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.