What Actually Predicts Faculty Salaries at Jewish Day Schools — And What Doesn’t

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

In our benchmarking analysis of 20 schools located in 14 communities, only four reported using a formal scale that pays teachers uniformly based on experience and credentials. The dominant approach — used exclusively or partially by 16 of the 20 — is individualized negotiation, where compensation is set teacher by teacher by the head of school or principal.

When asked what factors matter most in setting salaries, the schools are nearly unanimous on one thing: 95% rank retaining top performers as their most important priority. After that,

the picture fractures.

• Sticking to the budget is “most important” for 37% and “moderately important” for another 58% — reflecting the perpetual tension between compensation ambition and fiscal reality.

• Being competitive in the local labor market registers as “most important” for 37% and “moderate” for the rest, while being competitive nationally against other day schools is a non-factor — 53% call it “of little importance” and 37% say it matters not at all.

• Ensuring faculty feel fairly compensated, perhaps surprisingly, ranks as only “moderately important” for the majority (58%), with just 21% calling it most important.

• Several schools volunteered that intangible factors — teaching satisfaction, warmth, and family feeling — also guide their approach.

   

What Actually Drives Salary Levels Based on Statistical Analysis?

So what actually drives the salaries that emerge from this largely ad hoc, school-by-school process? We tested a range of institutional characteristics against the compensation data, and found that factors people might assume matter most often don’t — while a couple of structural variables dominate.

The Dataset

Our analysis draws on survey responses from 20 Jewish day schools spanning 14 states, collected between February and November 2024. These schools range from small single-division academies with under 200 students to large K-12 institutions enrolling nearly 1,000. We examined reported General Studies median salaries across divisions, experience levels, and degree types, then tested their relationship to a range of school-level characteristics: enrollment size, total budget, per-student spending, staffing levels, faculty attrition, and local cost of living.

The goal was simple: among the factors that school leaders typically cite when discussing compensation, which ones actually correlate with what teachers earn?

The Two Factors That Truly Matter

Cost of Living is the strongest single predictor of faculty salary (r = 0.64, p = 0.01). Schools in expensive metros — the Five Towns on Long Island, the Boston suburbs, the San Francisco Bay Area — do pay more in raw dollars. For every one-point increase in a metro area’s cost-of-living index, faculty salaries rise roughly $284 on average. This isn’t surprising. What is surprising is the magnitude of the gap between what COL demands and what schools actually deliver: a 10% higher cost of living is associated with only a 5.2% increase in salary. Faculty in high-cost markets are systematically losing purchasing power compared to their peers in more affordable cities.

Surprisingly, student-to-teacher ratio is the second key predictor, and arguably the more actionable one. Once you strip out the effect of geography, staffing intensity becomes the strongest remaining driver of individual salary levels (partial r = -0.59, p = 0.03). Schools that maintain lower ratios — meaning more teachers relative to students — tend to pay those teachers more. This likely reflects an institutional philosophy: schools that invest in small classes are making a deliberate quality play, and competitive compensation is part of that investment. It’s not that small classes cause higher salaries; it’s that both emerge from the same strategic commitment.

When you combine these two variables in a single model, they explain 58% of the variance in faculty salaries across schools (p = 0.008). For a relatively small sample of schools, that’s a remarkably strong result.

What Doesn’t Predict Salaries

Here’s where conventional wisdom breaks down.

Total school budget: essentially zero correlation (r = -0.06). A school with a $20 million budget is no more likely to pay its teachers well than a school running on $4 million. Bigger budgets typically mean bigger schools, which means more mouths to feed — the money gets spread across headcount rather than concentrated in individual paychecks.

Total enrollment: also near zero (r = -0.12). Larger schools don’t pay more. If anything, the slight negative trend suggests that scale doesn’t translate into compensation advantages for faculty. This challenges the assumption that enrollment growth will eventually “fund” better salaries.

Per-student spending: negligible (r = 0.14, not significant). Some of the schools with the highest per-student budgets in our dataset are not the ones paying their teachers the most. Per-student spending captures many things beyond faculty compensation — facilities, programming, financial aid, administration — and its connection to what an individual teacher takes home is weak at best.

Total faculty FTEs: no relationship (r = -0.13). Having more staff doesn’t mean paying them better. In fact, the partial correlation analysis suggests that once you account for COL, schools that manage their headcount more efficiently may actually achieve more competitive individual salaries.

Professional development spending: weakly negative (r = -0.28, not significant). This one stings a little. Schools that invest more in PD per faculty member are not the ones paying higher base salaries. This doesn’t mean PD is wasteful — it may reflect a substitution effect where some schools lean on professional growth opportunities as a partial offset for lower pay, or it may simply be noise in a small sample.

The Attrition Puzzle

Faculty retention is often framed as a compensation issue: pay people well and they’ll stay. Our data complicates this narrative. The raw correlation between attrition rate and salary is actually positive (r = +0.30) — schools with higher turnover report higher salaries. Before that triggers any alarm bells, the explanation is straightforward: high-COL markets create pressure on both fronts. Schools in expensive areas pay more in nominal terms but still can’t fully match the local cost of living, so faculty leave anyway. Once you control for COL, the attrition-salary relationship effectively disappears (partial r = +0.13, not significant).

This finding has important implications for retention strategy. If your school is in a high-cost market and experiencing turnover, raising salaries alone may not solve the problem — because you’re competing not just with other schools but with the entire local labor market and housing costs. Schools in these markets may need to think creatively about non-salary compensation: housing assistance, loan repayment programs, or COL stipends that acknowledge the real economic pressure faculty face.

The Purchasing Power Gap

Perhaps the most striking finding in our analysis is what happens when you adjust salaries for local cost of living. The rankings scramble dramatically. A school paying $57,000 in the Cleveland suburbs delivers more purchasing power ($63,000 adjusted) than a school paying $84,000 in the Five Towns ($53,000 adjusted). A teacher earning $67,000 in Skokie, Illinois takes home more real value than one earning $82,000 on Long Island.

This has direct implications for recruitment. Schools in moderate-cost markets have a compelling pitch if they frame it correctly: Your paycheck may look smaller, but your life will be bigger. Meanwhile, schools in high-cost areas need to confront an uncomfortable reality — their nominal salaries, while higher in absolute terms, may represent some of the lowest real compensation in the Jewish day school ecosystem.

What This Means for School Leaders

Three practical takeaways emerge from this analysis.

First, benchmark on purchasing power, not nominal salary. When your board compares compensation to peer schools, insist on COL-adjusted figures. A $55,000 salary in Beachwood, Ohio treats faculty better than a $65,000 salary in Watertown, Massachusetts. Without this adjustment, schools in affordable markets undervalue their competitive position, and schools in expensive markets overestimate theirs.

Second, recognize that staffing philosophy and compensation philosophy are inseparable. You cannot pursue small class sizes while paying below market. The schools in our dataset that achieve both low student-teacher ratios and competitive salaries are making an integrated strategic bet on quality— and the data suggests it’s a bet worth making.

Third, stop assuming that budget size or enrollment growth will solve compensation challenges. The factors that actually predict salary — geography and staffing intensity — are structural. They require deliberate strategic choices, not simply more revenue. A school that grows enrollment without a clear compensation philosophy will likely end up with more staff earning the same modest salaries, not fewer staff earning competitive ones.

Limitations of this Analysis

This analysis covers 20 schools depending on data availability for each variable — a meaningful sample for the Jewish day school world, but small in absolute statistical terms. More schools will be added in the coming months. Because of this small sample, several correlations that appear substantive in magnitude don’t reach conventional significance thresholds, and we should be cautious about over-interpreting any single finding. The salary data reflects reported medians across experience and degree levels, which may not capture the full distribution at each school. And cost-of-living indices, while the best available proxy for local economic conditions, don’t perfectly reflect the specific financial realities of Jewish communities in each metro area.

What the data does provide is a corrective to some persistent assumptions — and a starting point for more rigorous, evidence-based conversations about faculty compensation in Jewish day schools.

How Benchmarking for Good Can Help Your School

Benchmarking for Good's research grants and customized research can help your school understand your staff's perceptions about your compensation system and build a system that is financially sustainable and attractive to faculty members. Contact Dr. Harry Bloom at harrybloom@benchmarkingforgood.org to discuss your school's needs and our soluitions.