What 2,500 Parents Just Told Us About Why Families Leave — and What Heads of School Can Actually Do About It

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

When a family seriously considers another school, you usually find out too late — at the exit interview, or never. Across 18 diverse Jewish day schools and 2,546 parent responses in Benchmarking for Good's 2026 peer dataset, 24% of parents told us they had seriously considered enrolling their child in an alternative school within the past 12 months. That's flight risk made visible — and most of it is preventable, not preordained.

The variation across schools is the first thing worth dwelling on. The lowest-flight school in our peer set sits at 7%. The highest sits at 49%. That's not noise — Schools have agency here. Two schools in the same region, serving similar families, can have wildly different flight rates. Something the leadership of one school is doing well, the leadership of another is not.

So we ran the numbers. Of 132 candidate factors — every satisfaction, importance, agreement, and extent question in the parent survey — 77 remained significantly correlated with flight risk after Bonferroni correction for multiple testing. The patterns in those 77 factors point to four clear takeaways for any Head of School.

1. Environment beats program. Every time.

The strongest predictors of flight risk weren't about the curriculum or the test scores. Twelve of the top thirty factors were SCHOOL ENVIRONMENT satisfaction items: religious development, social dynamics among students, confidence in school leadership, role models, sense of community, admin-student relationships. Only five top-thirty factors were SCHOOL PROGRAM items, and even those were about outcomes (next-stage prep, college/yeshiva placement track record) — not classroom content.

Specific academic subjects — math, English, Hebrew, Tanach, science — clustered in the middle of the list at correlations around r = −0.20 to −0.27. Real, but a tier below environment.

The action: When you're allocating your scarce attention this year, the leverage is not in another curriculum review. It's in how the school feels — to a fifth grader walking down the hall, to a parent at pickup, to a family at a Shabbaton. Walk the building during recess. Sit in on Tefilah. Read your school's discipline log with fresh eyes. The texture of community is your retention engine, and it's almost always within a Head of School's direct control.

2. Communication quality is the silent killer.

Three of the top nine predictors involved how the administration communicates with parents about their concerns: caring manner of response (r = −0.40), professionalism of response (r = −0.38), timeliness of response (r = −0.32). These are bigger predictors than almost any academic item. And they describe a problem most schools haven't measured: the parents who consider leaving are the ones who feel they don't get heard when something goes wrong.

A parent emails the office about a social issue. How long until they get a reply? Is the reply genuinely caring, or boilerplate? Does the principal call back, or does it route through three layers? Your answers to those questions explain more about your retention than your AP scores do.

The action: Audit the parent-facing inbox. Set a 24-hour internal Service Level Agreement (SLA) on parent communications. Have someone — not the person who wrote it — read your last 50 admin replies cold and rate them on caring tone. Most schools think they're communicating well; the data says many of them aren't.

3. What parents say they value matters less than what they experience.

This was the most counterintuitive finding. The survey asks parents to rate factors on importance ("how important is academic excellence to you?") and on satisfaction ("how satisfied are you with academic excellence?"). The importance ratings — what parents say they value — were uniformly weak predictors of flight risk. The satisfaction ratings — what parents experience — were the strong ones.

This is liberating, in a way. It means you don't need to chase every parent's stated priority list. What you need is to deliver consistently on the experience side: do parents feel their child belongs? Do they have confidence in the leadership? Is the social environment among students healthy? Do they see role models in the building?

The action: Stop asking parents what they want and then trying to deliver it. Start measuring whether your existing program is being experienced well. The two questions look similar but produce wildly different management priorities.

4. Hashkafic fit is the strongest environment factor — by a margin.

Among items asked across all 18 schools (so n > 2,000 — the most generalizable findings), the top satisfaction predictor of NOT considering alternatives was: "Promotes My Family's Desired Religious Development" (r = −0.35).

This held across the network — modern Orthodox high schools, community day schools, Conservative-affiliated schools, more right-leaning yeshivot. The specific religious orientation didn't matter; what mattered was whether parents felt the school was authentically their fit. Strong religious guidance, effective role models, and family religious development clustered tightly at the top.

The action: Be explicit and honest about your school's hashkafic identity, in admissions and onboarding. The biggest retention risk isn't a parent who disagrees with your approach — it's a parent who thought they were getting something different than what you actually deliver. Hashkafic mismatch is a slow-build resentment that surfaces as flight risk three or four years in.

The bellwether you should already be tracking

If you only watch one number: NPS. "How likely are you to recommend our school to other Jewish families you know?" was the single strongest predictor of flight risk in the entire dataset (r = −0.42). It's also the easiest to measure, hardest to fake, and most sensitive to changes in your school's trajectory. Track it twice a year. Watch the trend, not the absolute number. A 0.5-point drop is your earliest warning signal that something has shifted in how families experience your school.

The bigger picture

The schools at the bottom of our flight-risk distribution — the ones where only 7-15% of parents seriously considered alternatives — aren't necessarily the most academically rigorous in our peer set. They're the ones where parents say they feel heard, where the social environment among students is positive, where leadership inspires confidence, and where religious life feels authentically aligned with family values. Those four things, more than anything else, are what keep families in your seats.

The good news: every one of them is something a Head of School can actually move.

How Benchmarking for Good Can Help

Most of the actions above depend on the same first step: knowing where your school actually stands. Without peer comparison, a 7.2 NPS sounds either good or bad depending on the room. With peer data, you know it sits at the 25th percentile of the network — and you know whether the gap is closing or widening.

Benchmarking for Good's parent climate survey is the source of the dataset behind this post. The instrument captures the full satisfaction and importance batteries analyzed here — religious development, leadership confidence, social dynamics, communication quality, NPS, and the rest — and the school-specific report shows:

• Where your school ranks against the peer network on each predictor of flight risk

• Which factors are statistically significant differentiators (positive or negative) for your school in particular

• How parent experience varies by division, tenure, and child grade — so leadership knows where to focus its attention and resources

• Year-over-year tracking on the metrics that matter most, with NPS as the bellwether

For schools running an active strategic planning process, BFG layers parent data with parallel staff and student climate surveys, faculty compensation benchmarking, staffing-ratio analysis, and full SWOT-driven planning support. Flight risk is rarely about one thing. The diagnostic value comes from seeing how the systems interact: where unhappy faculty cluster in the same divisions as unhappy parents, where the academic offering that scores weakest by parent rating is also weakest by staffing investment, where leadership-confidence gaps trace back to specific structural decisions a board can address.

If any of the findings above resonated — particularly the gap between what parents say they value and what they actually experience, or the outsized role of administrative communication quality — those are precisely the patterns this work is designed to surface. The first step in moving flight risk is being able to see it clearly.

Contact harrybloom@benchmarkingforgood.org to learn how our research can put your school in the driver's seat regarding family retention.

Prescription for Enhancing Teacher Job Satisfaction

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

New Benchmarking for Good network analysis of over 1,400 Jewish day school teachers working in 30 schools reveals that four institutional conditions explain most of the variance in teacher satisfaction

Ask a head of school what makes classroom teaching staff happy, and you will likely hear about salaries, mission, and the joy of working with students. The data tell a more precise — and more actionable — story.

The 2026 BFG Staff Climate Survey captured responses from 1,429 classroom teaching staff — 1,182 teachers, 163 assistant teachers, and 84 specialist teachers (music, art, physical education, and related disciplines) — across 29 Jewish day schools. Using Spearman rank-order correlation analysis, we mapped every measured variable against job satisfaction and against each other. What emerged was not a list of independent levers but a structured causal network — a small number of upstream institutional conditions that drive a single mediating experience, which in turn drives how satisfied classroom staff feel about their work.

That mediating experience is the work environment.

What the data show

Among all survey dimensions measured, work environment satisfaction is the single strongest predictor of teacher job satisfaction across the BFG network, with a Spearman correlation of ρ = 0.538 (p < 0.001, n = 1,176). This is not the work itself — the curriculum, the students, the mission — but the surrounding conditions: the institutional climate a teacher inhabits every day.

Four specific attributes drive that work environment experience, each correlated with it at nearly identical strength:

• Open communication — the degree to which teachers feel they can express ideas and concerns freely (ρ = 0.502)

• Collegial culture — the extent to which colleagues actively support a positive school culture (ρ = 0.481)

• Feedback quality — satisfaction with the quality of feedback that promotes professional growth (ρ = 0.476)

• Tool quality — satisfaction with the resources and tools provided to perform the job (ρ = 0.484)

A second-order finding: the drivers move together

The four institutional conditions are themselves intercorrelated, with Spearman coefficients ranging from ρ = 0.330 (collegial culture ↔ feedback quality) to ρ = 0.479 (feedback quality ↔ tool quality). Schools that are weak in one area tend to be weak in the others. This is not a coincidence — it reflects a common underlying cause. Where institutional leadership is disengaged or reactive, communication suffers, tools go unfunded, feedback processes atrophy, and collegial culture deteriorates in parallel. Conversely, schools with strong leadership investment tend to score well across all four dimensions simultaneously.

This has a practical upside: because the drivers share underlying causes, targeted investment in any one of them tends to pull the others upward. A principal who introduces structured peer feedback mechanisms is not just improving feedback quality — they are also modeling open communication norms and investing in collegial culture.

The prescription

Based on the network structure of these correlations, we recommend four interventions, sequenced from highest-leverage to most targeted:

What this means for school leaders

The single most important implication of this analysis is that teacher job satisfaction is a systemic outcome, not an individual one. It is not primarily determined by how much a given teacher loves their subject, their students, or the school's mission — though those things matter. It is determined by whether the institution around them functions as a place where people feel heard, resourced, supported by colleagues, and given meaningful feedback on their growth.

The prescription is not complicated. It requires sustained attention, administrative courage, and the willingness to invest in conditions that show up on no external ranking — but that determine, more than almost anything else, whether the teachers who build your school each day choose to stay and invite others to join them.

How Benchmarking for Good Can Help

Our research grants enable schools to get valuable actionable information regarding their staff climate, diagnose strengths and impediments to a workforce that is happy with their jobs, and develop a tailored action plan for getting there. Contact harrybloom@benchmarkingforgood.org to discuss how we can work together to ensure your school creates a work environment that is a magnet for the best available teachers.

Most Powerful Driver of Staff Satisfaction in Jewish Day Schools Is Supervision — Is Your School “Leaving It on the Table”?

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

Ask a Jewish day school teacher what they most need from their school to do their best work, and you will not hear "more money" or "better benefits." What you will hear — across schools, roles, and career stages — is some version of: “I want a supervisor who is present, who gives me real feedback, and who helps me grow.”

The 2026 Benchmarking For Good (BFG) Staff Climate Survey, which gathered responses from 1,600 educators and administrators across 29 Jewish day schools, puts hard numbers behind that observation. Of all the things a school can invest in — salaries, benefits, facilities, professional development programs — the quality of supervision is, by a significant margin, the strongest predictor of whether staff are satisfied with their jobs and whether they would recommend their school to a friend or colleague. Schools that supervise well have more satisfied staff, more committed teachers, and more staff who act as enthusiastic ambassadors for their school. Schools that do not are losing ground.

What the data shows: supervision touches everything

Schools where staff feel well-supervised — where supervisors show genuine appreciation, give useful feedback, and hold reasonable expectations — are also the schools where staff report higher job satisfaction, stronger career development, and greater willingness to recommend the school as a place to work. The relationship is not subtle. Schools at the top of the supervision distribution have nearly seven in ten staff who would enthusiastically recommend their school to a friend considering working there. Schools at the bottom have fewer than four in ten.

The gap: one in seven staff feel under-supervised

Across the 29 schools in the BFG network, roughly one in seven staff say they receive too little supervision. That is not a complaint about administrative oversight — it is a signal that they are not getting enough professional engagement, enough feedback, enough of the dialogue with a knowledgeable supervisor that helps them become better at their work.

The variation across schools is striking. At the schools with the strongest supervisory cultures, fewer than 5% of staff report feeling under-supervised. At schools in the bottom third of the supervision distribution, that figure approaches one in five. 

3 things separate schools that supervise well from those that do not

Feedback is specific and growth-oriented, not generic and evaluative. Staff across the network distinguish clearly between supervisors who appreciate them and supervisors who actually help them improve. The schools at the top of the supervision distribution score well on both — but it is the feedback quality scores that most powerfully predict career growth and staff promotion. When teachers feel that the feedback they receive genuinely helps them get better at their work, everything else in the supervisory relationship improves too.

Expectations are realistic and communicated clearly. When supervisors hold staff to expectations that feel unachievable or are never clearly defined, staff do not just feel stressed — they feel unseen. Workload realism is one of the three components of the BFG supervision composite, and it is one of the clearest signals of whether a supervisory relationship is built on genuine knowledge of what staff are actually doing.

Supervision is a regular practice, not an annual event. At schools where staff feel well-supervised, the rate of "too little supervision" complaints is below 5%. That is not achieved through annual reviews. It is achieved through ongoing professional engagement — regular feedback conversations, consistent presence in the work, and a supervisory relationship that staff experience as a resource rather than an obstacle. The schools that have built this culture are seeing it show up across every outcome measure in the survey.

When teachers feel that feedback genuinely helps them grow, staff promotion rates rise, job satisfaction rises, and career growth satisfaction rises. The data across 29 schools points consistently in the same direction.

The opportunity

The most important takeaway from the 2026 BFG Staff Climate Survey is not that supervision is hard — everyone already knows that. It is that supervision is the lever with the highest return. Schools that invest in their supervisory relationships — that give supervisors the time, the training, and the expectation that developing their teachers is a core part of their job — are seeing that investment show up in staff satisfaction, staff retention, and school reputation in ways that salary increases and benefits upgrades simply do not match.

Join the BFG Staff Climate Research Network

The findings in this report are drawn from the 2026 BFG Staff Climate Survey — a rigorous, field-tested instrument administered across 29 Jewish day schools and 1,579 respondents. Participating schools receive not only their own results but full network benchmarking: how their staff's satisfaction, priority ratings, and supervision scores compare to peer schools by type, size, and geography.

What participating schools receive:

School-specific supervision scorecard. Your school's composite supervision score and sub-dimension breakdown — appreciation, feedback quality, and workload realism — benchmarked against the full 29-school network and your peer group.

Correlation-based priority analysis. We identify which satisfaction dimensions are most strongly driving staff promotion likelihood and job satisfaction at your school specifically — so your leadership team is investing in the right levers.

Career growth and retention risk profiling. Career growth is the lowest-rated satisfaction dimension field-wide and the strongest predictor of retention risk at the individual level. Participating schools receive a full breakdown of career growth satisfaction by role, division, and years of experience.

Network-wide tercile benchmarking. See where your school stands relative to the top, middle, and bottom tercile of the BFG network on every dimension — so your board and administration have an honest, externally validated picture of your school's supervisory culture.

BFG's Staff Climate Survey program is designed specifically for Jewish day schools, administered in a format that respects your school's culture and calendar, and analyzed by researchers who understand the unique dual-curriculum context, staffing structures, and mission dynamics of the field. Schools that have participated in multiple survey cycles use the data to track progress on supervision quality over time — turning a one-time snapshot into a longitudinal instrument for institutional improvement.

To Learn More

To learn more or to register your school for the next BFG Staff Climate Survey cycle, contact Dr. Harry Bloom at harrybloom@benchmarkingforgood.org or visit benchmarkingforgood.org. Space in each survey cohort is limited.