It’s all too easy to complain about the cost of tuition, but it’s important to look at both sides of the issue. JTA’s Jacob Berkman has an excellent piece on the angst of yeshivas and day schools as they cope with skyrocketing costs and increasing demand for scholarships.

The crisis moved the Orthodox Union to hold a recent seminar to search for solutions.

“Education officials say the more than 800 Jewish day schools in the United States, with 200,000-plus students, are in trouble as tuition dollars decrease, the need for financial aid rises and the pool of available philanthropic dollars shrinks,” writes Berkman.

“We are now in an industrywide crisis,” Moshe Bane, the chairman of the board of governors of the Orthodox Union, told the meeting of more than 60 officials from Jewish day schools at the organization’s New York offices.”

While individual schools should be judged on how much bang they give for their buck, no one should look at attendance in a well-run private school as a right that should be handed over for nothing or next to it. The survival of every one of these institutions depends on a thriving partnership between administration and parents, alumni and supporters, since the level of government aid is negligible and the majority of yeshivot are not part of a parent or umbrella organization, in the way that Catholic schools are run by the Church.

Chasidic yeshivot are an exception, with sects like Lubavitch and Satmar running systems that are comparable, or larger than the school systems of many cities. Somehow, they manage to keep tuition low enough for large families to send multiple children there from nursery through high school and beyond. Centralized purchasing is one asset, donated food and texts another, and it is unlikely there are many administrators earning six-figure salaries with generous retirement packages. More likely, these underpaid rabbis view their service as an obligation to the community and their contribution to a system relied on by their children and grandchildren.

The Reform and Conservative movements also have their system of day schools, but enrollment in those schools are a small fraction of the estimated 200,000 kids in Jewish non-public schools.

Most other yeshivas share some resources and expertise and unite on common issues, but are essentially islands unto themselves. Maybe they should look to the example of the corporate world and think about mergers and consolidation. While non-Orthodox schools will never merge with yeshivot, they might start thinking about pooling some resources for secular studies. Some are already talking about holding joint advanced placement classes, according to JTA. A lot more than that can be done.

On Long Island, the Hebrew Academy of Five Towns and Rockaway recently  joined with Rambam Mesivta High School and the Shalhevet girls’ school to form Machon HaTorah, an organization that now runs three unique schools with a common administration, reducing administrative and other costs. This could be a useful model for other schools around the country.

The New York State Board of Regents has approved the charter application for the Hebrew Language Academy Charter School, something that is bound to appeal to a great many Jewish parents.

The Hebrew Language Academy would initially enroll 150 kids and could eventually rise to some 675 K-8 students, with priority for residents of District 22 in Midwood, Mill Basin and Sheepshead Bay.

New York yeshiva administrators will not lose much sleep: Even if several Hebrew charter schools opened in the state the number of students served won’t come close to the more than 100,000 yeshiva pupils in the area alone. This may cause more anxiety in areas where Orthodox-run day schools are the only Jewish game in town.

As I discussed in the post below, the massive growth of yeshiva education in America in the past 50 years has a lot to do with fear of public schools. That is not to question the commitment of a majority of parents who are devoted to investing in full-time, intensive Jewish study for their kids. But when I went to a Brooklyn yeshiva in the 70s, many of my classmates were not Sabbath observant, and many of them openly said they were there because “my parents didn’t want to send me to public school.” The decade prior had been a turbulent era for city schools.

Both the education standards and the safety level of public schools have dramatically increased over the past three decades as more politicians have made it a priority. But the die is cast, and a majority of people who attended yeshivot will want the same for their own kids.

Hebrew charter schools (one is already in business in Florida) change the calculus substantially, allowing a free, high standard education with a heavily Jewish student body, with bare-bones Jewish identity instruction in the form of Hebrew language and culture. Religion is off limits, but even the charter school applicants admit that completely separating Hebrew from its Torah origin is next to impossible.

“The H.L.A. planning team understands fully that no instructor or staff member can in any way encourage or discourage religious devotion in any way on school premises,” says the application as reported by The Times. “We also understand that the full study and exploration of any language necessarily includes references to the rich cultural heritage inextricably tied to that language, including elements touching on religion.”

As in Florida, where the Ben Gamla Academy in Hollywood had to repeatedly modify its curriculum to pass muster, the Hebrew Language Academy will be under the continuous scrutiny of church-state watchdogs. So it’s unlikely students will learn much more about Judaism and than the Hebrew names of holidays or more  about Jewish history and Zionism than the background of the modern Hebrew revival in Israel.

That will still give a leg up to yeshivot and day schools that offer intensive religious instruction and Zionistic history classes even if a dozen Hebrew language charter schools open.

But the question will be how those yeshivot and day schools will fare when Hebrew charter schools help hundreds, if not thousands of marginal families with limited observance, many of them straining to pay tuition, overcome their fear of public education.

And once the idea of secular Jewish education, built more around language than principles and customs, takes hold, backed up by curricula, is it only a matter of time until it becomes the hallmark of new private schools?

The Jewish Week’s Carolyn Slutsky explores the impact in this week’s paper, and gets the reaction of Rabbi Avner German, dean, Be’er Hagolah Institute, a school geared toward Russian immigrants that accepts little or no tuition from a majority of students. It is heavily funded by the Jewish philanthropic world.

“Our mission here is to Americanize these boys and girls,” says the rabbi. “Our mission is then to give them a feeling for where they come from, where their people are from, both culturally and religiously, what is not acceptable is teaching culture in the abstract. Jewish culture we believe is synonymous with the jewish religious traditions, and that you can’t teach in a charter school.

“I truly believe that if they’re exposed to culture in the abstract without it being interwoven with their religious traditions, heritage, with Torah and Mitzvot it’s going to evaporate eventually.”

Email: continuumblog@yahoo.com

After all the years my wife and I have carried  the burden of yeshiva tuition, we never thought we’d see the day we pull one of our children out because of an issue not related to money. But sure enough, because of learning issues that were impeding the progress of one of my kids, we decided an unusual mid-year shift was in order.

What kids who have difficulty meeting grade level expectations need are inclusion classrooms in which they get the help they need in the same setting as the other kids, something few yeshivot are prepared to offer. But that’s a discussion for another post.

Switching a kid from yeshiva to public school is so loaded with sociological, religious and emotional issues that it’s hard to begin describing it. There are few decisions with as many potential ramifications on a family’s Jewish heritage and legacy. Searching on the Internet, I was unable to find much in terms of resources for people who struggle with this dilemma or have taken the plunge. NCSY and Chabad are available with their afterschool programs, and I’ll be assessing and writing about them. 

I have heard numerous people in my circles longingly dream of being relieved of their massive tuition bill, which can rival or exceed housing as their single biggest monthly expense. Often I hear the lament that, if enough Orthodox people would enroll their kids at the same time in public school, they would happily be part of that cohort. But to have their kid isolated, no dice.

What they are really saying is that they would enroll their kids in public school if they could be sure they would have enough observant Jewish friends with whom to fraternize and date. The obvious subtext is the fear public school will be the first step down the road to non-Jewish grandchildren.

But the fact is that much of the Jewish community we know today, including the Orthodox world, is built on public education. Two or three generations back, full-time yeshiva was the exception, rather than the rule, for the vast majority of all Jews.

According to the book “Jewish Day Schools in America,” by Alvin Schiff, published in the 60s, there were 28 yeshivot founded in North America between 1917 and 1939. In 1928, there were 4,290 pupils enrolled in 17 day schools.

Between 1940 and 1963, yeshiva enrollment boomed from 7,700 to 65,400, and from 35 to 306 schools. Today, the number of students is likely to approach a quarter million, says Jewish education expert Marvin Schick, who last counted 210,000 in a detailed survey, and suspects a new figure of 225,000 in the next poll.

Most of today’s yeshivot and day schools have existed in the range of 50-75 years, which coincides with the European immigrant boom of the early to mid-20th century. One of the oldest yeshivot in America, Mesivta Tiferes Jerusalem on the Lower East Side, was founded in 1907 as a Talmud Torah, and for decades it was typical for Orthodox immigrant families to send their children to afternoon ”cheders” or Talmud Torahs after school while getting their full secular education, kindergarten through college, courtesy of the city and state.

“Many Orthodox synagogues had significant Talmud Torah schools connected with them,” says Brandeis University Jewish historian Jonathan Sarna. “There were places where kids went for two or three hours every day and all day Sunday.”

But Sarna notes that many parents viewed these programs as “a way to keep kids out of trouble” in the days before little league and youth groups, and that “only the most studious kids benefited. It was a much weaker Jewish education and , indeed, it was common in Orthodox settings to find lay people with a sophisticated world view but a pediatric knowledge of Judaism.” 

Still, those Jews in large part turned out no less faithful than today’s yeshiva students and their prosperity made it possible to build such landmark institutions as Yeshivah of Flatbush and Ramaz, or the Maimonides School in Boston. They also built up Jewish organizations, neighborhoods and contributed heavily to Israel and other causes. Maybe it was their lack of textual knowledge that spurred them to express connection more through action.

Yeshivot and day schools are overflowing today not only because they are ubiquitous and in large part people can afford them, but because public education has become so stigmatized among observant Jews. And that’s a disservice to those for whom yeshiva should not be the last option, whether because of finances or other, child-related issues.

Preserving our traditions and beliefs for the next generation is a sacred task, but we shouldn’t assume it is incompatible in and of itself with public education. The most important factor is surely what is taught in the home and whether kids are presented with a lifestyle they’ll want to duplicate in their own homes.

It’s in the best interest of Jewish continuity to provide more resources for problem-solving and peer support to those for whom yeshiva education is no longer an option, for whatever reason, but want to stay just as connected as ever to the Jewish community, and to God.