An In-depth Study By Dr. Harry Bloom, Founder and President, Benchmarking for Good, Inc. Ask a head of school how faculty salaries get set, and you'll usually hear some version of "it depends." We wanted to know what it depends on. So we asked 23 diverse Jewish day schools — Early Childhood through Upper School — to share how they set pay and what they actually pay. Then we ran the numbers across nine research questions. The picture that emerged is highly pragmatic but one th

By Dr. Harry Bloom, Founder and President, Benchmarking for Good, Inc. What school leaders do or don't know about one of their most important financial and educational drivers can make the difference between a good school and a great one! Data from the field and Benchmarking for Good experience suggest a significant amount of unintentional staff to student ratio variation exists--among schools with similar educational goals. Read the charts this way: dots at the same horizont

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 simp

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 surve

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 t