Monday, May 17, 2010

We have nothing to lose but our paper chains

(Crossposted to Jewschool.)

As we collectively get ready to receive Torah, it seems an appropriate time to put up some thoughts on Jewish education. I don’t have children yet (and if my parents are reading this, no, I don’t have any immediate plans to), but I’ve been thinking about the Jewish education I would want to provide my hypothetical future children, and which elements of this would need to be provided in an organized setting outside the home. (From what I hear, once I do have children, I won’t have the time to think and blog about these things, so I’m doing it now.) Specifically, I’m interested in exploring models of organized Jewish education that are alternatives to Jewish day schools and conventional Hebrew schools.

If the existing day school or Hebrew school models work(ed) for you or your children, that’s just fine; I’m not trying to take that away from you (and I couldn’t even if I tried). I’m not suggesting that the models discussed in this post are right for everyone. In particular, I’m assuming that my children will be growing up in an actively Jewish home and an active Jewish community. I know this assumption doesn’t hold for all (or most) Jewish children, but maybe (or maybe not) it holds for your (current or future) children too. If you have thoughts on how to implement and/or refine these models, or you’re aware of existing programs already operating along similar lines, or you’re interested in participating in these sorts of things, please post in the comments. If you want to argue that day schools are the only conceivable option for serious Jewish education (not only in practice, but in theory), or that conventional Hebrew schools are just fine the way they are (or would be just fine after incremental inside-the-box improvements), please save your breath.

Preschool

Hebrew immersion preschools exist in a small but increasing number of locations. This just seems like such the obvious way to go. Thanks to the magic of language acquisition, exposing children to a Hebrew environment at a young age will result in much more bang for the buck than any later attempts. Any Israeli 5-year-old has better spoken Hebrew than any American Hebrew school graduate and most day school graduates. I lived in Israel for two (non-consecutive) years and completed the highest level of ulpan, and my Hebrew still isn’t nearly as strong as my (native) English.

A Hebrew immersion preschool need not have any explicitly “Jewish” content; it can just be the regular preschool content, but in Hebrew, and this will contribute much more in the long run to a child’s Jewish education than a preschool with Jewish content in the vernacular.

Early Elementary School

So the usual argument in favor of day school (among the less problematic arguments) is that day schools simply have more hours available in the week for Jewish education than Hebrew schools and therefore can accomplish more. The response is: “But what if there were an after-school program that met for more hours than a standard Hebrew school? Then this, too, could accomplish more.” And the response to that is: “But that would never work: with homework and other extracurricular activities, kids would never have time for this on top of a full school day.”

Let us stipulate, for the sake of argument, that this is true for older kids (which we’ll discuss in the next section). However, someone with whom I have been discussing this recently pointed out that the opposite is true for students in the lower grades: they don’t have so much homework, they don’t have so many extracurricular activities, AND if they have two employed parents (or an employed single parent) they have a few hours after school every day when they NEED to be supervised (whether with an organized after-school program, day care, or a babysitter). This seems like the perfect time in life for supplementary Jewish education that meets 4 or 5 days a week, since the children have to be somewhere for those hours anyway, and they wouldn’t have the resistance that (e.g.) 6th graders would have. This could also be entirely or partially in a Hebrew-immersion environment, which would solidify the language learning begun during preschool. That would also mean that this program wouldn’t have to be all “school” all the time, since other activities (or supervised free time) would also be teaching Hebrew.

The more formal elements of this program could include learning to read Hebrew, which would occur not so long after the students learn to read English. This would go much more smoothly than in Hebrew school, since it would be learning to read a language that the students already understand, rather than learning to sound out meaningless syllables.

Late Elementary and Middle School

These years are the core of conventional Hebrew school. Again, let us assume (as discussed above) that a student at this age who is attending public school full-time has limited hours available for formal Jewish education. Is it possible to achieve a level of Jewish education comparable to day school (or better), in an amount of time comparable to Hebrew school? I think so, iff those hours are narrowly focused on what can’t be done at home.

The fundamental assumption of the typical Hebrew school is that it is the only source of Jewish education in its students’ lives. Therefore, when it’s not teaching students how to sound out meaningless syllables, it has to teach Jewish identity, Jewish culture, Jewish rituals, Jewish values, etc., and it spends multiple weeks around each Jewish holiday teaching about the holiday. So I would cut basically all of that. As I said above, my children will grow up in an actively Jewish home (as I did). When I was a kid, we made paper chains for our sukkah at home, so I didn’t need to go somewhere else to make more paper chains or find out what a sukkah was. We lit candles on Chanukah, and had a seder on Pesach, and said kiddush on Shabbat, and made hamantashen for Purim. Similarly, my children will learn about Shabbat on Shabbat, and will learn about the holidays on the holidays, so they won’t need to learn about them on Sunday mornings and Wednesday afternoons too. With all of this removed from the formal supplementary school and returned to the home and to the Shabbat/holiday community, suddenly lots of time is freed up for other things.

To be fair, I should note that Hebrew schools aren’t all paper chains anymore, and there are innovative developments going on in many places. But I should also note that these innovative developments, while they may be serving their target populations well, are going in the opposite direction from what I’m looking for. This is because they are premised on the same fundamental assumption noted above, which is indeed an accurate assumption about most American Jewish children, and they make the best of this situation. And so they focus on informal and experiential Jewish education (i.e. what my children will pick up anyway even if they’re not enrolled in any Jewish educational institution), and on using the children as a hook to get the parents involved (not necessary in my case or my wife’s case).

So what would I do with all the extra time, if the children won’t be learning to gamble? Study Jewish texts. In the original. This is something that would actually benefit from a classroom setting, and doesn’t just get picked up by osmosis. With the Hebrew language background outlined above, I’m sure students will be able to develop the familiarity and skills with texts at least at the level of their (non-Orthodox) day-school peers in the limited time they have (which suddenly seems like much more time, now that they’re not doing anything about holidays, unless they’re studying Seder Mo’ed).

High School

I have taught high school students in a number of settings, and know that they have much more intellectual capacity than most Jewish high school programs (including camp and youth group) give them credit for. This is the time when they can be gaining the resources to make informed adult Jewish choices. If they are treated like “teenagers”, they’ll act like teenagers; if they are treated like adults, there is at least a chance they’ll act like adults. (Of course, adult education isn’t so strong in most American non-Orthodox Jewish communities either; if it were, I’d say just open it up to high school students.) I have heard of proposals to have high school students take Jewish studies courses at nearby universities for college credit; does anyone know if this has been implemented anywhere? With or without that option, the Beit Midrash Program at Ramah Wisconsin has demonstrated that high school students (and not only day school students) are capable of intensive text study; this sort of program could be adapted into a year-round version.

28 comments:

  1. I have a great deal of sympathy for your educational vision. But what will you do if you cannot convince an entire community of parents to go along with your vision? Can you imagine giving your children a Jewish education at an existing day-school or supplemental school that exists in your community?

    ReplyDelete
  2. DW-
    It wouldn't have to be an entire community, just a critical mass within a community. And the earliest I could possibly have a child entering school is fall 2016 (the preschool piece already exists around here in some form), so it's way too early now to be thinking about Plan B -- for one thing, we don't know what the existing options will look like in 6 years.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I'm entirely behind your vision, and agree that only a critical mass is needed. I still worry, however, about the limited hours of Hebrew school (even if narrowly focused as you say) and the sense that it's secondary to other academic and extracurricular pursuits. (One empirical way to test this would be to see what percentage of Prozdor students place Prozdor above conflicting academic/social/sport events.) So I like the Mormon model in Utah, where students attend public school but have an hour _during_ the day set aside for "other studies" (or however it's framed) where the Mormon students flock over to the church to get their dose of religious education (and the other kids have study hall or whatever). I realize that that's a bigger vision for what it would mean to do real multi-faith/multi-cultural education in the US, but might be something to strive for in a small and close-knit enough multi-faith community.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Sounds fantastic in theory and definitely worth trying, though Murphy's Law being what it is, there are likely lots of practical challenges that we couldn't foresee.

    I'm not sure that you can make the assumption that people would be teaching their kids at home about home Jewish life since that's not true even at community day schools and even Ramaz and Flatbush. The reality seems to be that you need these less-involved parents to get the critical mass of students to support the school, and thus you need to teach the school at the level that these parents' kids need. And because these are non-day-school kids, you're selecting for the least involved parents. It seems improbable that you could assume that all students in your school started out in the same Hebrew immersion pre-school.

    Have you researched what happened to the Talmud Torahs of the 1950s? They're the nearest model for what you're describing, and they went away as day schools became more common, but there may have been other factors too.

    Given the economy, there's a lot of interest in general for creating less expensive alternatives to day schools, and in Baltimore's Charedi monthly magazine someone wrote about the need for a real Talmud Torah. Now would be a better time for someone to start this than 2016 since difficult economic times is when people want day school alternatives, and that way all the problems would be worked out by the time your kids come to it.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Two immediate reactions:

    A truly revolutionary vision!

    and then

    ...a vision truly disconnected from reality!

    sigh.
    and then a pause
    and another
    sigh.

    I think that the reason why, programmatically, Jewish education is where it is "at" is because most folks are generally happy with the dosage, time commitment, etc. and are loath to experiment with models that might demand more thought on their part, more time when there is much less to be found during the week, more money (of which there is also much less) or might result in their children outgrowing their own household's level of Jewish engagement ... all very scary options for most folks who just want to get in and get it done, if you know what I mean...

    ReplyDelete
  6. A great discussion to kick off - thanks for doing so. I believe the trick here is to add one more element to the mix, namely a collaborative, community-based approach that makes it possible to offer the broad range of options needed to meet the needs and desires of today's highly segmented, choice-oriented Jewish educational marketplace. This is precisely the process now underway in Columbus, OH. We'll see how it works. The change will not be easy - far from it - but I think the forces in society that are pushing all institutions toward greater accommodation of choice and empowerment will eventually require that the mindset and culture of Jewish education change.

    In the meantime, the power of the internet makes it possible for groups to self-organize in ways that were not previously possible. So, you may well find your critical mass for the options you want to design. BTW, the program you describe for the early elementary years exists: it's called Kesher, and it operates in Cambridge and Newton, Mass. There should be dozens like it around the country. And, though I wish it were not the case, I fear that the economic pressures on day schools and day school families will create a growing market for the kind of intensive academic supplementary program that you describe.

    Above all, we should not underestimate the desire out there for better options. We just have not been asking parents and students the right questions.

    Good luck in your efforts.

    ReplyDelete
  7. I like the vision, but wonder what tuition will be and how to find quality teachers qualified by more than their ability to speak Hebrew fluently.

    In the current state, tuition would appear to be beyond the means of many and many of the instructors aren't very good teachers.

    ReplyDelete
  8. RE: the economics, I think the best model is to have the program under the auspices of a local federation, and to institute a voluntary "Jewish School Tax", under which members of all the Jewish institutions would add n percent of their income (n being a rather small number) to their membership fees, and this would go to the school.
    Those who would choose not to pay the tax would be denied honors in the shul and a Jewish burial.

    ReplyDelete
  9. I live within 2 miles of you. I have a four year old child. There is less than a year until we have to choose: a day school route we don't like, a synagogue school that teaches only the stuff we teach at home and will take all our Sundays, or....

    If you build this, we will come.

    EWH

    ReplyDelete
  10. Here's my big question: What do we do about extracurricular activities for Shabbat observant super-kids who don't attend day school?

    Being shomer Shabbat is arguably a much bigger handicap in high school, where the top kids are expected to do everything, than it is the post-college employment world, and arguably than it is in college.

    (In college even super-kids can only do a small fraction of extracurricular activities, social life happens on weeknights as well as Shabbat, and where an observant kid can likely walk everywhere on Shabbat if needed.

    How does this fit in your model?

    ReplyDelete
  11. wolfman writes:
    So I like the Mormon model in Utah, where students attend public school but have an hour _during_ the day set aside for "other studies" (or however it's framed) where the Mormon students flock over to the church to get their dose of religious education (and the other kids have study hall or whatever).

    This exists for Jews too (run by Chabad), though I know nothing about how it works or how many students participate. I imagine that this would require a large enough number of students at the same school in order to be practical.

    ReplyDelete
  12. Janet writes:
    The reality seems to be that you need these less-involved parents to get the critical mass of students to support the school, and thus you need to teach the school at the level that these parents' kids need. And because these are non-day-school kids, you're selecting for the least involved parents.

    Dan M writes:
    I think that the reason why, programmatically, Jewish education is where it is "at" is because most folks are generally happy with the dosage, time commitment, etc. and are loath to experiment with models that might demand more thought on their part, more time when there is much less to be found during the week, more money (of which there is also much less) or might result in their children outgrowing their own household's level of Jewish engagement

    I would agree that people who are happy (to first order) with conventional Hebrew school, and/or are looking for what conventional Hebrew school offers, aren't the target population for what I'm talking about. The target population would be parents who are ambivalently or reluctantly considering day school (not because they want day school per se, but because they don't see anywhere else that provides a serious Jewish education), or who (like my neighbor EWH any myself) say "A plague on both your houses" to both day school and conventional Hebrew school.

    ReplyDelete
  13. OJ writes:
    I like the vision, but wonder what tuition will be and how to find quality teachers qualified by more than their ability to speak Hebrew fluently.

    ...and if the constituency includes parents who might have considered day school, then the tuition, whatever it is, suddenly becomes massively cheaper in comparison.

    Doing a back-of-the-envelope calculation with values that are probably upper bounds: Let's say teachers get paid $100/hour (much more per hour than I was paid as a public school teacher), and each class meets 6 hours/week, 40 weeks/year, and there are 10 students in a class. Then the cost per student is $2400, which is not insignificant, but is about 10% the cost of day school!

    ReplyDelete
  14. Janet writes:
    Have you researched what happened to the Talmud Torahs of the 1950s?

    No, and I'd like to learn more about this.

    Given the economy, there's a lot of interest in general for creating less expensive alternatives to day schools, and in Baltimore's Charedi monthly magazine someone wrote about the need for a real Talmud Torah.

    Wow, so they would consider public school?

    Now would be a better time for someone to start this than 2016 since difficult economic times is when people want day school alternatives, and that way all the problems would be worked out by the time your kids come to it.

    Agreed. I was only saying that Plan B could wait until 2016 (or closer to it), but I think we should be working on Plan A now.

    ReplyDelete
  15. Here's my big question: What do we do about extracurricular activities for Shabbat observant super-kids who don't attend day school?

    What do "super-kids" who do attend day school do about this?

    ReplyDelete
  16. At religious day schools, the sports teams and clubs generally don't meet on Shabbos, and they often have policies that families cannot host parties on Shabbos as well.

    This is a big sticking point for me - I really don't want to send my (theoretical) kids to Day School for a variety of reasons, but I don't want them to grow up thinking of Shabbat as "that thing that stops me from joining sports teams or debate or going to my friends birthday parties."

    ReplyDelete
  17. BZ,
    I'd bump up the number of hours a bit more. If this is also an aftercare substitute, an adult would have to be hired from at least 3:30 until 6:00PM even if the core instruction period is 1 hour (hopefully the rest of the time is playtime primarily in Hebrew and maybe some time to do public school Hebrew).

    That would be 12.5 hours in a typical week (though slightly less during early Shabbat weeks where Friday might shortened or cancelled). Your the former teacher, but, for this type of curriculum, I'd think the teacher would need 30 min of paid preparation time for each hour of teaching. Since all 12.5 hours aren't serious teaching, lets say it averages to 3h of prep time per week.

    If I drop wages to $50/hour since this isn't purely teaching hours (no clue what teachers earn) and assume a 40 week year, that's now $31,000. For that wage, taxes, health insurance, etc are a non-trivial addition.

    The class might also need a substitute teacher or parents using a co-op model for substitutes.

    Supplies also aren't free. This would be $1000 for basic craft projects and could be much more if the teacher needs curricula or things like TaL AM training.

    For a class of 5 kids, it could meet in people's houses. For 10 you'd need to get free space from a synagogue or add in a rental cost.

    I'd be surprised if this could be done for less than $5000/family. I'd easily believe $8000 or even $10000, but that is still much cheaper than day school.

    Working with a synagogue so that their administrative staff can cover some curricular costs or lesson planning guidance could save money.

    ReplyDelete
  18. Wow, what you have described comes very close to what I would hope to do for my hypothetical future children. I particularly like the reminder that all of a child's Jewish education doesn't have to come from one place, and that whatever we all end up doing will be a supplement to the education that happens at home.

    To Dunash, who asked about extracurricular activities for shomer shabbat kids attending public schools: I was one of those kids. You make it work. Certainly, there are some activities that are out of the question for kids who are shomer shabbat, and others that may require some modification, but a good school probably still has a lot of activities that don't conflict with Shabbat, and if not, one can look outside of school. I think it could be a real problem for a kid who really wanted to play on a school sports team, but for non-athletes it doesn't have to be such a burden. My own experience (which may or may not generalize) was that Shabbat probably kept me sane in high school, because after 6 days filled with rigorous classes and a ton of activities, I had to stop for 25 hours and take a break.

    Finally, for what it's worth, I'm currently on the religious school committee at my shul, despite not having any children at this point. Education is something I care a lot about, and since the shul is in the process of starting a Hebrew school when it didn't have one before, this seemed to be a good time to get involved. "Full-service" shuls and independent minyanim obviously each have their own advantages and disadvantages, and I certainly wouldn't suggest that anyone join a shul just because sometime down the road they might have a child who needs a Jewish education, but at the same time I am glad to have the opportunity to influence the direction that our Hebrew school takes. I am cautiously optimistic that by the time I have children ready for Hebrew school, the program we come up with will be a worthwhile part of their Jewish education.

    ReplyDelete
  19. Jewtah-
    Are there leagues for sports, debate, etc. where day schools just compete against other day schools?

    ReplyDelete
  20. Dan-
    That's true, it would be more hours in the younger years, but if the parents would have to pay for some form of afterschool supervision anyway, this decreases the marginal cost.

    ReplyDelete
  21. Are there leagues for sports, debate, etc. where day schools just compete against other day schools?

    in areas like NYC where there are lots of Jewish day schools, yes there are separate yeshiva leagues. Some of this is for shabbat reasons, some not. and sometimes yeshivas chose not to participate in the yeshiva leagues. I know Frisch in Northern NJ participates in the North Jersey Debate League, which holds its debates during school hours. The Mock trial team at Frisch is also not in the yeshiva league, and it holds competitions on week nights, since thats when the lawyers who help out are willing to volunteer.

    When it comes to sports, some of the rationale for separate leagues is because the yeshivas dont want to/ have the money to invest in fancy sports teams. As someone who thinks too much school money is wasted on sports, I'd like to see more schools follow the minimal fancy equipment- normally paid coach - sports are for fun not something you base your future on - model.

    ReplyDelete
  22. I understand that in smaller jewish communities it may be hard to find a committed core, but I am baffled at how nothing like this exists in larger communities. (Im sure I should be less naive by now).

    I think such a school would best succeed if it were not labeled as a place for those indie minyan people, but as a magnet school for children belonging to any synagogue. Kids who didnt cut it (miss too many classes, cant keep up, dont do homework, whatnot) would be asked to leave.

    The real question is how to sell a broad network of synagogues on the idea of a magnet school. Some combo of allowing people who are members to get a tuition deal through their membership, and thus get synagogues to contribute financially, but also make it equally affordable to people who dont belong to any synagogue.

    ReplyDelete
  23. @MS I am baffled at how nothing like this exists in larger communities.

    First it does exist in some communities like Boston and soon-to-be Berkeley. I suspect that part of the issue is that the community at large got into its head at some point that day school is the only way to get a real, serious education and decided to commit as much communal resources as possible to it. I haven't studied the history, but I suspect this is part of the cause of the death of the talmud torah model.

    I don't want to turn this into a day school argument and I think that many day schools do an excellent job at giving a Jewish education to children who attend, but the reality is that they are only pulling in a small fraction of the total Jewish children. I hope people are starting to wake up to the fact that more quality options, in addition to day schools, can benefit the larger community and are worthy of communal investment.

    ReplyDelete
  24. Everyone seems to be attacking this model as unrealistic for one reason or another, and most of those reasons seem to boil down to social inertia among typical Hebrew school parents. There's a point there: in my experience, both professional and personal, the parents sending their kids to Hebrew school are rarely the parents who show up on Shabbat. The assumption by the Hebrew school that it is the sole source of Jewish education is often accurate.

    But what about the other end of the spectrum? With personal wages declining as day school tuitions rise out of control—often as services are reduced—it's inevitable that somebody investigate the possibility of serious Jewish learning for children in an environment other than the one in which they study algebra. The current model of middle class parents paying high-end private school tuitions for multiple children is not really sustainable in the long term, and is absurd when one considers that those parents are only really paying because of half the curriculum. (I know there are some who think it's important for their kids to learn secular subjects in an all-Jewish environment, but I am far out of sympathy with this view and doubt that anyone who holds it would be much interested in a radical new model, no matter how good it might turn out to be.)

    ReplyDelete
  25. in my experience, both professional and personal, the parents sending their kids to Hebrew school are rarely the parents who show up on Shabbat.

    This was also the assumption at my synagogue. We then surveyed the congregation and discovered almost no relationship between Shabbat and day school attendance. If anything, the non-day school kids were MORE regular Shabbat attendees. Anecdotally, I've heard day school parents say their kids get their Jewish education during the week therefore the family can do other things on Shabbat.

    My synagogue might be an exception, but I'm curious how many exceptions are out there if people crunch the numbers.

    ReplyDelete
  26. Easy solution to the tuition crisis and the problem of motivating kids to learn Hebrew-
    Come to Israel and raise your kids here.
    Also, since the Jewish holidays are also the national holidays, the holiday feeling in the air makes them much more "real" to both kids and adults.

    ReplyDelete
  27. Easy!

    But seriously, even if one isn't moving to Israel, the money saved by not sending kids to day school can easily pay for a family trip to Israel every year, with most of it still left over.

    ReplyDelete
  28. Hey,
    All that sounds great. But I am planning on raising my kid not only in a Hebrew-immersion pre-school but actually an entirely Hebrew speaking society. Imagine what it would be like to have your kid leave school and then speak Hebrew with the bus driver??? Absurd, I know. (They also wish the driver and the shopkeeper Shabbat Shalom... But only on Fridays).

    ReplyDelete