The 4 Challenging Parent Segments Requiring Proactive Leadership Attention

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

Ask a head of school which parents are hardest to satisfy and you will get an assortment of answers. The financial aid families. The ones who have been here since Early Childhood and have seen it all. The parents of kids with learning needs. Every school has its folk wisdom about who the difficult constituency is.

We actually analyzed the issue. Drawing upon Benchmarking for Good pooled parent survey responses from 3,102 families across 20 Jewish day schools, we harmonized 34 attributes that parents rate for both importance and satisfaction, and cut the data five ways: by division, by how long the family has been at the school, by number of children enrolled, by share of tuition paid out of pocket, and by whether a child receives learning support. Every finding is corrected for statistical significance corrected.

Spoiler Alert: Most of the folk wisdom did not hold up. What replaced it is more useful.

Your parents do not disagree about what matters

Start with the finding that reframes everything else. Across division, tenure, family size, and tuition burden, not one of the 34 school attributes showed a statistically significant difference in stated importance. Zero. Early Childhood parents and high school parents want the same things. Full-pay families and deep-discount families want the same things. First-year families and eighteen-year veterans want the same things.

This runs against how most schools talk about their parent body. Leadership teams spend real energy debating whether the Middle School crowd cares more about academics while the Lower School crowd cares more about warmth. The data says they care about the same things in about the same order.

What differs between your parent segments is not what they want. It is what they believe they are/are not getting.

That distinction changes the management question. If segments wanted different things, the job would be portfolio design: build a program that serves several distinct constituencies. Because they want the same things, the job is delivery. Somewhere in your school, a group of families believes it is being served worse than the others on attributes everyone agrees are important.

1.School division is where satisfaction is won and lost

Of the five ways we sliced the parent body, division was by far the most powerful. Twenty-four of the 34 attributes differed significantly by division.

The pattern is consistent and it is not flattering to the middle. Early Childhood parents are the most satisfied on nearly everything. Satisfaction declines through Lower School. Middle School is the floor. On positive and nurturing environment, Early Childhood families score +76% on our net promoter satisfaction measure and Middle School families score +41%. On faculty quality, the gap is +45% versus +4%. On social dynamics among students, +60% versus +20%.

Some of this is developmental reality. Middle school is hard on children and therefore hard on their parents, and no school fully escapes that. But a 35-point spread on nurturing environment inside the same school, on the same instrument, in the same year, is not something to write off as adolescence. It is a service gap with an address.

The other division finding worth attention: parents with children in multiple divisions score lowest of all on academic excellence and faculty quality. They are averaging across the whole school, and the average includes whichever division is underperforming. Multi-division families are your most exposed constituency, and they are also, in most schools, your most committed one.

2. The year 8-to-12 family trough is real, and it is specifically about academics

Among families where we could measure tenure, overall satisfaction is highest in years one through three, falls 0.30 points on a five-point scale by years eight through twelve, and then partially recovers past year thirteen.

The interesting part is what erodes. Satisfaction with general studies excellence swings from +33% net promoter score in the first three years to −7% by year twelve. Faculty quality goes from +36% to −2%. Confidence in school leadership goes from +51% to +21%.

Meanwhile the mission attributes hold. Values and character education, religious guidance, and the sense that their children love being Jewish decline far more gently. Long-tenured families are not souring on why they chose you. They are souring on academic delivery and on the administration.

This is diagnostic. A school losing veteran families to general disenchantment has a culture problem. A school seeing this specific pattern has an academic quality and leadership credibility problem, and those are addressable in ways that vague disenchantment is not.

3. Families paying full tuition are the least convinced they are getting value

Here is the folk wisdom that failed most decisively. We tested out-of-pocket tuition share against satisfaction, likelihood to recommend, parent belonging, child belonging, and whether the family had considered leaving.

If anything, families paying the deepest discounts trend somewhat more satisfied, not less.

Families paying full freight are the least convinced they are getting value, scoring +2% on value relative to tuition against +36% for families paying under half. The value perception problem in day schools is concentrated in the households funding the school, not the households receiving support from it.

4. It is the Special needs families who are not getting services who are less satisfied

Here is a surprise. Families receiving learning support are more satisfied than families not receiving support. On support for learning differences, families receiving it score +26% while families not receiving it score −4%.

Read that gap carefully. Where a school's learning support is receiving failing parent grades, it is failing the families who have not asked for it: the ones whose child is struggling in ways that have not yet triggered a formal process, or whose needs sit just below the threshold your services reach. The families inside the system are being served. The families adjacent to it are not.

In summary

Segmentation is not about discovering that different parents want different things. In this dataset, they do not. It is about finding where your delivery is uneven, and the seams run along division, tenure, and family complexity rather than along the demographic lines schools usually watch.

Four questions worth putting to your own data:

1. Where does your Middle School sit relative to your other divisions on nurturing environment and faculty quality? If the gap is 20 points or more, that is your priority.

2. Do your veteran families show the academic and leadership erosion pattern, or a broader decline? The two call for different responses.

3. Are your full-pay families your least convinced on value? If so, your value case is being made to the wrong audience.

4. What are your learning support families saying about the process of getting services, as distinct from the services themselves? The families still waiting outside the system are the ones your data underrepresents.

Benchmarking for Good Can Help

Our no cost research grants can help your school analyze subsegment priorities and satisfaction and help drive one of your school’s most important improvement efforts. 

Contact Dr. Harry Bloom at harrybloom@benchmarkingforgood.org to discuss your school’s needs and our research grant programs. 

Create Your School's Improvement Dashboard with Benchmarking for Good..at No Cost!

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

It's a new school year. Right now, everyone's intentions are positive. The budget is approved, the faculty came back energized, parents are hopeful. But by November, the seeds of the year's real challenges will have surfaced — and you'll be reacting to them instead of getting ahead of them. But there is an alternative: implement Benchmarking for Good's no-cost research suite, so you and your team have the data to be in control.

Why not start the year by gaining a comprehensive understanding of your school's situation--its staff, spending and compensation benchmarking position, its perceived strengths and weaknesses among key stakeholders--- then, identifying a number of high impact improvement areas and developing plans to address them. Measuring a few key things. Having a "dashboard" the leadership team can manage together.

How Benchmarking for Good Fits In

Benchmarking for Good is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. We provide research grants to day schools because the field needs better data, and we do so to grantee schools at no cost. Our Fall/Winter 2026 round is now open in three areas.

Becoming an Employer of Choice--a Magnet for the Best Educators. What your staff values in considering your school an employer of choice, how supported your staff feel, and how they experience supervision and compensation. Evaluating your school's performance relative to that of 34 peer Jewish day schools. Benchmarking your staffing, spending, and compensation against against relevant schools.

Parent Priorities and Satisfaction--an Enabler of Enrollment and Fundraising Growth. Developing a deep understanding of Parents' priorities and satisfaction across every dimension of school life, statistically analyzed to surface those dimensions parents actually prioritize. Benchmarking priorities and performance leveraging data from over 3,000 parent respondents in over 20 Jewish day schools.

Student Priorities and Satisfaction--an Enabler of Student Wellbeing and Advocacy. Students are likely the most under-surveyed constituency in your building. Whether students feel known, challenged, and safe — leading indicators that show up in student voice long before they show up in attrition data. We provide quality insights into what is important and how your school is meeting perceived needs.

Each study comes back as a presentation-ready deck built for your leadership team: benchmarked scores, attribute-level breakdowns, driver analysis, and coded open-ended comments, reported with attention to statistical significance so you can tell a real gap from survey noise. We then identify correlations and other connections across your constituencies and present a composite view of your school's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.

  To assess whether our programs are a good fit for your school we ask that you take a few minutes to complete our Grant Inquiry Form. To do so, please Click here

Below is a Selection of Testimonials from Distinguished Benchmarking for Good Grantees

“Dr. Bloom’s Benchmarking for Good initiative has meaningfully elevated our strategic thinking and sharpened our focus as we prioritize our school's needs and thoughtfully allocate resources. Through his carefully designed surveys, we have a powerful window into how JKHA/RKYHS is experienced and perceived by those who know us best: our students, parents, and faculty. At times, the findings are deeply affirming, reinforcing the strengths that define our school. At other moments, the data challenge us to think differently and push us to grow. Both are invaluable. Listening carefully to our community's voices helps us better understand what our stakeholders value most and what they believe makes JKHA/RKYHS special. We are deeply grateful to Dr. Bloom for his expertise, his thoughtful guidance, and his genuine dedication to the success of our school. His work has helped us see ourselves more clearly and has empowered us to move forward with greater purpose as we continue striving to strengthen the value and impact of a JKHA/RKYHS education.”

Rabbi Eliezer Rubin, Head of School, JKHA/RKYHS Kushner Academy, Livingston, NJ 

"The most important ingredient in an outstanding school is having outstanding faculty. The most important ingredient in having outstanding faculty is a faculty that feels appreciated and supported. Harry Bloom's work provides excellent comparative data to inform schools of where they stand in terms of faculty compensation and overall satisfaction. The data is extremely valuable for schools that want to know where they stand with their faculty in these areas. I highly recommend joining this important study."

Rabbi Yisroel Kaminetsky, Rosh Yeshiva, Hebrew Academy of Long Beach; Menahel, Davis Renov Stahler Yeshiva High School for Boys

“At Westchester Day School, we found incredible value in the Faculty Climate Survey and Parent Survey conducted through Benchmarking for Good. The feedback we received provided clear and actionable insights into both our strengths and areas for growth. What truly sets this process apart is the ability to benchmark our results against similar schools, offering meaningful context that deepens our understanding of the data. These surveys have become an important tool in our strategic planning, helping us set thoughtful goals for both the near and long term. I am grateful to Dr. Harry Bloom and his team for their expertise and highly recommend this process to other schools committed to continuous improvement.”

Rabbi Dani Rockoff, Head of School, Westchester Day School

"Participating in this strategic and potentially transformative initiative will not only contribute to a broader understanding of our schools, but will also provide all of us with valuable benchmarking data. I strongly encourage all of you to join us in this endeavor for the mutual benefit and advancement of all of our schools. Together we can positively shape the future of Jewish Day Schools in America."

Helena Levine, Head of School, Donna Klein Jewish Academy, Boca Raton, Florida

"As someone who has worked with Harry Bloom multiple time over many years at two different schools for the purpose of conducting faculty climate surveys, I can attest to the incredible value of the entire process. The importance of high job satisfaction and a positive culture amongst school faculty is well documented, and a survey like this is one of the best ways to assess that culture and improve upon it in concrete, measurable ways."

Rabbi Adam Englander, Head of School, Hebrew Academy of Long Beach, Woodmere, NY

“The work we embarked on with Harry Bloom and Benchmarking for Good has provided us with invaluable feedback after completing a Faculty Climate Survey and Student Survey. The feedback has provided us with a clear picture of our strengths and opportunities for growth. We have a roadmap to help us set thoughtful and actionable goals as we plan for the future.”

Lisa Stroll, Head of School, Hebrew Academy RASG

We look forward to hearing from you.

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

What 3,000 Day School Parents Tell Us is Important versus What Actually Matters!

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

Ask a parent why they chose your school, and the answer you get is not what actually drives their behavior.

Not because they are hiding anything. Because a survey question about school choice quietly asks a parent to perform a role — the responsible advocate for their child — and they answer from inside it. So they name the things a good parent is supposed to name: safety, academic rigor, the quality of the teachers. Those answers are sincere. They are also the socially expected ones, and the parent giving them has no idea that a different set of factors has been driving their actual behavior all along.

That second set is harder to say out loud. It tends to be about the parent's own experience of the school rather than the child's — whether the family feels welcome, whether calls get returned, whether the tuition still feels worth it. Nobody chooses a school and tells you "because I wanted to belong somewhere." But that is very often what they are keeping score on.

Benchmarking for Good has now pooled parent survey responses across twenty Jewish day schools — 3,028 parents in all. That scale lets us ask a question no single school's survey can answer on its own. Not "what do parents say matters," and not "how satisfied are they," but the harder one sitting between those two: which attributes actually move a parent's willingness to recommend the school to another family?

The gap between the two lists is large, and it is instructive.

What parents say

The stated rankings are almost exactly what you would predict. Across all 3,028 parents, our instrument asked them to rate 35 attributes on how important each was to their choice of school. The top of the list:

Rank	Attribute	% "Very Important"
1	Safe campus environment	90.2%
2	Positive and nurturing environment for students	89.7%
3	Teaching good values and character/middos	88.6%
4	My child(ren) love being Jewish	87.2%
5	Confidence in school leadership	86.8%
6	Teacher attention to individual students' needs	84.1%
7	Positive social dynamics among students	83.6%
8	Hires and supports a first-rate faculty	83.6%
9	Provides effective role models	82.5%
10	Academic excellence in general studies	79.3%
11	Proactive in communication about my child	79.2%
12	Responsive to my communications	79.2%
13	Effective preparation for the next stage	78.7%
14	Strong social community for my child	78.6%
15	Positive administration–student relationship	78.4%
16	Treats student feedback with respect	72.8%
17	Adapts educational methods to individual needs	70.5%
18	Strong religious guidance for students' growth	69.6%
19	Academic excellence in Jewish studies	69.0%
20	Effective mental health guidance	63.9%
21	Effective class sizes	63.2%
22	Promotes my family's desired religious development	62.3%
23	Strong value relative to tuition	61.8%
24	Welcoming environment for our entire family	61.5%
25	Support for students with learning/special needs	60.4%
26	Graduates' track record of next-step admissions	59.5%
27	Strong guidance for next-stage placement	54.7%
28	Curriculum with innovative educational offerings	51.8%
29	Enrichment programs for advanced students	44.8%
30	High quality school facilities	43.7%
31	Variety and quality of arts programming	43.3%
32	Convenient location	38.3%
33	Variety and quality of sports activities	25.3%
34	Strong physical education program	19.6%
35	Strong visual and performing arts programs	14.8%

Safety, warmth, values, teaching quality. It is a sensible list, and it is the list that ends up in most admissions materials.

What actually moves the needle

To find the real drivers, we looked at how satisfaction with each attribute relates to a parent's likelihood of recommending the school. The catch is that satisfied parents rate everything highly — the halo effect makes every attribute look like a driver. So we used a relative weights analysis, which separates each attribute's unique contribution from the shared glow. The result is a set of weights that sum to 100%, showing how much of the recommendation decision each attribute actually accounts for.

The top of that list looks different:

Twenty attributes were rated by essentially every parent in the study, so those are the twenty we could model. Here they are in full, with each one's stated rank alongside for comparison:

Impact rank	Attribute	Share of impact	Stated rank	Gap
1	Welcoming environment for our entire family	9.5%	24	+23
2	Positive and nurturing environment for students	8.3%	2	0
3	Responsive to my communications	7.6%	12	+9
4	Teaching good values and character/middos	7.3%	3	−1
5	Strong value relative to tuition	7.2%	23	+18
6	Promotes my family's desired religious development	6.9%	22	+16
7	Strong religious guidance for students' growth	6.3%	18	+11
8	Proactive in communication about my child	6.0%	11	+3
9	Provides effective role models	5.1%	9	0
10	Effective mental health guidance	4.2%	20	+10
11	Academic excellence in Jewish studies	4.1%	19	+8
12	Teacher attention to individual students' needs	4.1%	6	−6
13	Hires and supports a first-rate faculty	3.9%	8	−5
14	Adapts educational methods to individual needs	3.5%	17	+3
15	Academic excellence in general studies	3.5%	10	−5
16	Treats student feedback with respect	3.4%	16	0
17	Safe campus environment	3.4%	1	−16
18	Curriculum with innovative educational offerings	3.3%	28	+10
19	Effective class sizes	1.4%	21	+2
20	Variety and quality of sports activities	1.1%	33	+13

A positive gap means parents under-report how much the attribute matters to them. A negative gap means they over-report it. Three findings deserve attention.

Safety is a threshold, not a differentiator. Safe campus environment is the single most-cited priority — and it ranks 17th of 20 on actual impact, at 3.4%. This is not a reason to spend less on security. It is a reason to stop leading with it. When 90% of parents call something essential, there is no variation left for it to explain. Failing on safety would be catastrophic; excelling at it earns you nothing you don't already have.

The strongest driver is one parents barely mention. "Welcoming environment for our entire family" ranks 24th on what parents say they were looking for, and first on what actually predicts whether they recommend you. Parents shop for a school for their child. They stay, and they advocate, based on whether the school made a place for them. That is a distinction with real operational consequences — it points at the front office, the parent WhatsApp group, the second-year family nobody has spoken to, not at the curriculum.

Communication is doing heavy lifting. Two separate items — being responsive to parent communications, and being proactive about their child — together account for 13.6% of the impact. That is more than any single attribute in the study. Communication is cheap relative to almost everything else on the list, and it is chronically under-resourced.

Where academics land

This is the finding schools find hardest to hear, so let us be precise about it.

Academic excellence in general studies (79.3% "Very Important"), a first-rate faculty (83.6%), teacher attention (84.1%), and effective class sizes (63.2%) all sit in the bottom half of actual impact — 3.5%, 3.9%, 4.1% and 1.4% respectively.

Academics are not unimportant. They behave the way safety behaves: as table stakes. Parents who chose a day school have already assumed a serious academic program; that assumption is the price of being considered at all. Once inside, what separates a satisfied parent from an advocate is relational, not instructional.

The pattern underneath all of it

Read the gap column top to bottom and a single organizing principle emerges, and it is the most useful thing in this study:

Parents systematically under-report everything about their own family's relationship to the school, and over-report everything about their child's instruction.

Every attribute describing the school's relationship with the family is undervalued when parents are asked directly — a welcoming environment for the whole family (+23 ranks), the family's desired religious development (+16), religious guidance (+11), mental health support (+10), responsiveness to parent communication (+9). Every attribute describing what happens to the child in a classroom is overvalued — safe campus (−16), teacher attention (−6), a first-rate faculty (−5), general studies excellence (−5).

This is the performance we described at the top, showing up in the data. The stated list is a parent answering as their child's advocate. The derived list is a parent answering as themselves — because recommending a school to another family is not a statement about instruction. It is a statement about how the school has treated you, and that is the ledger parents are quietly keeping.

If you take one thing from this research, take this: your parent experience is not a soft complement to your academic program. It is the part that determines whether families advocate for you.

What to do with this

Two suggestions.

1.First, stop treating your stated-importance rankings as a strategic priority list. They are a good description of what parents believe about themselves, and a poor guide to where your next dollar should go.

2.Second, audit your school along the family/child line above. List what you do for the child, and list what you do for the family — the front office, the return phone call, the second-year family nobody has spoken to, the parent who is not on a committee. Most schools find the second list is short, unowned, and unbudgeted. That is where the cheapest available gains are sitting.

Parents will keep telling you it is about the academics and the safety. Believe them about what they value. Watch what they recommend.

About this research. These findings come from Benchmarking for Good's cross-school parent survey database: 3,028 parent respondents across 20 Jewish day schools, spanning early childhood through high school, single-sex and coed, Modern Orthodox, Community, Chabad and Solomon Schechter-affiliated. Stated importance is the share of parents rating an attribute "Very Important" to their choice of school. Derived impact uses a relative weights analysis relating satisfaction on each attribute to willingness to recommend, which together explain roughly half the variance in recommendation.

Partner with Benchmarking for Good

Benchmarking for Good conducts parent, student and faculty survey research, compensation and staffing benchmarking, and strategic planning support for Jewish day schools. Schools interested in seeing where they sit against this 20-school benchmark can reach us at harrybloom@benchmarkingforgood.org.