve in response to new circumstances, the trends we trace have not changed dramatically, and most of the challenges we observed still shape the schools. (At the end of the concluding chapter, we briefly take stock of how the nine schools in our sample fared during the first seven months of the COVID-19 crisis and how directly their responses reflected changes in their approaches during the years prior to the crisis and their distinctive cultures.)

As to our method of research, both of us visited all nine schools, typically at different times of the year and separately. The lead author of a chapter spent more time in the school, usually for five days, while the secondary author was present for two or three days. During those visits, we made sure to spend a day shadowing the head of school and a day shadowing a group of students from one of the oldest grades; these provided rich opportunities to gain a sense of the school’s leadership, learning cultures, and rhythm. Where possible, we joined students for Tefila, prayer services. We spent a good deal of time in classrooms observing teaching styles and interactions between students and studying how teachers approached pedagogy. Occasionally we had opportunities to observe students in the course of special events, such as ceremonies and performances. We interviewed the full range of individuals who inhabit the schools and shape their policy: students, teachers, administrators, board members, and parents. In some cases, our trips coincided with board meetings or student recruitment programs, which our hosts generously permitted us to observe. We spoke with alumni too. In every case, we interviewed community leaders, such as professionals at federations of Jewish philanthropy (which offer some financial support to day schools), and local rabbis whose congregants enroll their children in the day school we were studying at the time.

Inspired by the pioneering work of Sarah Lawrence Lightfoot, whose book The Good High School serves as a model of insightful school research, we too have opted to name schools (in every case with permission); we have endeavored to present portraits of schools and also to draw conclusions about the critical building blocks they have assembled to offer a good day school education. Like Lightfoot, we chose our schools seeking out goodness, not perfection. Also, like her, our selection was not scientific. No random sample was taken, no large-scale opinion surveys were sent out in order to identify good schools. They were chosen because of their reputation among school people, the high opinion of them shared by their inhabitants and surrounding communities, and because they offered easy and generous entry.¹³

Though it is impossible to find schools with an orientation representative of all Jewish day schools of their sector, the portraits presented in this book touch on many of the most pressing challenges day schools face. Our examination of how these schools go about their work, the voices included in our chapters, and the stories we tell about the people we met—students, teachers, administrators, board members, and communal observers—are designed to present Jewish day schools in the round, as living, evolving organisms. Collectively, our portraits of these schools also provide answers, even if only indirectly, to the questions posed at the outset of this Introduction that are on the minds of parents, educators, and other stakeholders.

How This Book Is Organized and May Be Read

Our approach to gathering data and then writing each of the chapters in this book has been akin to the various ways one might approach a jigsaw puzzle. Sometimes it is easier to start with a corner piece, sometimes with a line of pieces from along a puzzle’s border, and sometimes with a set of particularly striking pieces somewhere in the middle of the puzzle.

It was hard to predict in advance the most useful way to pick up the trail of a school’s story. When we started our work, we presented a consistent wish list to all of the schools, including the types of personnel we sought to interview and the kinds of settings we wanted to observe. Although we were drawn to these schools because they were well known for some feature or another, typically we did not know ahead of time what would prove to be of a special interest at a school. In each case, the narrative hook was quite distinct. For example, at Brandeis Marin, a lower and middle school in the Bay Area, it was the head of school’s educational vision for how day school education can prove compelling for a very wide range of Jewish and non-Jewish families. At Hillel Torah, a K–8 school in Skokie, Illinois, it was how the school’s leaders had enabled the fusion of cutting-edge educational practices with the core curriculum tasks of a Modern Orthodox day school. At the Rav Teitz Mesivta, it was the work involved in turning around a long-established high school and enthusing a skeptical faculty to embrace a child-centered vision for the yeshiva day school, while constrained by acute financial challenges.

Reflecting these different foci, each chapter starts and finishes in different and distinct places. None follows a single tick-the-box template. Each chapter has its own unique trajectory. To help orient readers and draw out some initial comparative analyses, each chapter concludes with pointed observations about connections and exceptions: the commonalities shared by some of the schools and where schools find themselves in unusual circumstances and chart their own unique approaches.

In the final chapter, we draw together what we believe this collection of studies reveals about day schools as a whole. The Conclusion reflects on the roles the schools play in the lives of students, families, and communities and on what we perceive to be the common keys to performing these roles well.

Readers need not necessarily read the following chapters in their order of appearance. Some might find it enlightening to read the chapters along a denominational/ideological continuum, starting, say, with Yeshiva Darchei Torah, a New York area, male-only institution, the most traditionalist school in the sample, and ending with Brandeis Marin, a progressive community day school on the West Coast with a small minority of non-Jewish students. If school size is of special interest, then it would pay to start with Nashville’s Akiva Academy, the only day school in its community, and with fewer than eighty students in kindergarten through sixth grade. At the opposite extreme is TanenbaumCHAT, a high school located in a competitive day school marketplace and boasting over one thousand students.

We have chosen to organize the chapters according to the grade level schools serve. The first section of the book gathers the accounts of five K–8 or K–6 institutions. The next section presents examples of Jewish day high schools. Finally, there are two chapters about schools that run from