I’ve been a Jewish day school teacher for 20 years. I make less money than I did in my 20s
Jewish education is integral to Jewish continuity. So why are teachers paid so little?
Many Jewish day school teachers are living in financial precarity. Graphic by Nora Berman
I began my 20th year of teaching middle school Judaic studies in Brooklyn at a Hebrew day school just after Labor Day. When I entered the profession in 2004, making a career change at the age of 30, my salary was $33,000 a year (about $54,000 in today’s dollars), roughly a third of what I’d made in my previous job as a writer for children’s television.
Two decades, and 400 students later, my salary is still well below what I earned in my single, child-free late 20s as a television writer.
I tell my students all the time that I have the best job in the world. Teaching makes me feel alive — creative, challenged and connected. I am grateful that I am not sitting at a desk in an office, and am able to care for middle schoolers during an exciting and difficult time in their lives. Knowing that I am helping my students grow as human beings in conversation with Jewish texts and values gives me a powerful sense of meaning and joy. But I cannot encourage the next generation of prospective teachers to enter the field, unless they already have a trust fund.
I want us all to acknowledge the truth: If you send your children to day school in NYC or another expensive area, you are benefitting from the involuntary tzedakah of your child’s teachers.
It begs the question: What drew me to Jewish day school education, and why have I stayed? Who would enter a profession, especially in an expensive metropolitan area, that guarantees you will never be able to afford a home or a family, let alone take a vacation?
The only reason I can afford to remain doing what I love is due to a serious accident. When I was 27 years old, I was in a taxi that got hit by a tow truck. The resulting crash shattered bones in both my legs, fractured my elbow and left me with a serious concussion, as well as $800,000 in compensation for my pain and suffering. I could never have taken on the financial insecurity of becoming a Jewish day school teacher without this settlement.
When I look around at my incredibly talented colleagues, I see what my life would be like without the privilege of this financial cushion. Average salaries of American public school educators are low, and for those of us teaching in Jewish day schools, even lower.
Most day school professionals commute from the outer reaches of Brooklyn or Queens, where they can potentially afford a home. Yet the vast majority of my fellow teachers are living with roommates in their mid-30s, some in apartments with no air conditioning, taking extra hours tutoring to make ends meet. A few are supported by their parents or wealthier partners. No one, however, living in New York City can afford to buy a home or have a family on a Jewish day school teacher’s salary alone.
My colleagues are far from the only New Yorkers who struggle with the cost of living in the second-most-expensive city in the United States. We choose to work in Jewish day schools because we are committed to educating Jewish children in the rich depth and complexity of our tradition and culture. We are part of l’dor v’dor — transmitting Jewish values from one generation to the next. A Jewish day school education can be a formative and integral part of the continuance of our people — so why is our labor valued so minimally?
Administrators understand that raising teacher salaries is a critical necessity, but schools cannot solve this problem by themselves. There is no magical money store in the basement; schools are already under-resourced. Increasing tuition, and transferring the problem to the families of our students, is also not a solution. Parents are already struggling to afford the expensive cities in which many Jews live, and I fear that more of them will move their children into public schools in the suburbs rather than go into debt for their Jewish day school education.
There is a straightforward solution: Donors and foundations need to take on the unsexy work of funding endowments and financial aid. “Deep Jewish education has not, at least until the recent past, been top of the list among investments in the Jewish community,” Paul Bernstein, CEO of Prizmah: Center for Jewish Day Schools, told Tablet earlier this year.
It’s not trendy, and it doesn’t come with any cool buzzwords or acronyms. But it is crucial to the survival of Jewish day schools that we be able to recruit and retain high quality teachers with fair pay and adequate benefits. Some private family foundations do fund day schools (which then get their name), but there are no major foundations that subsidize Jewish education completely. I can’t help but imagine the impact the funding from a single Birthright trip would have at my school.
Day school employees should be able to have children and save for retirement without some extraordinary set of financial circumstances. Teachers in metropolitan areas who agree to stay in the profession should have access to low-interest loans so they can afford to buy a home, or schools could explore owning apartments that can be rented out to employees. Synagogues do this for their rabbis and cantors — why can’t day schools similarly acknowledge that finding housing in affluent neighborhoods on a teacher’s salary is impossible?
Pirkei Avot teaches: “If there’s no flour, there’s no Torah.” Morally and practically, paying day school teachers fairly is the right thing to do. The current system relies on Jewish day school teachers being lucky enough to have generational wealth, or sacrificing their own financial wellbeing.
Our financial insecurity subsidizes your children’s education. That is neither fair nor sustainable, and it has to change.
To contact the author, email [email protected].
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