Jewish education does not lack philanthropic investment. Yet for all the money that flows into Jewish schools, it seems to me that one area experiences chronic underinvestment: teachers. 

Over the last few decades, I have seen investments in beautiful facilities, in subsidies to address affordability, in well-compensated and highly professional senior administrators and heads of school as well as investments in institutional development and fundraising. There has also been an explosion of consultants and third-party service providers hired to help educational institutions achieve these ends. Direct investment in the primary point of education, however — the classroom teacher who interacts most frequently with the students and facilitates learning — has not kept pace with other investments in Jewish education. To be fair, there have certainly been indirect investments in teachers, through organizations and conferences meant to create curricula and train teachers in one discipline or another favored by particular philanthropic interests, but there has not been significant investment in the salaries and overall role of the teacher who directly faces young learners for most of the day in school. 

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The teacher of today, like the teacher of 30 years ago, earns a wage that fails to provide a comfortable life in the Jewish community. I would argue that this is among the primary reasons that, despite Jewish day schools offering very expensive programs overall, we have not actually improved student learning outcomes. 

I would like to describe a scenario that is very familiar to me and, I would guess, other Jewish day school principals and heads of school: 

There is a very talented young Judaics teacher on staff, one with exceptional skills in the classroom; a teacher who has that rare ability to combine compelling communication with a well-structured curriculum that scaffolds student learning to solid benchmarks. Everything is great for a few years, until the teacher realizes that she is unable to afford life on a teacher’s salary. As principal, you’ve stretched your budget for a teacher as far as it can go, but you have money for administrative roles that can bolster the teacher’s salary. You have a program coordinator role here, a grade supervisor role there, so you offer the teacher these roles knowing she will be good at them — but also wanting to keep her in the classroom. Underneath this move, however, you know what you have set in motion: A cascading series of incentives that pull talented young Jewish teachers out of the classroom and place them into administrative roles. Pretty soon, your young talented teacher will realize that her efforts and energy are best invested in showing the school that she is as talented an administrator as she is a teacher, because that’s where there’s room for financial growth; that’s where she can earn a salary that allows her to stay in education and still afford life in the Jewish community. 

There is a structural value for Jewish education embedded in this scenario that warrants discussion among those who support the enterprise. Schools invest money in well-planned and executed Shabbatons, student activities, trips and experiences that have great value in the development of Jewish identity and, in many cases, help students form their strongest connections to Judaism. Let’s call these “informal” learning experiences, as there is often little formal measurement of learning in these programs but a good deal of anecdotal feedback about the power and impact of these experiences. 

“Formal” learning is a process that seeks to develop student skills by structuring a plan for learning and evaluation aimed at measuring improved cognitive capacities that serve student growth toward specific goals. In Jewish day schools, these goals can range from securing and succeeding on an elite post high school path to being a well-informed and devoted Jewish practitioner and ongoing learner. The challenge schools face is that formal learning only fully succeeds for the minority of students who can achieve mastery within the given timeframes. 

I have been in fundraising meetings where some version of the following pitch is made: “Help us support this or that Jewish experience for our students because, when interviewed at graduation, our students overwhelmingly express that this was the most impactful part of their time in our school.” It is more difficult to make the same pitch for that rigorous classroom teacher who transformed the way some students learn and think through Tanach or Talmud. It’s not that those teachers and students don’t exist; it’s just that they are not the majority. The return on philanthropic investment in schools is (seemingly) significantly greater in areas that involve informal learning experiences. 

If we want to increase the ROI on formal learning, we need teachers who are agile, creative professionals willing to extend their work beyond the school schedule and the artificial limitations of the traditional system of period-based classes that must conclude before summer vacations. 

Investing in this type of learning would require reimagining the professional role of the teacher in both scope and salary. Going back to our aforementioned scenario, let’s imagine that the talented teacher seeking to increase her earnings could receive bonus compensation based on the number of students who achieve mastery, regardless of whether it is during a time designated on the daily schedule or after a certain date on the school calendar. A system like this would emphasize the value of the teacher-student interaction and reinforce the process of formal learning as the primary function of a school.

Instead of tackling this challenge, we accept that the formal learning system has reached its limits. Schools expect they will only fully succeed in formal learning for the 20% or so of students who can master their learning within the given constraints; the remaining 80% make their way through their school years with varying degrees of success in their formal learning, before they emerge into a world where their opportunities for success will be far less limited. Accepting this distribution as a given, schools invest around the formal learning component to build a robust informal program and social environment for all students so as to offer them a strong sense of belonging and community despite their inability, in the main, to master their learning. 

Perhaps this is not a purely Jewish phenomenon. The chart above highlights the growth of district administrators vs. teachers and students in the U.S. public school system. I am not aware of any similar measurements in the Jewish day school system — certainly none that also look at the money invested in the partial administrative roles among teachers. But, if I had to guess, we are part of a larger trend that prioritizes high quality school leadership and excellent school experiences, but fails to offer any significant changes in formal learning outcomes for most students. 

What I want to put forward for consideration is whether we want the approach we have taken. Do we want a Jewish day school system that is designed to push our most talented teachers to become administrators? Are we satisfied with a structure that settles for mediocre formal learning outcomes for most students even as we build them an excellent informal learning experience? Perhaps it is time to experiment with new models — maybe schools that focus almost exclusively on formal learning by investing greatly in teachers and minimally in administrators and programming — and see those results. And if we do not make additional investments in formal learning, why are we still sticking all our students in classrooms from 8 a.m. until 5 or 6 p.m.? Maybe we should wrap up formal learning at 2 or 3 p.m. and have hours of Jewish-centered informal learning programs after school, similar to what is done in Israel. 

We are at a pivotal moment in North American Jewish education, one when we can acknowledge what has or has not been working in the system. Considering these questions will, I hope, help us determine the direction Jewish education will take in the coming decades — ideally in a way that transparently reflects our philanthropic priorities. 

Hillel David Rapp is the principal of Bnei Akiva Schools of Toronto. He writes frequently on Jewish education at JED Notebook, which can be found at hillelrapp.substack.com