A response to Dr. Pesha Kletenik’s “Open Letter to Day School Leaders”

Dr. Pesha Kletenik recently issued an important challenge to Jewish day school leaders: if we want our teachers to be regarded as serious professionals, we need to portray them that way. “Let’s show the work,” she writes. “Let’s show the expertise. Let’s show the profession.”

Yes. And let’s show the joy.

The choice Dr. Kletenik presents between professional seriousness and the team-building activities of faculty orientation is a false one. More importantly, it overlooks something fundamental about healthy schools: culture is not what we build when we take a break from the serious work of education. Building culture is part of the serious work of education.

I share Dr. Kletenik’s concern about the status of our profession. I want parents to appreciate what it takes to develop an effective lesson, the expertise required to understand how children learn, and the extraordinary emotional labor involved in helping them raise their children. I want teachers compensated accordingly. I want boards to truly believe that excellent educators are not interchangeable commodities. And I want our communities to invest far more aggressively in attracting, developing, and retaining talented people who choose Jewish education as their life’s work.

But none of that requires us to stop celebrating them. If anything, it requires the opposite. Jewish day schools do not struggle to pay teachers adequately because we serve them breakfast at faculty orientation. Nor do teachers lack professional respect because the school posted a photograph of them eating ice cream. Precisely because teachers are too often undercompensated for work that demands so much of them, school leaders have an even greater obligation to build communities in which educators experience appreciation, belonging, shared purpose, and joy. Those things are not substitutes for salary. Bagels and lox will not pay a mortgage, and team-building exercises will not fund retirement. But compensation alone does not create the conditions in which educators flourish.

Research on teacher wellbeing points toward something good school leaders experience every day: the conditions in which teachers work matter. Teacher wellbeing is associated with retention, teacher-student relationships, and student outcomes. As we ask how we will recruit the next generation of talented educators, we should be equally concerned with creating schools in which they want to stay.

Dr. Kletenik asks us to imagine the parent who is a CEO, surgeon, or attorney, scrolling through social media after arranging childcare because school has not yet begun, only to encounter photographs of teachers “eating pizza and playing team-building games.” Presumably, that parent wonders what teachers do all day, or why they deserve greater compensation or professional respect.

But if that is the conclusion a parent draws, our responsibility as leaders should not be to reinforce that perception. It should be to challenge it. Our parents and boards need to understand that investing in faculty culture is evidence that school leaders are serious about creating environments where people can do exceptional work. We should not need faculty orientation to appear joyless in order to demonstrate its intellectual seriousness. And we certainly should not perform misery in order to prove that teaching is a profession.

Healthy professional organizations look like people studying together and laughing together. They look like rigorous professional learning alongside thoughtful investment in relationships. They look like teachers wrestling with curriculum, analyzing student needs, preparing classrooms, and occasionally eating ice cream with the colleagues alongside whom they are about to undertake another demanding year.

These are not competing images of our profession. Together, they tell the truth about it. This is the paradox that Dr. Kletenik’s argument misses. We need not choose between rigor and compassion, individual and community, joy and seriousness. Outstanding schools hold these things in tension. Excellence without culture is difficult to sustain. And culture without excellence is insufficient.

Dr. Kletenik calls some of these moments “fun” and worries that they can look like an “adult birthday party.” I see colleagues strengthening relationships that will matter when the work gets difficult. I see institutions signaling to educators that while we expect enormously from them, we also value them as human beings.

The danger of reducing culture-building to frivolity is not simply that we might eliminate a few welcome-back breakfasts. It is that we reinforce an impoverished conception of professionalism in which seriousness must look joyless, appreciation is suspect, and the needs of the adults educating our children are secondary to the work they produce.

If we hope to convince another generation of talented young adults to choose Jewish education, and to remain in it, we need to build institutions worthy of their commitment: places of intellectual seriousness and professional growth, but also places of connection, belonging, gratitude, and joy.

And then we should proudly show our communities all of it. Show them the lesson planning and the professional learning. Show them the collaboration and the preparation. Show them the extraordinary expertise and care that excellent teaching requires. And when the faculty gathers at the beginning of another school year to reconnect, to laugh, and perhaps even to eat some sushi, show them that too.