CAJE Tackles Teacher Recruitment Crisis
Posted on 10/29/2021 @ 08:00 AM
If you live long enough, everything old becomes new again— isn’t that the old adage?
Our Jewish community, and others around North America, are experiencing a crisis in teacher recruitment and retention. To education veterans and Jewish communal professionals, this is, of course, nothing new.
What is new is that this summer the first systematic effort in more than 10 years to collect data about the Jewish education workforce was published based on a four-part research study led by Rosov Consulting and the Greenberg Team. The study was led by CASJE (Collaborative for Applied Studies in Jewish Education) at The George Washington University, and entitled the Career Trajectories of Jewish Educators Study. The project was generously funded by the William Davidson Foundation and the Jim Joseph Foundation.
The survey was fielded in 8 communities—one of which was Miami-Dade-- selected to represent a range of sizes of Jewish populations and include diverse geographic regions of the United States. CAJE Miami was instrumental in ensuring our community brought in a good survey response rate.
The good news is that with so many families having moved to Miami in this last year due to the pandemic and parents taking their children from public schools to day schools (among other reasons), enrollment in our funded Jewish day schools is up 12%, the highest it’s been in over 10 years.
The bad news is that the recruitment/ retention crisis in our schools is even worse than when the survey was conducted.
With the data in hand, CAJE is bringing key stakeholders in our community together to determine how we can create actionable, community-wide solutions.
This past Monday, Dr. Arielle Levites, the Managing Director of CASJE, gave a 50-minute presentation of some of the findings to the CAJE Board, with shorter presentations to follow at upcoming board meetings through the year. Seven CAJE Board members were energized by the challenge and volunteered to serve on a task force to address the issues.
In parallel, we will be asking our Day School Principals and Administrators Council to brainstorm ways they believe the community can help them so as to determine potential solutions. And these issues are across the board, thus we will be examining this with our CEPN (Congregational Education Principal’s Network) and our JECN (Jewish Early Childhood Network) to ascertain what they need and what they recommend.
CAJE Miami and the Greater Miami Jewish Federation care deeply about the health and excellence of our schools, investing millions of dollars in Jewish education, which we all acknowledge is the foundation of Jewish life.
Decades ago, CAJE and Federation created the Teacher Fringe Benefits program and a teacher licensing process to compete with the public and non-Jewish private schools as well as enhance the quality of the teachers employed in our schools.
As Rabbi Mitch Malkus, EdD, co-chair of CASJE’s Advisory Board and Head of School at Charles E. Smith Day School of Greater Washington, DC., has noted: “If we want to attract and retain great talent and train individuals appropriately, we must have reliable information about who Jewish educators are, why they enter and leave the profession, and what they require to succeed. Now, anyone in the field can access the Career Trajectories study findings to help elevate the expertise, talent, and professionalism of the Jewish education workforce.”
At CAJE, we are excited to embark on this journey and use the data to help our schools, our educators and ultimately our most precious resource— our children.
Stay tuned for more updates about what the study tells us and what our community can do about it.
