Is Jewish Day School Faculty Pay Pragmatic, Equitable — or Just Arbitrary?

An In-depth Study By Dr. Harry Bloom, Founder and President, Benchmarking for Good, Inc.

Ask a head of school how faculty salaries get set, and you'll usually hear some version of "it depends." We wanted to know what it depends on.

So we asked 23 diverse Jewish day schools — Early Childhood through Upper School — to share how they set pay and what they actually pay. Then we ran the numbers across nine research questions. The picture that emerged is highly pragmatic but one that demands greater leadership attention. Why? Because Staff Climate Surveys with 3,000 faculty indicate only 55% are satisfied with the competitiveness of their salaries, although at the top tier schools like Ida Crown Jewish Academy that percentage increases to as much as 85%!  

Flexibility wins. Every time.

Twelve of 23 schools set salaries through individualized negotiation with the head or principal — far more common than a formal scale. And the priority driving that choice is unambiguous: 22 of 23 schools ranked retaining top-performing faculty as most important. Local-market competitiveness came next.

Transparency and equity? Named most important by only one in five schools.

That single ordering explains nearly everything else in the data. Scales and bands constrain retention flexibility, so schools resist them — and accept the drift that comes with it.

Selected nuggets that make reading the White Paper worthwhile:

• Division matters more than degree.

• The degree premium is a hiring effect, not a career-long one. 

• Judaic Studies is not the underpaid track. 

• Cost of living is related to pay but in a surprising way. 

• Some schools have astoundingly large salary ranges for staff with similar characteristics.

Why this should influence annual and longer term planning

Most compensation conversations start from anecdote — a departing teacher, a board member's hunch, a number someone heard at a conference. This white paper lets the next one start from evidence.

Inside, you'll find:

• All nine research questions, with the underlying figures and significance testing

• School-by-school range comparisons (anonymized) you can locate yourself against

• The Relative Pay Index, which controls for division, experience, and degree so a school doesn't look generous merely because it reports more Upper School roles

The clearest next step for any school is an internal pay audit which must include benchmarking— checking whether your practices line up with your stated values around tenure, division, credentials, and equity. Benchmarking for Good offers benchmarking grants to help shape your understanding of how your school stacks up. Contact harrybloom@benchmarkingforgood.org to explore the possibility of a grant for your school. 

Download the white paper

Is Jewish Day School Faculty Pay Pragmatic? Equitable? Arbitrary? is available at no cost to school leaders.

[Click to Download the full white paper →]

Benchmarking for Good provides survey research, compensation benchmarking, and strategic planning for Jewish day schools nationally. School research grants include in-depth compensation benchmarking and faculty climate surveys.

Staffing by Design: Why School Leaders Must Manage Their Educational Ratios Intentionally

By Dr. Harry Bloom, Founder and President, Benchmarking for Good, Inc.

What school leaders do or don't know about one of their most important financial and educational drivers can make the difference between a good school and a great one! Data from the field and Benchmarking for Good experience suggest a significant amount of unintentional staff to student ratio variation exists--among schools with similar educational goals.

Read the charts this way: dots at the same horizontal position enroll the same number of students, so the vertical gap between them is pure staffing difference — extra educators carried for the same number of children. Those gaps are large, and they show up across Early Childhood, Elementary, Middle School, and Upper School alike.

The Middle School makes it concrete. Three schools enroll essentially the same student body and similar educational standards staff it across a range of more than twelve full-time educators:

School	Middle School enrollment	Educational staff (FTE)	Students per educator
School A	210	29.0	7.2 : 1
School B	210	21.5	9.8 : 1
School C	207	16.5	12.5 : 1

Schools A and B enroll identical numbers of students. One runs its Middle School on 29 educators, the other on 21.5 — a third fewer staff for the very same children. The pattern holds at both ends of the building. In Early Childhood, comparably sized schools range from 5.4 to 7.5 students per educator; in the Upper School the spread is wider still, and the school with the most students carries the fewest educators:

Division	School	Enrollment	Educational staff (FTE)	Students per educator
Early Childhood	School A	185	34.5	5.4 : 1
Early Childhood	School B	205	32.0	6.4 : 1
Early Childhood	School C	198	26.5	7.5 : 1
Upper School	School A	227	46.1	4.9 : 1
Upper School	School B	247	45.0	5.5 : 1
Upper School	School C	275	33.7	8.2 : 1

The conclusion is unavoidable: enrollment does not set staffing. Two schools serving the same number of students can differ by a quarter or a third in their teaching headcount — and therefore in the biggest line of their budget. Every one of these schools chose its position, whether or not it experienced the decision as a choice. That is exactly why intentionality matters: the choice is being made regardless. The only question is whether leadership is the one making it.

Why ratios drift when no one is steering

Left unmanaged, staffing does not hold steady — it moves in one direction: richer. Positions accrete. A specialist is added for one unusually large cohort and stays after the cohort moves on. A co-teacher brought in for a year of acute need quietly becomes permanent. A grade shrinks, but the section and its teacher remain. None of these is a bad decision in the moment; each is defensible in isolation. But they only ever ratchet one way, because cutting a position is painful, visible, and political in a way that adding one never is.

So a ratio nobody is steering doesn’t stay put — it decays toward richer staffing and thinner margins, one reasonable yes at a time. And because the drift is gradual and the budget impact lags, it usually surfaces not as a decision but as a crisis: a deficit years in the making that suddenly demands cuts. Intentional management is what replaces that slow, invisible drift with a deliberate position leadership has actually chosen.

What intentional management looks like

Managing the ratio on purpose is not a budgeting exercise bolted on at the end of the year. It is an ongoing posture, and it buys leadership four concrete things.

A defensible answer to every staffing request. In isolation, every request to add a position looks reasonable. What’s missing is context. A leader who knows the school’s ratio against a peer benchmark can weigh each request in proportion — this hire moves us from the middle of our peer group toward the richest tenth of it; is that where we want to be? The benchmark turns a string of one-off approvals into a coherent, articulable stance.

Margin protected through the gentlest lever. A school watching its ratio can hold the line through deployment and natural attrition — declining to backfill a departure, shifting a specialist across divisions — long before it is cornered into program cuts or another tuition increase. Small, early adjustments substitute for large, painful ones.

Internal imbalances made visible. A single school-wide average hides more than it reveals. The real insight lives at the division level, because schools are rarely staffed evenly. It is common to find one division running leaner than peers while another runs notably richer — a reallocation opportunity that is invisible until the ratio is computed division by division. The scatter plots above show how wide that intra-school variation can run.

A real read on enrollment elasticity. Knowing where you sit relative to capacity tells you how much growth you can absorb at near-zero marginal teaching cost before hitting a class-size cap — and how much cushion you have if a cohort contracts. That is planning intelligence you cannot generate without the ratio in hand.

Intentional does not mean lean

Managing a ratio intentionally is the opposite of blindly minimizing it. A richer ratio is often the right, deliberate choice — and for mission-driven schools, frequently the whole point.

A Jewish day school structurally staffs richer than a secular independent of the same size, and for a sound reason: a dual curriculum means roughly two instructional tracks — Judaic and general studies — running in parallel, which lowers the student-to-educator ratio before any decision about generosity is made. Inclusion commitments, the diseconomies of small schools, and an explicit promise of small classes are all legitimate reasons to sit on the rich end of the curve. They are features, not inefficiencies. And the returns to richness plateau — past a point, more adults per child adds real cost but little additional learning, which is itself a reason to know where that point falls.

The goal of intentional management, then, is not a lower number. It is an owned number. The meaningful distinction is between a school that staffs richly as a funded, deliberate differentiator it can explain to its board and its families — and a school that is simply overstaffed and has never examined the question. Both can post the identical ratio. Only one of them is managing it.

Knowing where you stand: How a Benchmarking for Good No Cost Research Grant Can Help

Intentionality requires a reference point. A raw ratio — students per educator — means little on its own; 5.5 to 1 is rich or lean entirely depending on the fundamentals of educational quality, position design, faculty qualifications among other factors.Benchmarked against a credible peer set, division by division, the number finally answers the question that drives decisions: are we a genuine outlier with a structural anomaly to address, or are we sitting deliberately inside a range we have purposely chosen, after careful study? Both are fine places to be.

Drifting without knowing which one you are is not.

Staffing is the largest commitment a school makes and the clearest expression of what it values. The schools that lead well are not the ones with the leanest ratios or the richest — they are the ones that chose their ratio on purpose, can say why, and revisit it as enrollment, mission, and budget evolve. Staffing by design, not by default. That is the whole of it.

Benchmarking for Good no cost research grants can provide clear visibility of your school’s educational staffing ratios compared to your peer network, division by division--and can put you in touch with relevant role model peer schools. Contact Harry Bloom at harrybloom@benchmarkingforgood.org to explore your school's edibility for a grant.

What Makes a Parent Stop Recommending Their School: “Listening In” on 3,000 Jewish Day School Parent Conversations

By Dr. Harry Bloom, Founder and President, Benchmarking for Good, Inc.

Every parent survey ends the same way: an open box and a quiet invitation to say what you really think. Most families leave it blank. The ones who don’t are telling you something important— and when you gather three thousand of those answers from twenty schools and lay them side by side, a story comes into focus that’s almost impossible to see one comment at a time.

Benchmarking for Good did something simple with those comments. We sorted every parent by how likely they said they were to recommend their school — the enthusiastic, the lukewarm, and the ones who wouldn’t — and then we read what each group actually wrote. The goal was to find the handful of things that separate a family who would advocate for the school to their friends from a family who quietly wouldn’t.

The surprise hiding in the comments

If you simply counted which subjects parents bring up most, teachers and academics would win every time. They fill the comment boxes. It would be the most natural thing in the world to read that and conclude: fix the teaching, sharpen the academics, and the recommendations will follow.

Here’s the catch. The parents who love their school talk about teachers and academics just as much as the ones who don’t. Those topics are simply what everyone discusses when they discuss school — the air everybody breathes, not the thing that divides them. So while they’re the loudest themes in the comments, they barely move the needle on whether a family would recommend the place.

It’s a humbling finding for any school tempted to read its comments by tallying them. You can pour your heart into the subject everyone mentions and watch your recommendation numbers sit perfectly still — because you were working on the backdrop instead of the things that actually decide it.

What actually changes a parent’s mind about recommending their school

When you look at what unhappy parents raise more than happy ones, five themes rise clearly above the rest. Notice that none of them is really about the classroom. They’re about how it feels to be a family at the school.

1. The feeling that a school is slipping. This is the most powerful signal of all. It doesn’t sound like an ordinary gripe — it’s the parent who “used to” love the place, who points to recent leadership changes or a sense that standards have softened. It does the most damage because it quietly turns yesterday’s champions into today’s skeptics.

2. Whether the tuition feels worth it. Unhappy parents raise cost as an issue three to four times as often as happy ones — but listen closely and it’s almost never about the number on the invoice. It’s about value: whether the school feels worth what it asks, and sometimes whether it quietly expects a way of life that families can’t keep up with.

3. Being heard. About one in five unhappy parents mentions communication, and it’s rarely about how many emails the school sends. It’s the parent who reached out about something that mattered and heard nothing back. The wound isn’t silence in general; it’s silence at the moment they needed an answer.

4. A shared sense of mission. Whether the school’s values and religious character fit the family’s — and, just as often, worry about which way that character is drifting. Families want to know the school they chose is still the school their children are in.

5. Trust in leadership. The most-mentioned of the five. The theme is relational, not managerial: a sense that some families or donors get favored, or that leadership grows defensive when a parent raises a concern. Parents forgive a great deal when they trust that the people in charge are fair.

The same story, school after school

None of this is the tale of one or two unhappy buildings. When we looked school by school, these same themes pulled recommendation downward in the large majority of places where parents raised them — the sense of fit, the quality of communication, and trust in leadership each weighed on recommendation in roughly three of every four schools where they came up.

At any single school the effect can look modest, simply because each school has only a few dozen parents who write comments — too few to draw a bold line through on their own. But the direction is strikingly consistent everywhere you look. And that’s the tell. A theme that drags on recommendation across nearly every school isn’t a quirk of one community. It’s telling us something about the field.

Why this is good news

Put it all together and a reassuring picture emerges. Whether parents recommend their school — and with it how families talk about the place and how long they stay — rests less on instructional brilliance, which parents largely take as a given, and more on whether the school feels trustworthy, responsive, fairly priced for what it offers, clear about who it is, and steady in where it’s going.

That’s encouraging, because these are leadership and relationship questions, not multimillion-dollar reinventions of the academic program. Listening well. Answering when a family reaches out. Treating everyone even-handedly. Being honest and transparent. Holding a clear, stable sense of mission. These are things a school can actually work on — and they’re where the loyalty is won.

For a school reading its own comments, the discipline is to weigh what sets unhappy families apart, not what simply comes up most. For funders and network leaders, the fact that the same handful of relational themes surface across very different communities makes a strong case for investing in school leadership and family engagement, not programs alone.

How Benchmarking for Good Can Help

Our no cost research grants in arenas that include parent and student priorities and satisfaction and staff member priorities and satisfaction provide school leaders with the hard data they need to optimize their school’s performance. Contact harrybloom@benchmarkingforgood.org to discuss our research grants and how your school can benefit from them.