Good Friday morning!

The Orthodox Union’s school advocacy arm, Teach Coalition, is seeking a $150 per pupil increase in transportation funding from the state of New Jersey in fiscal year 2022, Dan Mitzner, Teach Coalition’s director of state political affairs, told eJewishPhilanthropy. The budget must be passed by July 1.

The formula by which the state calculates how much it will give to nonpublic schools for busing was set in 2003, which means parents and schools have had to absorb rising costs since then, Mitzner said. In partnership with such allies as the New Jersey Catholic Conference, the coalition is asking for $1,150 per student.

“We know it’s an aggressive number, but funding has been frozen for years,” Mitzner said.

Teach Coalition represents 150,000 non-public school students in New Jersey and also works in California, Florida, New York and Pennsylvania.

Teach Coalition is also asking for an increase of $10 per student to offset pandemic-related expenses such as equipment used to create remote learning systems. Gov. Phil Murphy’s proposed budget maintains last year’s funding level for technology in nonpublic schools at $36 per student.

The budget includes an increase of $10 per pupil, to $112 from $102, for nursing in non-public schools, Mitzner said.

The Jewish Federation of Northern New Jersey has called for an end to attacks on an elementary school student who wrote an essay from the perspective of Adolf Hitler to fulfill an assignment from a Jewish teacher. “Social media has sadly played a very negative role in this situation,” the federation wrote on its Facebook page. “We are aware that the surge in anti-Semitism in the country is troubling and unacceptable, but the vitriol surrounding this incident has been misplaced.”

LEARNING TO COUNT

Researchers arrive at a first-ever estimate of Jewish educators

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There were more than 72,000 Jewish educators working in the United States in 2019, according to a new study from the Collaborative for Applied Studies in Jewish Education (CASJE) that aims to better understand and support the Jewish educational workforce. The study’s authors and backers told eJewishPhilanthropy’s Helen Chernikoff that this research is the first of its kind. 

Drawing a baseline: “Any mature and specific field needs a knowledge base for policy makers and funders to make decisions, respond to needs and take advantage of opportunities,” said Stacie Cherner, director of learning and evaluation at the Jim Joseph Foundation, which funded the research for the report, along with the William Davidson Foundation. Researchers have in the past counted Jewish day school and yeshiva teachers, as in the Educators in Jewish Schools Study of 2006 by the Jewish Education Center of North America, said Arielle Levites, CASJE’s managing director. 

A new definition: This study uses a much broader definition of “educator”: Someone who educates or “engages” in a Jewish setting, regardless of the subject taught or whether the educator identifies as Jewish. This includes full-time, part-time and seasonal workers, but no pulpit rabbis, people who work solely in operations or administration or those who have a non-educational expertise, such as school psychologist or therapist. The study counted educators not only in schools but also in camps, supplementary schools, preschools, youth groups, museums, adult education programs, college campus organizations, afterschool programs and family engagement or social justice organizations.

Outside the classroom: Engagement programs might include work with adults or families, and their inclusion reflects the researchers’ aspiration to look beyond formal school settings to include other educational experiences, such as those that happen at Moishe House, a global network of housing for young Jewish adults, or OneTable, which facilitates Shabbat meals, Levites said. The census is the first of a four-part series of papers exploring Jewish educators’ career trajectories, to be released starting in July, Levites said. “The most important factor in a student’s success is the teacher,” she said. “We need to know how to support their development, how we recruit them, how we prepare them. All of that matters.”    

Read the full story here.

Dull is good

The Jews in the Pew: What the 2021 Pew report tells us about modern identity

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“Will we learn more if we actually observe how Jews live their lives instead of asking them about it?,” asks Andrés Spokoiny, president and CEO of Jewish Funders Network, in an opinion piece for eJewishPhilanthropy.

Pew two: “No bombshells, no surprises, no Jewish leaders pulling their hair and crying ‘gevalt.’ The Jewish population is growing at the same pace as the general population, and levels of affiliation are fairly stable. Dull. But dull is good!”

Remaining neutral: “Good demographers, and especially the world-class professionals of Pew show data; they don’t offer prescriptions or judgment. Data, like a Jewish text, can be interpreted in many ways, and all sorts of hidden messages can be extracted from it through the hermeneutics of experience and comparison with the reality that communal professionals observe in our daily life.”

Being cautious: “[A] word of caution and a suggestion for demographers and sociologists: All the tools we use to study Jews — surveys and questionnaires — rely on reported reality, not reality itself. They ask but don’t observe… The next step in data generation is, in my view, twofold: We need ethnographic data based on observation, not on self-reporting, and we need the different studies we produce to “talk to each other.” 

Read the full piece here.

VIRTUAL INTERNSHIPS

Meeting the growing needs of commuter students

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“Commuter students, like their counterparts at traditional residential colleges and universities, have suffered the tremendous loss of access to in-person education, social opportunity, and the college experience as a result because of the pandemic. However, in other ways, their experiences are quite unique,” write Merav Fine Braun and Jonah Geffen of Hunter Hillel in an opinion piece for eJewishPhilanthropy.

Spring 2020: “When commuter students lost their summer internships last year, they also missed out on the learning process that accompanied it… These students came to us at Hunter Hillel asking how they could continue to learn these important skills from their apartment, to keep growing their career as internships were canceled.”

Fast forward: “We took our skills in program design, student engagement, and needs assessment and went into curriculum development overdrive. This virtual, self-directed internship was designed to provide students with staff mentorship, professional support, and skills so that their pandemic summer would be a productive one that would help set the stage for what was sure to be a challenging job market when they graduate.”

Lasting impact: “The summer group was so successful we implemented a cohort for each semester of the 2020-2021 school year. Last semester alone, 25% of participants who completed the internship had full-time jobs or internships at its end. This is the kind of lasting communal impact that is possible when we work together to serve our students’ most pressing needs.”

Read the full piece here.

Worthy Reads

  Sounds Of Silence: Too many employers are either silent on their post-pandemic office strategy or talking about it in vague terms, write David Greenway, Kimberly Merriman and Tamara Montag-Smit in The Conversation, citing a recent survey of full-time corporate or government employees and their own research using a dataset of almost 600,000 people. This communication is hurting morale and retention, especially among employees who based significant personal decisions, such as where to live, on what employers told them earlier in the pandemic: “What workers want most from management are more remote-work resources, updated policies on flexibility and more communication from leadership.” [Conversation]

 Taking Feedback: In Inside Philanthropy, Dawn Wolfe explores the nuances of a new, five-year grantmaking strategy from the Chicago-based Joyce Foundation, which is notable for its unusually long time frame and for provisions created in response to grantee suggestions, including reduced reporting requirements and multiyear grants. The plan also commits the foundation to direct $100 million of its roughly $1 billion in assets to social impact investments in early-stage firms that are racially and gender-diverse. “Our orientation is not about playing it safe … we learn from what we weren’t able to accomplish,” said Darren Reisberg, vice president of programs and strategy at the foundation. [InsidePhilanthropy]

 Ripple Effect: Observers of the nonprofit sector are starting to understand that Mackenzie Scott’s $5.7 billion in unrestricted, one-time donations will have an impact not just on the original grantees, but far beyond them, writes Maria Di Mento in the Chronicle of Philanthropy. Her gifts have created a virtuous circle in which the recipients use the funds to expand their work, and then secure additional funding from banks and other foundations who trust Scott’s judgement. “Coming out of the tech world and the whole notion of disruption, I would say she is the big disrupter of traditional billionaire philanthropy,” said Chuck Collins, who leads the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at the Institute for Policy Studies. [ChroniclePhilanthropy]

 Complicated Plan: A group of about 600,000 individuals, companies and governments with opioid-related claims against Purdue Pharma, the maker of Oxycontin founded by the Sackler family, will likely vote this summer on the company’s bankruptcy plan, described by attorneys involved as “one of the most complicated and controversial bankruptcies ever,” reports Brian Mann on NPR. If the creditors vote in favor of the plan, it will provide immunity from future lawsuits to more than 160 financial trusts, dozens of Sackler family members and at least 170 other entities associated with the family, which has surrendered ownership of Pursue Pharma but will remain one of the most wealthy in the country. The plan will distribute hundreds of millions of dollars each year in aid to communities and individuals harmed by opioids, but some critics say it’s too lenient: “The bankruptcy system should not be allowed to shield non-bankrupt billionaires,” Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey said. [NPR]

Pic of the Day

The Florida Holocaust Museum

At the Florida Holocaust Museum’s #UniteAgainstHate solidarity event yesterday, religious and community leaders gathered to support the museum after it was targeted with antisemitic graffiti last week. Michael Igel, chair of the museum’s board, held aloft his copy of Elie Wiesel’s book Night.