What School Leaders Need to Do to Build a Happy and Supportive Student Body

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

We asked 2,013 students across ten Jewish day high schools how likely they were to recommend their school to other Jewish students. Then we asked them to rate their school on fifty-two attributes — the quality of the science curriculum, the warmth of the environment, the responsiveness of administrators, the strength of the athletics program, and forty-eight more.

The purpose was not to produce a ranking. It was to answer a practical question for heads of school and boards: of everything a school leader controls, what actually produces students who are happy where they are and willing to say so?

The answer is narrower than most leadership agendas, and it points somewhere other than where most schools are spending their energy.

Stop leading with academic rigor

The two attributes most strongly associated with a student's willingness to recommend their school are whether the school offers a positive and nurturing environment, and whether the student simply enjoys going. Both correlate with recommendation at roughly 0.57, and their confidence intervals separate them cleanly from everything ranked below fifth place.

What follows is a tier of nine attributes, statistically indistinguishable from one another, that are almost entirely relational: a strong social community to belong to, excellent role models, teaching good values and building character, a positive social dynamic among students, a positive relationship between administrators and students, a sense of belonging, a welcoming environment for the whole family.

Not one of them is academic.

Subject-level quality is the weakest family in the entire instrument. Satisfaction with English language instruction ranks fifty-second out of fifty-two. Social studies ranks fifty-first. Science ranks forty-eighth. Hebrew language ranks forty-seventh.

A student's satisfaction with how well science is taught tells you roughly half as much about whether they would recommend the school as whether they feel the place is nurturing. Recruitment messaging aimed at students — and the current student word-of-mouth that no marketing budget can buy — should be built accordingly.

Work on seven things, not forty

Correlations invite a costly misreading: that there are a dozen separate levers here and a school should pull all of them. There aren't. These attributes intercorrelate heavily — the average correlation among the top fourteen is 0.52. A student who thinks the environment is nurturing tends also to say the role models are good, the social dynamic is positive, and the values instruction is strong. They may be reporting one underlying impression through fourteen different questions.

So we modeled the top fourteen together to see which carry independent weight. The model explains 45% of the variation in recommendation, and only seven attributes survive with meaningful unique contribution:

1. Students enjoy coming to school — by a wide margin the strongest

2. The environment is positive and nurturing

3. Students feel they belong

4. The school provides strong religious guidance and spiritual growth

5. The Jewish studies program is excellent

6. The school is welcoming to the entire family

7. Administrators create an environment that helps students learn

Role models, social community, values instruction, and treating student feedback with respect all fall away once enjoyment and environment are accounted for. They are not unimportant — they are simply not separate from the thing they are measuring. A leadership agenda with forty initiatives on it is mostly measuring itself.

Protect the Jewish core — it is doing work the general program is not

Items four and five on that list deserve every Jewish day school leader's attention. Religious guidance and Jewish studies quality both rank only mid-pack on raw correlation, yet both hold independent predictive weight when general academics do not. They are the only programmatic attributes in the instrument carrying unique signal.

This cuts against a common strategic instinct. When enrollment pressure mounts, schools often respond by strengthening their general studies competitiveness against secular independent schools — more AP offerings, stronger college placement messaging, upgraded STEM facilities. The data say that is not what makes current students advocates. The distinctively Jewish elements of the school are.

Fix the eleventh-grade cliff

The clearest actionable pattern in the entire dataset is one no school asked us to look for.

Ninth graders average 4.35 on the five-point recommendation scale. Tenth graders average 4.02. By eleventh grade it falls to 3.81, recovering only partially to 3.95 in twelfth. The decline is highly significant and consistent across the network.

Most schools have a serious, well-resourced ninth-grade onboarding program and nothing comparable for upperclassmen. Whatever schools are doing to make new students feel they belong, they are not sustaining it through the middle years — and the students who most influence recruitment conversations with prospective families are precisely the ones at the bottom of that curve.

This is a specific, bounded, solvable problem. It should be on a leadership agenda this year.

Do not mistake "environment matters more" for "instruction doesn't matter"

Across the network, only 11.6% of students say classroom lessons are engaging "a tremendous amount." Only 14.7% say they learn from teacher feedback to that degree. Only 16.4% say the teaching styles offered match their learning needs.

These are not the failures of a few weak schools. On two of these measures we found no statistically significant variation between schools at all. Every school in the network shares the same floor.

Fixing instructional engagement will not, by itself, produce advocates — that is what the correlation evidence says. But it removes a drag that currently sits under every school in the network, and no leader should read this research as permission to leave it alone.

The recommendation numbers are healthier than the engagement numbers: 47.8% of students are very likely to recommend their school, producing a network Net Promoter Score of +23. But 24.8% land at neutral or below. One student in four would not endorse the school they attend to a peer.

Know where your school can actually stand apart

We tested each school against the rest of the network on eight core experience measures, with correction for multiple comparisons. The school-level differences were small. No school scored significantly above its peers on any measure. The only significant findings were on the downside.

The single largest point of differentiation between schools was not academics, environment, or belonging. It was extracurricular activities, where the spread between the highest and lowest school was more than four times the effect size of any other measure.

For a head of school, that is the most encouraging finding in the study. Extracurricular programming is comparatively inexpensive, fast to change, and entirely within a school's control — and it is the one area where deliberate choices show up clearly and unambiguously in how students experience the school.

The leadership agenda this produces

Four commitments follow from the evidence:

Make enjoyment an explicit, measured goal. Not a byproduct of good teaching or a soft value in the mission statement — a tracked outcome with someone accountable for it.

Build an upperclassman experience with the same seriousness as ninth-grade onboarding. The enthusiasm decline from ninth to eleventh grade is the most consistent pattern in the data and the clearest opportunity in it.

Resource Jewish studies and religious guidance as strategic assets, not as the part of the program that competes with general studies for time. They carry independent weight that the general academic program does not.

Use extracurricular programming as your differentiation lever. It is where schools in this network actually separate from one another, and where a modest investment moves a real number.

None of this is as easy to put in a viewbook as an AP course list. It is what students are telling us they actually care about.

How Benchmarking for Good Can Help

Benchmarking for Good is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. We offer qualified day schools no-cost student research grants that put this same instrument and the same analysis in the hands of their own leadership team.

Network-level findings are useful for framing the question. They cannot answer it for your school. The seven attributes that carry independent weight across ten schools may rank differently in your building; your eleventh-grade curve may be steeper or flatter than the network's; your extracurricular program may be the differentiator the network data suggest it can be, or it may be the gap. Only your own students can tell you which.

A grant gives a school its own student data, benchmarked against the network, with the drivers of recommendation identified for that school specifically — so leaders can build their own pathway to a happy and supportive student body rather than working from someone else's.

To explore grant possibilities, contact Harry Bloom at harrybloom@benchmarkingforgood.org.