Tuition becoming more affordable at a New Jersey school

Whereas our efforts at making Jewish education more affordable are focused on reimagining the funding of education, we occasionally draw members’ attention to successful efforts in the United States where efforts toward affordability tend to focus on reimagining the delivery of education.

This week, Jeducation World, an online source of education-related stories from the Jewish world, published a story about a successful initiative by a New Jersey school to reduce the tuition fees to its parent body through reimagined methods of teaching.

After its fourth year of operation, the tuition charged for each student at Teaneck, New Jersey’s Yeshivat He’atid ($9,270 in the 2015-16 school year) fell below the actual cost of educating each student ($9,350). The tuition at He’atid is 40% lower than the local alternatives.

The tuition charge for each student in the coming year 2016-2017 is $9,540, still some 40% less than the price of local Modern Orthodox alternatives.

There are 296 students at the school.

Read the compete story about Yeshivat He’atid here: http://jeducationworld.com/2016/09/yeshivat-heatid-cost-per-student-fell-below-tuition-in-2015-16/.

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Reminder

Rosh Hashanah approaches.

May this year bring us closer to our objective of affordable Jewish education.

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Shabbat shalom.

GAJE

The moral and financial burdens

The Tikvah Fund, a New York based philanthropic foundation and ideas institution undertakes various educational initiatives to support the intellectual, religious, and political leaders of the Jewish people and the Jewish State to advance Jewish excellence and Jewish flourishing in the modern age.

Recently, one of the Tikvah Fund scholars, Eric Cohen, spoke with Cato Institute policy analyst, Jason Bedrick, about the economic and moral burden arising from the high cost of Jewish education in the United States. Their conversation is available as a podcast on the Fund’s website (www.tikvahfund.org).

The following is the introduction to the podcast that appears on the website:

“Jewish education is an important source of Jewish continuity in America. This is has been true in all times and places throughout the Jewish diaspora, but it is all the more so in the United States, a nation dedicated to the proposition that all are created equal. In America, with its individual freedoms, the most potent threat to the Jewish community is not anti-Semitic persecution of old, but assimilation.

“The threat of assimilation in modern America makes an education in Jewish particularism and Jewish peoplehood especially important, and yet the cost of Jewish education is a growing burden on Jewish families—entailing not only a financial burden, but a moral burden as well.”

While much of the substance of the Cohen-Bedrick discussion pertains to the legal/constitutional situation in the United States, many of the generic arguments pointing out the urgency of the need for more affordable Jewish education apply in our jurisdiction as well.

The key point for us to retain, however, is this: The affordability of Jewish education is increasingly appearing on the public agenda of Jewish communities throughout the Diaspora.

Solutions to the crisis are now on the horizon. It falls to us to bring the horizon closer to us.

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Reminder

The Taste of Limmud, which begins at 3:00 pm on Sunday September 18, at the Schwartz/Reisman Centre – Joseph & Wolfe Lebovic Jewish Community Campus
9600 Bathurst Street, Vaughan, has dedicated an entire track of study and discussion to the subject of Jewish Education.

For more information on the conference, please visit LIMMUD.ca.

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Shabbat shalom.

GAJE

Sage Advice

Maggid Books of Jerusalem has recently published a new edition of Pirkei Avot entitled Sage Advice. It was translated and provides commentary by the renowned scholar, teacher Rabbi Irving (Yitz) Greenberg.

We draw GAJE members’ attention to this new edition because Rabbi Greenberg infuses it with references about education. In the book’s preface, Rabbi Greenberg describes Pirkei Avot in a manner seldom used among the countless commentaries on this favourite book. “I admired its (Pirkei Avot’s) implicit goal of popular education and endearment as a paradigm for educators and as a model worthy of emulation.”

Rabbi Greenberg expands upon this early declarative characterization of Pirkei Avot throughout his commentaries. He notes that once the Second Temple was destroyed in 70A.D. and the people driven away from Jerusalem some 60 years later, the sages needed a radically different method to instill the awareness of the Divine Presence.

“…They detected within every word of Torah many levels of meaning, their continuous study uncovering ever more layers of wisdom. They also extended the activity from the intellectual elite to lay people. For the sages, teaching Torah was not a hereditary entitlement and scholarship not a genetic gift. It was essential that everyone should know how to learn Torah, and study was open to anyone willing to make the effort. To that end, the sages instituted a public school system that would include all children, especially the poor and orphaned. In place of the illiterate citizenry of the biblical period, awed by the Spectacle of the Temple service and overwhelmed by God’s Presence there, the Jewish people were now empowered en masse. They too could encounter the Divine Presence and personally participate in the religious life of prayer and home ritual. And so the sages turned the Jewish people into the People of the Book.”

Rabbi Greenberg adds: “Pirkei Avot reflects the sages’ focus on education as well as their pedagogical genius. I believe that R. Yehuda the Prince, who together with his scholarly circle edited the Mishna, grasped the nature of the miracle of continuity and transformation, which the sages had achieved. He realized that the new incarnation of Torah incorporated a more personal set of connections with a closer Shekhina. He grasped that the new Jew had to be more learned, his values more internalized, in order to be active in carrying on the tradition. This was to be the religion of the whole community, not just that of the rabbinic elite.”

Elsewhere Rabbi Greenberg writes, “The book (Pirkei Avot) is a masterpiece of popular education. It dramatizes how rabbinic Judaism was intended to serve and engage all people, not just the academic elite.”

There are other such key characterizations of Pirkei Avot as a foremost instrument of education. But the key point for our purposes is the recurring emphasis and re-emphasis by Rabbi Greenberg that education that “include[s] all children, especially the poor and orphaned” is at the living heart of the “miracle of continuity.”

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Reminder

Last week we pointed out that one of our GAJE members, Sholom Eisenstat, an expert in the use of educational technology in Jewish Education, will be speaking about the possibility of introducing blended learning for Jewish high schools at the Taste of Limmud on Sept. 18. His presentation is entitled: A Viable Solution to the Financial Crisis in Education.

This week we draw members’ attention to the fact that the Taste of Limmud dedicates an entire track to the subject of Jewish Education. In addition to the discussion on the possibility of blended learning, Daniel Held, Ilana Aisen and Evan Mazin will lead a discussion on A Tale of Two Vaughans: the Changing Face of the York Region Jewish Community; and Mary Pennock will discuss The Roots of Jewish Education.

For more information on the conference, please visit LIMMUD.ca

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Shabbat shalom.

GAJE

The needs of Jewish tomorrow are urgent

In the September 1 edition of The CJN, Pamela Medjuck Stein, a member of the paper’s board of directors, eloquently appeals to Jewish federations to “add a few percentage points to the Jewish education allocation of the annual campaign.”

Medjuck Stein writes that the “long road of high tuition fees” facing young parents is a threat to Jewish life. She therefore asks community leaders to view “the needs of the Jewish tomorrow” as urgently “as those of the Jewish today. It is a question of survival and leadership.”

Medjuck Stein cites three positive results that would flow from an increase in the communal allocation for education. It would enable families to think more positively about engaging with the community. It would reduce revenue problems for some schools. And finally, she suggests, “most significantly, more Jewish children would enjoy a high-quality, immersive Jewish school experience to underpin their Jewishness for a lifetime.”

Medjuck Stein’s last point cannot be overstated.

This is the very heart of the community obligation to educate our children. She mentions it at the outset of her cri de coeur. “Evidence is overwhelming that good Jewish education is valuable to the Jewish future. Learning and practising Jewish values in childhood lock in an attachment to Judaism. Even those who may wander off in young adulthood usually return, when they have children, to model Jewish values and traditions for their families.”

Medjuck Stein’s is correct.

There is a long-lasting, personal, familial and community-wide benefit in enabling children acquire a high-quality, immersive Jewish school experience. We are dedicated to making such an experience possible for all the families that wish it for their children.

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Take Note

One of our GAJE members, Sholom Eisenstat, an expert in the use of educational technology in Jewish Education, will be speaking about Blended Learning for Jewish High Schools at the Taste of Limmud on Sept 18. His presentation will focus on showing how blended learning structures can save schools money. It will be the first public presentation concerning the project on which he and others are working.
For more information on the conference, please visit LIMMUD.ca.

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This is the last weekend before our children return to school or in some cases, start school. It is an appropriate moment, therefore to point out that it’s not only to acquire knowledge that we entrust our children to the many caring and dedicated individuals who comprise their schools. It is also to acquire the skills, self-confidence, good character, sense of limitless possibilities and the expansive personal feeling of belonging to the Jewish people.

Thus we thank teachers, school staff, parents, grandparents and students for the precious work they are collectively undertaking and the eternal commitment they are collecting reaffirming.

May the coming school year be an excellent one and may it bring us closer to Jewish education that is more affordable.

Shabbat shalom.

GAJE

Defining Educational Success

In the book to which we referred last week, It’s Our Challenge: A Social Entrepreneurship Approach to Jewish Education, Dr. Jonathan Mirvis, dedicates an entire chapter to “How do we define educational success?”

Mirvis writes: “The question is of major significance. The social entrepreneurial perspective pushes us to focus our efforts on creating and sustaining social value. Thus both for the entrepreneur and for other stakeholders in an educational endeavor a clear definition of educational value is crucial.”

He identifies three different approaches to defining educational value, the attainment of which entails educational success. Each approach aims toward different outcomes and adopts different strategies. The three approaches are: literacy, relevancy and meaning, and identity and continuity. It is worthwhile to read Mirvis’ descriptions of the three. (The following is a short one or two line précis. In his book, Mirvis leads an extensive discussion on each.)

a. Literacy. “The goal is to ensure that the participants will be able to participate in the “Great Conversation” [concerning Judaism in all its facets). Participation in the great conversation is an ideal of liberal arts education, as articulated by Robert Hutchins.”

b. Relevancy and Meaning. “The goal is to enable the individual to fulfill his or her personal potential. This approach places the individual at the center of the educational enterprise and attaches importance to each individual’s quest to realize his or her full potential.”

c. Identity and Continuity. “The proponents of this approach are deeply committed to social continuity. They are concerned that future generations will neither treasure nor safeguard the prevailing values of the society and believe that education should facilitate continuity.”

Mirvis’ definitions are very helpful and instructive. GAJE accepts them all because they apply to all of us according to our own unique hopes and objectives for our own lives and for the lives our children. If fulfilled, each approach enriches and enhances the vibrancy and wellbeing of our community.

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GAJE committees – Funding, Legal and Political, and Communications – are steadily and steadfastly working toward future announcements.

Shabbat shalom.

GAJE

It’s Our Challenge

Dr. Jonathan Mirvis, a senior lecturer at the Melton Centre for Jewish Education has recently written a book that has the potential to be transformative for Jewish life. It is titled It’s Our Challenge: A Social Entrepreneurship Approach to Jewish Education.

As its name suggests, the book applies the principles of social entrepreneurship to the goal of enhancing access to Jewish education.

As many of you know, social entrepreneurship is the application of entrepreneurial strategies to bring about the achievement of broadly beneficial societal aims. (David Bornstein, originally of Montreal, now of New York, was one of the key thinkers and advocates for the notion that social entrepreneurialism can be used to help “change the world.”)

We commend the book to GAJE members. Though it primarily focuses on re-imagining methods of delivering education, much of the research and many of the book’s ideas can be applied with equal relevance and vigor to re-imagining the funding of Jewish education. As we have often written in the past, these two streams – rethinking educational models and rethinking funding of current educational methods – will inevitable meet when it is time to distribute newly gathered, specifically dedicated, community education funds.

Mirvis suggests a framework of eight essential traits that must be embraced to achieve a positive result. He distills these traits from the historical example of Rabbi Jochanan Ben Zakkai (whose bravery and farsighted thinking helped save Judaism after the destruction of the Second Temple) and from the more recent examples of four individuals in the USA who took steps to make Jewish education more accessible to a wider audience.

The eight key traits:

• A strong belief in the importance of Jewish education and its necessity for the future of the Jewish people.
• A high level of social responsibility and a deep commitment to the Jewish community at large.
• A deep commitment to making quality Jewish education accessible to larger audiences.
• A readiness to personally step forward.
• A “sixth sense” for spotting the opportunity.
• The courage “to put themselves on the line” and move forward despite the risks involved.
• A high level of ingenuity and political acumen.”
• The ability to operate in multiple time frames, dealing with immediate and long-term challenges simultaneously.

Mirvis presents these eight traits as essential for achieving successful results through social entrepreneurialism. In truth they are the very traits all of us need to assure that if we “will something to happen, it will be no mere dream.”

This is GAJE’s framework. We adopt the traits as necessary.

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Reminder:

If your family is eligible for the tuition cap program at the AHS or Leo Baeck campus in Thornhill, please enroll. Contact the Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Education at the UJA Federation for further information, 416-635-2883.

Shabbat shalom.

GAJE

“If you will it, it is no dream”

The website this week of Jeducation World, an initiative of the Pincus Fund for Jewish Education, contains an article written by Michael B. Soberman, a senior educational consultant at the iCenter for Israel Education, and an experienced Jewish communal professional formerly of Toronto.

Soberman wrote about a public school in Chicago’s southwest neighborhood, North Lawndale named more than a hundred years ago for Theodore Herzl. It is called the Theodore Herzl School of Excellence.

Soberman tenderly tells the story of the school’s origins and of its present character. Soberman writes that the school has remained loyal to Herzl’s inspirational legacy even after all of these years.

“What is striking about the school, its teachers, staff and Principal, Tamara Davis, is the commitment to excellence and encouraging the students to follow their dreams, a message that Theodore Herzl promoted all over Europe more than a century earlier. Herzl’s dream was about the creation of a Jewish State, one he never lived to see come to fruition but his message goes beyond the Jewish community and suggests that anything is possible if you have dreams and then pursue them.”

Soberman writes further: “I was, and remain inspired by the teachers, staff and students of the Herzl School of Excellence and take great comfort in the fact that more than 100 years after his death, Theodore Herzl’s message remains universal and relevant.” (You can read the complete article here: http://jeducationworld.com/2016/08/100-years-later-herzls-message-remains-universal-in-the-unlikeliest-of-places/.)

Herzl’s message rings as true for our community as it does for the staff and students in the North Lawndale school and as it did for the pioneers, fighters and founders of the Jewish state.

If we will it, it is no dream.

Our community can make Jewish education affordable. We have not lost our hope in making it happen.

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Reminders:

1. Please contact your rabbi to ask him or her to speak out during the High Holidays or even sooner on behalf of affordable Jewish education.
2. If your family is eligible for the tuition cap program at the AHS or Leo Baeck campus in Thornhill, please enroll. Contact the Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Education at the UJA Federation for further information, 416-635-2883.

Shabbat shalom.

GAJE

It takes a community

It is one of the core principles of our movement that the obligation to solve the problem lies with the entire community. Even if not all of our families will seek to provide Jewish education for their children, it still falls to the community in its fullest sense to ensure the viability and availability of Jewish education for all the families who seek it. The reason for this was succinctly stated some 20 years ago by the UJA Federation’s Commission on Jewish Education: “Jewish education is vital in ensuring that Jews have the knowledge and understanding needed for Jewish continuity and good citizenship.”

The term community must be understood in its fullest historical, sociological, ethnic and theological sense. Rabbi Irving (Yitz) Greenberg has written a great deal about this precise sense of “community”. We have referred to some of his writings on the subject in the past.

“Community is constituted when individuals come together and constitute themselves a group for a purpose. The goal creates the ground of values and the orientation… Jewry is a community devoted to the realization of perfection in human history. The Jewish people came into being to teach the world the concept and promise of redemption and thus to be a blessing to the nations… Sharing values is not enough. There must be a commitment to realize them, to pass them on, to be responsible until they are fulfilled.”

Who we are – as Jews – compels us to act according to our shared values to ensure that those values are passed on for all generations to come. The key instrument for doing so is a Jewish educational system that is affordable to the majority.

It will take a community, specifically our community, to make that happen.

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Reminders:

1. Please contact your rabbi to ask him or her to speak out during the High Holidays or even sooner on behalf of affordable Jewish education.

2. If your family is eligible for the tuition cap program at the AHS or Leo Baeck campus in Thornhill, please enroll. Contact the Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Education at the UJA Federation for further information, 416-635-2883.

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Shabbat shalom.

GAJE

Other communities rising on behalf of affordable Jewish Education

GAJE is dedicated to reimagining the funding of our schools. We are a catalyst for keeping the subject of school affordability on the community agenda. And we are a catalyst for actually finding funding solutions. We hope to create an educational trust that will permanently provide sufficient, stable funding to enable families to send their children to Jewish schools. Funds will be distributed to the schools by mechanisms currently in place in accordance with principles of need, accountability, transparency, efficiency and fairness.

The struggle to make Jewish education affordable, however, is taking place throughout communities all across North America.

We bring to our members’ attention the success of one organization based in New York, Affordability of Jewish Education Project (AJEP) that is attempting to solve the problem by reimagining education. AJEP just announced that the Hebrew Academy of Long Beach, the first school with which it collaborated on an new approach to the delivery of education – the 2 Sigma Education model –was able to show significant academic gains for students at the end of the school’s second year while also saving $450,000 from its elementary school’s annual budget.

To read more about the 2 Sigma Education model and the school’s achievement, visit www.ajeproject.org.

Our approach, our belief is that reimaging the funding of an educational system will inexorably intersect with a revised, even reimagined, educational system itself.

The point of sharing the exciting news of the Hebrew Academy of Long Beach is to show our members that throughout the Jewish world where individuals feel strongly about perpetuating their Judaism, families, parents, grandparents, educators, administrators, community leaders and community professionals are taking upon themselves the task of finding ways to reduce the unconscionably high cost of Jewish education.

The key is to change the mindset that says: the problem has no solution. Indeed it does.

Indeed, in time, we will solve it.

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Reminders:

1. Please contact your rabbi to ask him or her to speak out during the High Holidays or even sooner on behalf of affordable Jewish education.
2. If your family is eligible for the tuition cap program at the AHS or Leo Baeck campus in Thornhill, please enroll. Contact the Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Education at the UJA Federation for further information, 416-635-2883.
3. Please contact your Member of Parliament to help ensure funding for security needs of the school your children attend. Contact CIJA for further information, 416-638-1991.
4. We believe with all our hearts that the crisis regarding the cost of Jewish education is solvable. We believe that to say there is no solution breaks faith with our forebears and with the deepest values affirmed throughout Jewish history. We further believe that the obligation to solve the problem lies with the entire community.

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Shabbat shalom.

GAJE

Ensuring that our ‘tents’ are spiritually alive

GAJE has occasionally referred to the insights of Rabbi Marc Angel the head of New York-based Institute for Jewish Ideas and Ideals in this column. We do so again this week.

Rabbi Angel comments upon the Torah portion of the week, Balak, by discussing the attempts by many synagogues these days to find “solutions” to the perceived lack of adequate inspiration and spirituality in synagogue worship. Rabbi Angel refers to the key passage in the portion when Bil’am blesses the people of Israel saying: “How goodly are your tents, O Jacob; your dwellings O Israel.”

Rabbi Angel’s conclusion is germane to GAJE’s work.

“It is far from a simple matter for moderns to maintain, or regain, a sense of intimacy with God. Much of the time-spirit (dichotomous struggle) militates against genuine religious experience. Religion is not an easy way to God, and is not a short cut to spirituality. Treating symptoms without going to the root of our problem only makes the problem worse. (Our emphasis)

“If we want our synagogues to be more spiritual, we have to be more spiritual ourselves. If we want our “dwellings” to be spiritually alive, then we first have to be sure that our “tents” are spiritually alive.”

The “root of the problem” of which Rabbi Angel writes is the increasing drifting away by large swaths of the younger generation from a sense of belonging to the Jewish people. Intense, community-supported, family-affirmed Jewish education is the best remedy for curing the problem.

To hope and to ensure, in Rabbi Angel’s words, that the future tents and then the dwellings of the Jewish people are (Jewishly) spiritually alive, we must therefore provide a Jewish education to our children. We must do our utmost to instill in them a sense of Jewish belonging.

That means we must also do our utmost to ensure that Jewish education is affordable.

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The return to school is around the summertime corner. GAJE is ever mindful of the financial and other sacrifices that so many families are making to ensure their children receive a Jewish education. We remind and assure our members and the larger public that GAJE is relentlessly and absolutely committed to making that Jewish education affordable. To the families that send their children to Jewish school despite the huge burden, we offer our deepest expressions of appreciation and thanks. To the families for whom the financial burden is no longer bearable, we offer our understanding, empathy and hope that you will be able to reverse your decision in the future when Jewish education is truly affordable.

Reminders:

1. Please contact your rabbi to ask him or her to speak out during the High Holidays or even sooner on behalf of affordable Jewish education.
2. If your family is eligible for the tuition cap program at the AHS or Leo Baeck campus in Thornhill, please enroll. Contact the Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Education at the UJA Federation for further information, 416-635-2883.
3. Please contact your Member of Parliament to help ensure funding for security needs of the school your children attend. Contact CIJA for further information, 416-638-1991.
4. We believe with all our hearts that the crisis regarding the cost of Jewish education is solvable. We believe that to say there is no solution breaks faith with our forebears and with the deepest values affirmed throughout Jewish history. We further believe that the obligation to solve the problem lies with the entire community.

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Shabbat shalom.

GAJE