So Jews ought to support vouchers—or tuition tax
credits or other programs that would expand school choice. Yet the most prominent Jewish
advocacy organizations are opposed to school choice programs. Organizations like the
American Jewish Congress and the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai Brith do not oppose
Jewish education or separate Jewish schools. But they have been firmly opposed to
government programs to support education in religious schools—even when the support
goes to parents who then can choose what schools are best for their children.
There seem to be two main grounds of opposition. On the one hand, there
is skepticism that many more Jewish parents would send their children to separate Jewish
schools, even if some form of public funding made them more affordable. On the other hand,
there is concern that government aid to—or "entanglement"
with—religious schools would foster a more religious atmosphere in the country, which
would be, in practice, a Christian atmosphere, hence marginalizing to non-Christian
groups. Many Jewish organizations are staunch advocates of public education, seeing it as
a guarantor of a common public culture, which ensures toleration for religious minorities.
These assumptions and concerns are, I believe, misplaced in
contemporary America. But they still need to be confronted. It may be useful, however, to
start with some common ground—on why the encouragement of Jewish schooling would be a
good thing for the Jewish community on its own terms.
Benefits of Separate Schooling
In the two thousand years since Jews have lived in exile from the Land
of Israel, Jewish communities have always organized separate schools for their children to
teach the essentials of Jewish religious practice. Yet in America, Jews have been welcomed
with full citizenship rights and a fully equal status to a degree unmatched perhaps by any
host country in the long history of the Jewish Diaspora. And for perhaps the first time,
too, the Jewish community in America trustingly sent its children off to public schools,
where they received the same instruction as children of other faiths. Most Jewish children
in America receive almost no separate instruction in Jewish religious practice. Most of
those who do receive such instruction do so after school or in Sunday school classes,
where time is short and distractions are many.
In consequence, most American Jews now observe the ritual law quite
imperfectly or not at all. In synagogue worship, the traditional prayers and the readings
from the Torah are in Hebrew, a language which most American Jews, again, know only
imperfectly or not at all. Jews who have received no serious prior instruction are likely
to find the synagogue service bewildering. Certainly, the uninitiated find it hard to take
part and must remain, at best, spectators of a staged ceremony and not full participants
in communal worship.
Surveys in the early 1990s found that the majority of Jews who married
in the previous decade married non-Jews and that conversions of non-Jewish partners were
declining. As one might expect, opinion polls report that the children of intermarriages
regard religion as a matter of private belief or inner feeling—and not something that
requires formal ritual or demonstrative affiliation. Parents who do not establish a Jewish
home cannot expect their children to behave differently when they grow up. The demographic
trends are so disturbing that even the traditionally liberal Jewish advocacy organizations
have recently begun demanding programs to preserve "Jewish continuity."
But the most effective program is Jewish education. Children who
receive a more thorough Jewish education are far better equipped to participate in Jewish
religious practice. So, when they grow up, they tend to take their religious obligations
more seriously and to play a more active or committed role in the Jewish community.
The point should not require documentation but it has, in fact, been
documented. A survey conducted by Mordechai Rimor and Elihu Katz (funded by the Avi Chai
Foundation) found, for example, that 79 per cent of Jewish day school graduates married
other Jews, compared with fewer than half of those who had only received Jewish
instruction in after-school programs.
Does this effect simply reflect the fact that the parents who send
their children to Jewish day schools tend to be more committed to "continuity,"
themselves? A recent survey by Steven M. Cohen sought to control for parental influences
and isolate the separate effect of schools. He found that, among Jewish activities,
"part-time school, youth group, adolescent Israel travel, each make partial
contributions. Day schools, be they Orthodox or not, typically exert much greater
impact."
So why shouldn’t Jews support public policies that would allow
more Jewish children to attend Jewish day schools? Part of the cold response to voucher
schemes seems to reflect a skepticism that there really would be more children in Jewish
day schools even if government policies did make them more affordable. But the skeptical
attitude assumes that all Orthodox families are already sending their children to Jewish
schools and that demand for separate Jewish schools among non-Orthodox Jews will always
remain limited. Both assumptions are highly questionable.
Growing Opportunities
The overwhelming majority of Jewish day schools in the United
States—78 percent at last count—are Orthodox. But it is not true that Orthodox
parents have always sent their children to yeshivas and therefore will always do so, no
matter what the prevailing government policy.
As late as 1945, there were only 69 Jewish day schools in the United
States, with a combined enrollment of only 10,200 students. The growth in Orthodox day
schools in the decades since World War II has been extraordinary. By 1975, there were 425
Orthodox day schools, serving 82,200 students. There are 731 day schools today.
This expansion has occurred despite tremendous financial burden.
Vouchers would ease the tuition burden for parents and may allow schools to expand their
enrollments and improve their facilities. A 1994 report on "Jewish Day Schools in the
United States" sponsored by the Avi Chai Foundation found that day-school enrollment
falls off substantially in higher grades, even for Orthodox schools. A survey of very
traditionalist schools in New York found twice as many students enrolled in first and
second grade as in 12th grade. Why the decline? Cost is clearly a factor, along with some
dissatisfaction at small schools and inadequate facilities—which are related, in
turn, to financial pressures. A voucher of significant size might enable parents to keep
their children in these schools longer. What is more, the schools themselves would enjoy
the added resources that could make them all the more attractive as a viable educational
alternative.
This argument is even stronger—because the potential numbers are
much larger—if we turn to non-Orthodox schools and non-Orthodox families. Although
their enrollment is much smaller, non-Orthodox day schools represent a dramatic success
story in their own right. Prior to 1957, when the Conservative synagogues encouraged the
creation of their own Solomon Schechter Schools, the only Jewish day schools were
Orthodox. Since then, the number of students in non-Orthodox schools has risen to about
50,000. In addition to the Schechter Schools, which seem to serve the large majority of
non-Orthodox day-schoolers, there are now Reform day schools and a network of some 80
"independent" schools not affiliated with any synagogue or denomination.
One reason to expect continuing growth is that, although overall trends
are still dismaying, there is substantial evidence of Jewish commitments deepening among
those who affiliate with Jewish institutions. Growth in Jewish summer camps, like the
Ramah camps sponsored by the Conservative synagogues, has paralleled that of day schools.
After-school Jewish instruction, though enrolling far fewer students than it did in the
1960s, is much less likely to be a once-a-week affair than in the past.
Yet most parents outside Orthodoxy do not now send their children to
Jewish day schools. Though we do not have reliable numbers, enrollment in such
supplementary Jewish programs approaches 300,000, while enrollment of students in
non-Orthodox day schools is estimated at 50,000. Such figures imply that only about 15
percent of the potential market for non-Orthodox day schools is now actually served by
such schools. By contrast, Catholic schools currently enroll 28 per cent of Catholic
children in grades K-8 (according to Church estimates), even though intensive religious
instruction is not as critical to Catholic worship as it is for full participation in
Jewish ritual.
Voucher subsidies might help tip the scales in favor of a Jewish day
school, not only for parents concerned about cost but for those concerned about quality.
The larger the school, the more it can spread its costs and improve its facilities. Size,
moreover, gives an impression of reassuring vigor, just as half-empty classrooms may
reinforce a sense of fragility. Particularly for non-Orthodox parents, Jewish day schools
would become more attractive if they fed into more good Jewish high schools.
Some hint of this can be gleaned from a 1995 survey of Jewish parents
in Seattle, commissioned by the Samis Foundation. One third of the 419 families who did
not currently send their children to a day school said that they were giving the matter
serious consideration. Of these, nearly half said they would be willing to pay as much as
$3,000 for such a school—but less than 20 per cent said they would be willing to pay
more than $5,000. The Samis Foundation then provided assistance to the only Jewish high
school in Seattle so that it could cap its tuition charges at $3,000 per student. The
result was an immediate 34 percent jump in enrollment—from 58 to 78 students. Still,
a school with 78 students looks painfully small. With more assistance, the numbers might
expand still more and make a separate high school seem more inviting to hesitant parents.
Uncommon Schools
Many Jews will readily accept the argument up to this point. But they
will still insist that public assistance to religious schools, even in the form of
vouchers to parents, is wrong because it threatens public education’s ideal of the
common school.
The argument is often phrased in explicitly negative terms. Some Jewish
advocates worry that an expansion of religious education will promote an expansion or
proliferation of religious attachments. Only last year, an official of the American Jewish
Committee remarked at a Baltimore conference on church-state issues that government aid to
religious schools is improper because such schools "tend to proselytize."
When we are talking about private schools, where attendance is entirely
voluntary, reasonable concerns about religious indoctrination in public schools simply do
not apply. Nor is it easy to grasp how indirect government aid to such schools can be seen
as "endorsement" of particular sectarian doctrines, when rival doctrines of many
sects are equally eligible for such assistance. At bottom, then, the concern seems to boil
down to something like this: even if sectarian education is good for the Jews, it might
also be good for the Christians and therefore is bad for the Jews.
But in recent decades, the Catholic Church and major Protestant
denominations have gone to considerable lengths to eliminate or revise traditional
teachings that seemed hostile to Jews. In most American churches, anti-Semitism is not
simply a social taboo but a denial of current religious doctrine. In contemporary America,
there is no body of reliable evidence to substantiate the concern that Christian religious
education will foster intolerance.
Still, public education continues to inspire much Jewish sympathy, as
the foundation of a broader public culture in which Jews can fully participate. This
attitude is understandable—but sadly anachronistic. The public schools that trained
earlier generations of American Jews were the expression of a different America. The
sociologist Nathan Glazer captured the point quite well in a personal reminiscence of his
experience in the public schools in New York City during the 1930s and early 1940s:
"[N]ot a whiff of cultural pluralism was to be found.
Americanization was strong, unselfconscious and self-confident. Although probably
two-thirds of the students in New York’s public schools were Jewish or Italian, no
Jewish or Italian figure was to be found in our texts for literature, for social studies,
for history. All cultures but that of the founding English and its American variant were
ignored, and students were left to assume, if they thought about the matter at all, that
the cultures of their homes and parental homelands were irrelevant or inferior."
In retrospect, one might wonder whether this sort of relentless
"Americanization" was an entirely good thing for the American Jewish community.
But the era of "strong, unselfconscious, self-confident" Americanization is, in
any case, long gone. In the cultural upheavals of the 1960s, public schools were attacked
for promoting a false view of America, in the interests of an oppressive white elite. And
schools were quick to adapt to new views. Glazer emphasizes the continuing gap between
racial minorities and other Americans as a principal factor in fueling demands for
"multiculturalist" approaches. Despite his own concerns about fragmentation and
social division, Glazer has emphasized the "inescapability" of the new approach
in public education. In fact, In We Are All Multiculturalists Now he acknowledges
that "the victory of multiculturalism in the public schools of America" has been
"complete."
Since this ideology of public schools is already promoting limitless
lifestyle options and respect for all differences, it is hard to refute demands for
greater choice by reviving 19th-century slogans about promoting a common culture.
Jewish parents who support public education for their children will
still find many excellent, conventional suburban schools. But the question is whether the
Jewish community has a stake in "protecting" public education by blocking
government vouchers to private and religious alternatives. How much deference should be
given to the vision of a common school, when school authorities around the country are now
licensing more and more diverse school options? Can it really be in the Jewish interest to
see that every sort of diversity has its claim on public support—except religious
diversity?
