Why Day School Educational Administrators are Happier than the Teachers They Supervise...And What to Do About It

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

In an environment where day schools are struggling with faculty retention and hiring challenges, Benchmarking for Good research points to an important barrier to improvement. Educational Administrators are happier than the teachers they supervise!

Some of this is likely due to the fact that competent educational administrators are in high demand and have more negotiating power with current and prospective employers than do faculty. Or, to the fact that Administrators are more likely than teachers to move from school to school, and, in the process, negotiate better compensation, increased responsibility, and more authority.

Why this Matters

A key consequence of this phenomenon is that administrators may be assuming their faculty are as content with their condition as they are, and miss the danger signs that can lead to faculty attrition and lack of advocacy for potential new teacher hires to work at their school.

The Facts

Based on 2024 Benchmarking for Good surveys of teachers and educational administrators in 15 Jewish day schools employing close to 1000 teachers and 67 Educational Administrators, we learn that, relative to administrators, teachers are significantly:

·         less proud of working at their school

·         less aligned with their school’s mission

·         less happy with their jobs and work environment, career advancement opportunities, and with the openness of communication.

And, in terms of satisfaction with salary, while administrators were far from ecstatic with their salary, their satisfaction soars far above that of faculty members!

Administrators desiring to retain their teachers and attract new faculty should be aware of these discrepancies in satisfaction and plan to take action to maximize retention and enthusiasm.

Taking Action

What kinds of actions can Educational Administrators take to acknowledge the gaps and work to bridge them? Here are just a few ideas to consider:

1. Conduct Faculty Climate research so that you are aware of precise areas of satisfaction and dissatisfaction among your own faculty. Our work to date does suggest that it is not uncommon for school leaders to gain fresh insights into faculty climate from well conducted surveys of their staff members. Knowledge is power!

2. Conduct listening sessions with trusted faculty members who are invested in your school’s success and “have their fingers on the pulses of their colleagues.” Use the sessions both to ensure employees feel heard about perceived problems and to surface reasonable improvement suggestions.

3. Address faculty members’ salary dissatisfaction by advocating with the Board to benchmark your faculty salaries relative to those of competitors. In addition to working to bring your salaries into alignment with benchmarks, take steps to build confidence among the faculty that the system for administering salaries is both educationally sound and equitable.

In Summary

In a landscape where qualified faculty are in short supply and successful retention and recruitment are crucial, it's essential for school administrators to possess a fact-based understanding of faculty satisfaction. Access to timely research that facilitates this understanding is priceless. Benchmarking for Good has amassed considerable experience in conducting and analyzing faculty climate research and invites your school to inquire about our grant programs that provide such research. For further information, please reach out to Dr. Harry Bloom at harrybloom@benchmarkingforgood.org to explore the opportunities in this regard.

Faculty Climate Change in U.S. Jewish Day Schools: A Call to Action

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

The world is obsessed with climate change. Some people are concerned about global warming, others about the severity of the hurricane season. But there is another kind of climate change that may actually have more impact on Jewish life than these other kinds. Three coincidental factors have the potential to combine into a tsunami of trouble for Jewish day schools unless they are addressed. 

• First, the likely retirement flood that American Jewish day schools can expect due to the fact that the significant majority of teachers have been working in the field for many years.

• Second, the relative unhappiness of newer faculty members compared to their more senior colleagues. 

• Third, the deep unhappiness the vast majority of faculty members have with their compensation– both its competitiveness and with how it is administered. This unhappiness weakens the advocacy of current teachers to potential new teachers who might consider the field. 

Considered as a whole, these concerns could rise to the level of crisis unless addressed thoughtfully and urgently by the relevant national and regional organizations that support Jewish day schools and the day school boards of directors who do so locally. 

Recognizing the importance of motivated and qualified faculty to the vitality of Jewish day schools, our nonprofit organization, Benchmarking for Good, conducted faculty climate research during 2024 in 15 diverse Jewish day schools located in 11 states with over 1,000 faculty members. The resulting data are sobering and represent a call to action. 

Here are some highlights: 

1.Day school faculty is long tenured and massive retirements are to be expected: Our research indicates that two-thirds of current faculty have worked in the educational field more than 11 years and nearly half have done so for more than 15 years. Additional data from the National Association of Independent Schools’ (NAIS) DASL database suggests over 20% of faculty have more than 20 years of experience. While it is positive that students get the benefit of lots of experience, in the not too distant future, the system will need to deal with a significant wave of retirements. And, this will occur in an employment environment where fewer and fewer college graduates are choosing teaching as their profession. The NAIS recently reports that whereas five decades ago one in five college degrees were in education, today the figure is just 4%.

2.Teachers with 4-10 years of experience are significantly less satisfied with their jobs than their more senior peers. These mid-tenure faculty members represent the future of the profession and their relative dissatisfaction is a cause of concern because it could lead to unwanted attrition.

Attrition rates in the schools we surveyed averaged 13% but was above 20% in the weakest 1/3 of schools. 

3.Jewish day school faculty are unhappy with the competitiveness of their compensation and about how it is set. 

While compensation is not the most important employment criterion for faculty members—respect from supervisors and a collegial work environment are more important to them—2/3 of faculty indicate their salary level is very important to them. Only half of the faculty we surveyed are satisfied with the competitiveness of their salary. Certainly, the amount of pay is part of the issue—in some cases, faculty believe competing schools pay more. But written comments suggest that many Jewish day school faculty understand that funds to pay them are limited but feel the way the available pool of salary funds are administered is unfair.

In most schools salary administration works as follows. Top performers whose retention is of the utmost concern to administrators are given above average raises. Other faculty who choose to negotiate come next in the pecking order and generally tend to get more than the average raise. Those faculty members who choose not to negotiate divide what is left. This system is rife with inequity and perceived unfairness. Even teachers who are unsure whether other schools would pay them more feel their school is unfairly paying others more. This hurts morale. The following quote from a survey respondent illustrates the point eloquently. 

““Although the school may offer a competitive salary to some employees, there is a lack of equity in that each employee needs to fend for themselves and to push to make sure they earn what they are worth.”

What Needs to Change? 

So, what is needed to ensure Jewish day schools are adequately staffed with qualified teachers in the future? Taking stock of and managing school climate! 

• First, school leaders need to take a hard look at the steps they are taking to retain teachers. This begins with taking the trouble to gather real data via survey research about what makes their school a destination of choice for faculty. 

• Next, they need to understand how well faculty members believe their school is performing on those factors. Anecdotal feelings about how things are going is not sufficient. Then they need to acknowledge areas of weakness and take steps to act on them. 

• Finally, administrators need to recognize that the system of salary administration in our schools is inequitable and breeds a feeling of lack of unfairness for a large percentage of the faculty. Compensation is never the driving factor for teachers but if they are unhappy about other things, negative feelings about how they are compensated could be enough to tip them into retirement or leaving. The answer will not be easy to implement but ultimately is right because it is both equitable and pragmatic. 

  • It starts with transparent standards being set and communicated relative to what doing a good teaching job means. Then consideration needs to be given to the salary value of years of experience and advanced degrees, and also to the fact that certain specialized skills warrant higher salaries. This should all be publicly communicated and when it is, it will help clear the air, as part of the larger climate solution noted above. 

Net net, climate does matter – and while the climate outdoors is important, we cannot lose sight of the faculty climate in our schools. If we take the trouble to do so now, our schools will be employers of choice for faculty in the decades to come.

The State of Jewish Day School Faculty Climate in 2024

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

Please Click to Access the Study