Rabbi Jack Bieler (jackbieler@aol.com) has been involved in Jewish education since 1974. He has been a faculty member and administrator in two day schools, as well as a synagogue Rabbi for approximately twenty years. R. Bieler has written extensively about Modern Orthodox Jewish Education.

Jack Bieler asks: “How can we know if we are accomplishing our goals if we’ve never defined them clearly enough and never measured them?”

During my year as a Jerusalem Fellow in 1985-6, my tutor, Mike Rosenak, a”h, brought me up short. I had been teaching in a well-known Jewish day school for over a decade and had met with, in my opinion, a modicum of success. While I enjoyed the intellectual challenge that my very intelligent and sophisticated students presented, I was well-aware that many of them were not observant. This had not bothered me since my educational philosophy had been to try to present different dimensions of Judaism in a well thought-out manner, in the hope that adolescent students, for whom most of their lifestyle choices were yet to be made, would consider eventually living committed, traditional lives. However, I never thought about evaluating my teaching based upon my students’ eventual choices. While discussing this with Mike, he told me that he felt that not knowing, or for that matter caring, how Jewishly students lived their future lives was irresponsible, and could be viewed as even “bankrupt” teaching. One cannot only focus on process, and not take product into consideration. When all that matters is teaching in the moment, nothing is really on the line; there was no way to evaluate whether the teaching or the overall educational experience that was taking place was effective.

He then said,

Every class and school should set a baseline for its students depending upon its religious orientation and community. The choices of goals would of necessity vary, and emphasize one or a number of behaviors, including: observance of certain halakhot, choosing not to intermarry, joining a Jewish institution, visiting Israel, sending their own children to day school, living in a Jewish community, reading Jewish periodicals, etc. – and then measure over time to what extent such goals have been realized among the recipients of the school’s efforts. Either the results will confirm that the teaching and experience was effective, or it will demonstrate that the goals, the teaching approach, the educational environment, the type of faculty members, etc. have to be adjusted to the reality of the school, its student body and the state of general and Jewish culture.

I have never forgotten Mike’s observation and have been interested in seeing to what extent his conception could be born out not only in my own classes in school and shul, but for Jewish education in general. But, as in so many things, the “devil is in the details.” While I could relatively easily stay in touch with my own students and congregants, follow-up studies for schools as a whole are not only few and far-between but also rarely made public and accessible to the broader community. More often than not, sweeping evaluations are made based upon random anecdotes rather than solid data. The few schools that do conduct solid research are nervous that releasing less than stellar results will impact negatively upon their institution’s reputation and competitiveness in attracting students. Funders dismiss the idea of investing in this type of research because not only would it be very costly, but by the time any results are produced, the decision-makers claim that inevitable changes in both religious and secular culture and lifestyle will have rendered even the most evidence-based conclusions irrelevant.

Nevertheless, one has to wonder whether the schools themselves have specific Jewish performance standards in mind for the students who are currently attending as well as those who have already graduated. Mission statements for Jewish day schools are written for websites and to satisfy evaluative organizations like the Middle States Association for Colleges and Schools, but to what extent are these formulations of goals and vision made known, acted upon, and regularly revisited and updated within the school community? Additionally, while certain generic academic goals can comfortably be adopted by the entire faculty – e.g., critical thinking, textual analysis, logical written and oral presentations, the avoidance of sexual harassment and gender-based chauvinism, and overall moral and ethical sensitivity – universally advancing specifically Torah-based values and observance is ironically more problematic within the day school context. Since in most Jewish day schools a significant percentage of teaching and specialty staff, let alone members of the parent body, do not share the religious lifestyle or values which ought to constitute the raison d’etre of such an institution, is it reasonable to set ultimate goals of religious observance and/or Jewish identity, on whatever level for those passing through the school, when this will not necessarily be the consistent message that will be presented to or experienced by the student body?

I would argue that despite these many challenges, it is important for day schools to attempt to clearly define their goals and aspirations, and then proceed to determine to what extent their efforts have been successful. Shouldn’t they be interested in learning whether their visions have been effectively communicated to their students, and what sort of longterm effects can be observed? I believe that a Jewish day school’s raison d’etre is seriously undermined and thrown into question when attention is not paid to the effects of particularly the Jewish components of the school’s educational program. The costs of Jewish education continue to rise. It is difficult to expect parents to pay enormous tuition costs and philanthropists to subsidize these schools if concrete positive results cannot be quantified over time.

I would like to propose a means for beginning to gather information about as well as ultimately address these issues at relatively little financial cost, and with potential benefits that go well beyond studying trends in Jewish practice among day school graduates. A few years ago, I served as a mentor for the Lookstein Center for Jewish Education’s Principal’s Program, at which the concepts and practice of Action Research were taught to participants so that they could conduct research in their own schools when they would return to work. It seems to me that tasking day school faculties as a whole – should this be the responsibility of only the Judaic studies staff or the faculty as a whole makes for an interesting deliberation – to become researchers on behalf of not only their own particular schools, but the general enterprise of

Jewish day school education, constitutes a strategy by which this type of important information could be gathered and processed. Each staff member usually has a few students with whom s/he has developed a close relationship. Other graduates, who were not attached to a specific faculty member, could be assigned to various members of the staff so that at least an initial effort at establishing contact and investigating current Jewish practice could take place. Obviously this would be voluntary from the perspective of graduates and not everyone will wish to participate in such a project. But I suspect that even some of those who did not have the most positive experience might appreciate the opportunity to debrief regarding how they feel and the reasons that contributed to where they find themselves today. A former teacher, representing the school as a whole, showing interest in a former student may offer a connection that the student would welcome, now that he finds himself in an essentially secular environment of a college campus or the workplace. Recent articles describing the phenomenon of the “Odyssey Years” (three papers on this topic appear in the volume of the proceedings of the Orthodox Forum entitled The Next Generation of Modern Orthodoxy, ed. Shmuel Hain, Ktav, 2012), whereby individuals between the ages of 20 and 40 (!) do not make firm commitments. One result of this extended anchorless stage is that many day school graduates “fall between the cracks” Jewishly – reaching out to hear their voice would perhaps constitute an opportunity to help them reconnect.

At what point former students should be evaluated is an interesting question. Ideally, such contact and research should take place several times over a number of years – perhaps five and ten years post graduation – in order to gain some sort of sense of the evolution of belief and long-term effects of one’s education. While the precise timing of these assessments is debatable, we ought not waste time in the debate and in the process miss a critical opportunity.

The results of what teachers learn from communicating with former students would be shared by the entire faculty in the interests of evaluating what the results may imply and how to incorporate these findings into current curriculum and extra-curricular experiences. In turn, such discussions would encourage the school’s educators to reflect on the educational experience as a whole, individually as well as collectively, a process in which all professionals should engage. Such deliberations would also constitute an excellent method by which to train and season novice educators so they could adjust more smoothly to the Jewish day school setting. On a broader scale, hopefully several philosophically like-minded schools would compare and contrast their results so that future research initiatives could be refined, and policies could be developed collaboratively. There would also be a benefit to a particular school in the sense that it should become apparent to all that it is committed to its students well beyond the years of their attendance within its walls, which in turn may inform the type of education offered, how best to deliver it and an important basis for additional fundraising.

Finally, it probably would be optimal if such a project were overseen by an individual with professional training, so that experts trained in statistical analysis and educational research could advise and review the findings and suggest new avenues for research and innovation.