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. 

Becoming the Employer of Choice: A Year-End Action Plan for Jewish Day School Heads

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

The Staff climate surveys are in and the building is about to empty. The next ten weeks are the only uninterrupted window you will get to act on what your faculty just told you — before the same cycle begins again in August. Here is where the data says to spend it.

It is June. Your teachers are counting down days, your administrators are closing out budgets, and somewhere in your inbox sits a climate survey report you have been meaning to read closely. Here is the uncomfortable truth about that report: the window to act on it is almost entirely the summer. Once faculty return in August, the year carries you — and the same frustrations that drove your best people to quietly update their résumés this spring will still be waiting for them.

So before the doors close, it is worth asking what, exactly, makes a teacher choose to stay at — or leave — a school. We asked 2,100 educators precisely that: how important thirteen different attributes are to their choice of an employer. The answers point to a short, concrete to-do list for the weeks ahead.

The headline is one most Heads will find clarifying, and a few will find inconvenient.

What your faculty actually weigh. Mean importance on a 1–5 scale. The six attributes staff value most are all relational; the four they value least are the development perks schools spend the most money promoting.

The things that keep your best teachers are mostly free — and almost entirely within your control. Depending on how you have been leading, that is either very good news or a very pointed challenge.

Notice what sits at the top: being respected and supported by a supervisor (4.76), a collegial work environment (4.72), and being treated with respect by students. Salary lands seventh — important to nearly everyone, but not the lever Heads so often reach for first. And notice what sits at the bottom: mentoring, professional development, and career growth, the very things that fill your recruiting brochures. The rest of this note turns that ranking into four things to do before the year ends.

ACTION 01

Audit your supervisors before you touch the salary scale

The single most important attribute to your staff is how their supervisor treats them. That is not a budget line — it is a leadership behavior, and it is uneven across your building in ways your climate data can already show you. Some division heads and department chairs are quietly retaining people; others are quietly losing them.

Do this now:  Pull each supervisor’s climate sub-scores and sit down with them before they leave for the summer. The supervisor who scored low on “appreciation” or “realistic expectations” needs coaching in July, not a quiet word in October once the damage is repeating.

This costs you almost nothing and addresses the thing your faculty rank first. If you make one investment this summer, make it in the people who manage your people.

ACTION 02

Stop spreading development thin — aim it

Mentoring, PD, and career growth rank lowest on average — which tempts a cost-conscious Head to trim them. That would be a mistake. Those low averages hide intense, concentrated demand. The staff who crave development are specific and identifiable, and they are often the people you most want to keep.

Who is hungry for growth. Deviation from the staff-wide average. Assistant Teachers run hot across every attribute, and most of all on the developmental ones at the bottom of the chart.

Assistant Teachers rate expert mentoring a full 0.55 points above classroom teachers and professional development 0.41 points higher — differences that are statistically significant [p < .001] . The same hunger appears among staff who teach across both General and Judaic Studies, who rate mentoring, PD, and career growth significantly higher than single-track colleagues [p < .001]  — a reasonable response to a genuinely harder job.

Do this now:  Redesign next year’s professional development as tiered, not uniform: a structured mentoring track for new, assistant, and dual-curriculum teachers, and a different, lighter-touch offering for veterans who have told you they do not need it. Pair every first-year and dual-curriculum hire with a named mentor before opening day — not in the third week of September.

ACTION 03

Get veteran pay right — quietly, and now

Salary is the great equalizer of this survey. It is the only attribute on which roles do not significantly differ and the only one that does not differ by curricular track. Everyone wants fair pay about equally. But its importance is not flat across a career — it climbs steadily with experience.

What shifts as careers mature. The pull of mentoring and career growth fades with experience, while the importance of fair pay — and of being respected by students — rises.

Salary importance rises from 4.37 among first-year educators to 4.59 among those with fifteen-plus years. Your most experienced teachers — the ones whose departure is hardest and costliest to absorb — are precisely the ones for whom compensation has become non-negotiable.

Do this now:  Pressure-test your veteran salary bands against your real competitors over the summer, while you have the time and before contract season forces a rushed decision. A raise will not, by itself, make you an employer of choice — but quietly falling behind market will cost you the people you can least afford to lose.

ACTION 04

Write a stay case for each career stage

Read the three findings together and a strategy appears. Early-career staff are sold on the promise of growth; veterans are held by fair pay and daily respect; everyone, at every stage, is anchored by the quality of their supervisor and the collegiality around them. A retention plan that treats all faculty identically will overspend on some and underserve others.

Early-career staff buy the promise of growth. Veterans buy fair pay and daily respect. The same school has to make both cases — to the right people, before they decide on their own.

Do this now:  For every staff member you would be sorry to lose, write a single line answering: why would this person choose us again next year?  If the honest answer is “I’m not sure,” you have found your summer priority — and you still have time to change the answer.

Before the year ends: a Head’s checklist

❑  Review every supervisor’s climate sub-scores and schedule a coaching conversation with anyone who scored low — this month.

❑  Redesign PD into a new-teacher track and a veteran track instead of one program for all.

❑  Assign a named mentor to every first-year and dual-curriculum hire, confirmed before opening day.

❑  Benchmark veteran salary bands against real competitors over the summer.

❑  Write a one-line “stay case” for each staff member you would hate to lose; act on the blanks.

❑  Close the loop: tell faculty what the survey said and what you are changing. Being heard is itself a retention act.

The faculty who fill out a climate survey are, in effect, telling you how to keep them. The cost of acting is mostly attention and intention; the cost of waiting is paid in resignation letters you will read in the fall. You have about ten weeks. Spend them on what your people said matters most.

How Benchmarking for Good Can Help

Benchmarking for Good offers no cost Climate survey research grants to schools whose leaders are committed to excellence. Contact harrybloom@benchmarkingforgood.org to discuss your school's eligibility for a Fall/Winter 2026 no cost research grant.

About this analysis.  Based on 2,100 responses to the Benchmarking for Good 2026 Staff Climate Survey. Staff rated thirteen employer attributes on a five-point importance scale (1 = Very Unimportant, 5 = Very Important).

© 2026 Benchmarking for Good, Inc.  · Boca Raton, FL  ·  BFG faculty insights series.

Our Teachers Work Incredibly Hard, So Why Aren't Parents More Impressed?

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

The Dream Versus the Frustrating Reality

It is the dream of every day school Head: a faculty that is genuinely first-rate, and a parent body that knows it. Faculty quality is the single most defensible reason a family pays Jewish day school tuition rather than choosing a public, charter, or other private alternative. When parents are convinced their school's teachers are exceptional, they re-enroll, they tolerate tuition increases, they recommend the school to friends, and they forgive the inevitable operational stumbles. When they are not convinced, none of those things hold.

Yet across the universe of Jewish day schools, that conviction is far from universal. When 2,534 parents at 18 Jewish day schools were asked how satisfied they were with their school's performance on "Hires and Supports a First-Rate Faculty," only 38% answered "Very Satisfied." Another 38% landed at "Somewhat Satisfied" — the polite shrug of a parent who is not yet a believer. Roughly one in eight parents was outright neutral or dissatisfied.

Exemplars of Parent-Perceived Faculty Excellence

Schools that scored significantly higher in terms of parent satisfaction with faculty excellence include

•         Joseph and Florence Mandel Jewish Day School — Pluralistic, K-8, OH

•         JKHA/RKYHS Kushner Hebrew Academy — Modern Orthodox, N-12, NJ

The Correlates of a Perceived “First Rate Faculty”

The school characteristics that statistically correlate in parents’ minds most strongly with "First-Rate Faculty" are:

Correlate of "First-Rate Faculty" rating	Spearman r
Teacher attention to individual student needs	0.62
Educational methods that adapt to each student	0.62
Innovative curriculum	0.60
Treats student feedback with respect	0.56
Proactive communication about my child	0.55

Parents do not, it turns out, read "first-rate faculty" as "the school hires great teachers." They read it as "the school operates in a way that reflects great teaching" — differentiated instruction, individual attention, innovative pedagogy, respect for student voice, and communication about their specific child.

Leader Schools Overdeliver on Every Dimension

The schools that achieve first-rate faculty ratings do not just outperform on the headline item. They outperform on every one of the underlying factors parents weigh into their judgment of faculty quality. Comparing leader schools to the comparison group on top-box (% Very Satisfied) satisfaction across the full driver set:

Driver of Faculty Quality Rating	Leaders	Comparison Schools	Gap
Treats Student Feedback with Respect	60%	36%	+24pp
Teacher Attention to Individual Student	55%	32%	+22pp
Innovative Curriculum	46%	24%	+22pp
Proactive Parent Communication	55%	34%	+21pp
Educational Methods Adapt to Student Needs	43%	24%	+19pp

The Supervision Difference

The parent data tells us "what" leader schools are perceived as delivering. When we examine Benchmarking for Good staff climate research survey data, we gain insight into "how" they do so. Specifically, what does the staff experience look like at the schools where parents are convinced of faculty excellence?

When we compare the staff experience at the three leader schools against the comparison schools, one cluster of items stands out clearly:

•         Supervisor appreciation: 61% of leader-school staff are Very Satisfied with their supervisor's appreciation for their work, vs. 44% at comparison schools — a 16 percentage-point gap (p < 0.001).

•         Growth-oriented feedback: 46% of leader-school staff are Very Satisfied that their supervisor's feedback helps them grow professionally, vs. 34% at comparison schools — a 13 percentage-point gap (p < 0.01).

•         Workload realism: 52% of leader-school staff find their supervisor's workload expectations Very Realistic, vs. 41% at comparison schools — an 11 percentage-point gap (p < 0.05).

These three items are about how managers manage. They are about whether teachers feel noticed, given feedback they can actually use, and protected from unrealistic demands. They are the most actionable levers a head of school directly controls — and they are where the leader schools beat the comparison group most decisively.

Why supervision matters more than money

What this Means for School Leaders

If this analysis is right — and the patterns hold across 2,500 parent responses and nearly 2,000 staff responses then several common board and leadership conversations need to be reframed.

Reframe the head-of-school evaluation conversation. Weight the supervisor practice items — staff satisfaction with supervisor appreciation, growth-oriented feedback, and realistic workload expectations — at least as heavily as compensation competitiveness in any climate dashboard. These are the items most predictive of the parent-side outcome the school is trying to achieve.

Reframe the board priorities conversation. Treat investment in supervisor capability — formal supervisor training, structured feedback frameworks, protected time for supervisor-teacher conversations, calibration across supervisors — as a higher-leverage investment than across-the-board salary increases. Both matter; the first matters more for the outcome most schools are trying to achieve.

Reframe the recruitment pitch. Start leading with the developmental experience: here is how we will help you grow as a teacher, whom you will report to, what feedback you can expect, and how your work will be appreciated. This is what the leader schools deliver, and it is what their staff stay for..

How Benchmarking for Good Can Help

Benchmarking for Good's Staff Climate and Parent surveys offer schools the hard information to assess both satisfaction and the inputs that cause it. Please contact Dr. Harry Bloom at harrybloom@benchmarkingforgood.org to learn how your school can qualify for a research grant during the coming Fall/Winter 2026 season.