- Harry Bloom
- Feb 24
- 6 min read
By Dr. Harry Bloom, Founder and President, Benchmarking for Good, Inc.

In an era of teacher shortages and rising competition for talent, Jewish day schools face a defining question: what actually makes a school a place where people want to work — and want to tell their friends to work there too?
The intuitive answer — pay them more — turns out to be mostly wrong. Or at least, dramatically incomplete.
Benchmarking for Good’s analysis of staff climate survey data across Jewish day schools reveals a striking pattern: the attributes that most powerfully predict whether a staff member would recommend their school as an employer have almost nothing to do with salary and benefits, and almost everything to do with the daily experience of working there.
What the Data Actually Says
We examined the correlation between 40 school attributes and a single outcome measure: How likely would you be to recommend that a friend or family member work for your school? Using Spearman rank correlation across nearly 1,700 staff respondents, the results were unambiguous.

Every one of the top five — pride, job satisfaction, work environment, open communication, and tools — is an experiential attribute, something a staff member feels in the hallways, the faculty lounge, and the daily rhythm of their work.
Salary competitiveness? It ranked dead last among all satisfaction attributes, with a correlation of just .286. Meaningful, but roughly half the strength of work environment. Benefits competitiveness clustered in the .20–.25 range — statistically significant, but modest in practical terms.
The Stated-vs.-Revealed Preference Gap
Perhaps the most provocative finding involves what staff say matters versus what actually predicts their willingness to recommend.
When asked how important competitive salary is to their choice of employer, staff rated it highly. But the correlation between that stated importance and their actual likelihood to recommend? Essentially zero (ρ = .010, p = .668). The same is true for benefits package importance (ρ = .018, p = .457). Neither relationship reaches statistical significance.
In other words, everyone agrees that salary matters in theory. But in practice, it is not what separates the schools that inspire advocacy from those that don’t.
This isn’t an argument against fair compensation. Staff who feel their salary is uncompetitive are certainly less likely to recommend. But raising pay without addressing the work experience is unlikely to transform a school into an employer of choice. It is necessary but far from sufficient.
What Separates Top-Recommending Schools from the Rest
To move from correlation to practical impact, we divided the 27 schools with relevant data into terciles based on their mean employer recommendation score. The bottom third averaged 3.91 on the 5-point recommend scale; the top third averaged 4.56. What does the staff experience look like in each tier?

Table: % Reporting Highest Satisfaction by Recommendation Tier
% “Very Satisfied” / “Very Proud” · 27 schools

The gaps are consistent and substantial. Across every one of the five attributes, top-tier schools outperform bottom-tier schools by meaningful margins. The widest gap appears in tools for work: 50.0% of staff at top-recommending schools report the highest satisfaction with their tools, compared to just 27.4% at bottom-tier schools — a 23 percentage-point chasm. Pride shows a similar spread at over 21 points.
These aren’t marginal differences. A school where barely a third of staff report the highest satisfaction with their work environment occupies a fundamentally different reality than one where nearly half do. And the stair-step pattern — bottom, middle, top — suggests these relationships are genuinely linear, not threshold effects.
The Architecture of an Employer of Choice
The data points toward a clear hierarchy of what schools should invest in:
First, get the relational foundation right.
The quality of interactions — between staff and students, staff and parents, and among colleagues — forms the bedrock. Staff-parent interaction quality (ρ = .412), staff-student interaction (ρ = .411), and positive culture (ρ = .395) all rank among the strongest drivers. Schools where relationships feel strained or adversarial face an uphill battle no compensation package can solve.
Second, invest in supervisory quality.
Feedback that promotes professional growth (ρ = .396), supervisor support when facing negative feedback from parents (ρ = .396), supervisor appreciation (ρ = .363), and realistic workload expectations (ρ = .352) form a tight cluster of moderate-to-strong predictors. The supervisor relationship is, for many staff, the lens through which they experience the institution. A school can have a beautiful mission statement and a generous benefits package, but if a teacher’s direct supervisor is unsupportive or unrealistic in their expectations, none of that will matter much.
Third, create conditions for professional voice and growth.
Open communication (ρ = .445) and career growth opportunities (ρ = .407) both rank in the top tier. Staff who feel heard — who believe their ideas, concerns, and suggestions are genuinely welcomed — are dramatically more likely to become advocates for the school. This isn’t about suggestion boxes. It’s about a culture where professional voice is structurally embedded, where feedback flows in all directions, and where growth trajectories are visible and supported.
Fourth, provide the tools.
Satisfaction with workplace tools (ρ = .421) ranks surprisingly high — ahead of many relational and supervisory attributes. When teachers lack the curriculum materials, technology, classroom space, or resources they need, it sends an unmistakable signal about how the institution values their work. Conversely, investing in tools is one of the most concrete, actionable steps a school can take, and the data suggests the return on that investment is substantial.
A Note on Pride
The single most powerful satisfaction predictor in our analysis is pride — the extent to which a staff member feels proud to be part of their school. This finding deserves careful attention because pride is not an attribute a school can engineer directly. It is an emergent property. Pride arises when the mission feels real, when the work environment feels supportive, when relationships feel healthy, when growth feels possible.
Schools that chase pride as a branding exercise will miss the point. Schools that build the conditions from which pride naturally emerges will find that advocacy follows.
Implications for School Leadership
For heads of school, board members, and administrative teams, the data suggests a reorientation of effort and attention:
Audit the experience, not just the spreadsheet. Most schools can recite their salary scales and benefits packages. Fewer can articulate, with evidence, how their staff experience communication, supervision, and professional growth on a daily basis. Climate survey data provides that evidence.
Prioritize supervisory development. Given the cluster of supervisor-related attributes in the moderate-to-strong correlation range, investing in the leadership capacity of division heads, department chairs, and direct supervisors may be among the highest-leverage interventions available.
Take open communication seriously. The correlation between communication satisfaction and employer recommendation (ρ = .445) is strong enough to warrant institutional reflection. Are there real channels for upward feedback? Do staff feel safe raising concerns? Is dissent treated as disloyalty or as a resource?
Don’t neglect the basics. Tools, resources, and workspace aren’t glamorous, but they are powerful signals. Every broken copier, outdated textbook, and cramped classroom erodes the sense that the institution takes its staff’s work seriously.
Contextualize compensation. Fair pay matters. Competitive benefits matter. But they are table stakes, not differentiators. The schools that win the talent competition will be the ones that combine reasonable compensation with an extraordinary work experience.
The Bottom Line
Becoming an employer of choice is not primarily a budgetary challenge. It is a cultural one. The schools that staff recommend most enthusiastically are not necessarily the ones that pay the most — they are the ones where people feel proud, supported, heard, and equipped to do meaningful work.
In the current landscape, where every Jewish day school is competing for a limited pool of talented educators, that distinction is not academic. It is existential.
This analysis is based on Benchmarking for Good’s staff climate survey data encompassing nearly 1,700 respondents across 27 Jewish day schools. Statistical relationships reported as Spearman rank correlations; all top-tier findings significant at p < .001. Schools grouped into terciles by mean employer recommendation score
Benchmarking for Good Can Help
Benchmarking for Good research services can help your school gain an understanding of staff priorities and satisfaction and utilize advanced statistical analysis to identify a disciplined pathway to improvement. Contact harrybloom@benchmarkingforgood.org to discuss a tailored solution for your school.
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