The Mandel Foundation has long believed in the importance of Jewish education for thriving North American Jewish communities. And a strong educational ecosystem depends on talented educators choosing to commit themselves to careers in Jewish education. To that end, the Mandel Institute staff has been designing a new program for early career Jewish educators, the Mandel Early Career Educators program. The new program will not replace the current mid-career Educational Leadership Program, but rather supplement it with alternating cohorts. Before rolling out the program later this year, we wanted to share some of the thinking that informed our decision to create this new program.
Our survey of the field of Jewish education affirmed our sense that that there is a dearth of new talent entering the field, particularly in the supplementary school and day school sectors. CASJE’s Career Trajectories Study of Jewish Educators in the United States, for example, concludes that “the staffing challenge is most acute in supplementary schools.” And Prizmah, the network for Jewish days schools, partnered with the Jewish Education Innovation Challenge to convene a working group addressing what they call the “pipeline issue.”
The growing challenge of replenishing Jewish educator roles with new talent has been accompanied by decreased interest and enrollment in general Jewish education advanced degree programs. While noting that some specialized degree programs have seen growth, the CASJE study reports, “most tertiary level institutions have seen a contraction in the number of students graduating with a general degree in Jewish education.” Fewer and fewer young adults, it seems, are willing to foot the bill for full-time residential graduate degree programs in Jewish education. Hebrew Union College, for example, recently decided to pause its Master in Jewish Educational Leadership program due to decreasing enrollment. The result of these trends seems to be that entry level roles, such as religious-school teacher or synagogue youth director, are harder to fill, and that the young professionals filling them are often entering with less training and weaker Jewish literacy. The market may be pushing us to find new models of early career training beyond the residential degree program.
Additionally, we found that the number of high-quality professional development programs intended to support early career educators, retain them in the field, or bring talent into the field, is sparse. The Wexner Foundation recently retired its Wexner Graduate Fellowship/Davidson Scholars Program, a key preprofessional fellowship that attracted talent to the field of Jewish education (along with other sectors of Jewish communal work). While Wexner has launched the Wexner Davidson Fellowship for emerging communal professionals, this program does not have a particular focus on educators. Our plans for the Mandel Early Career Educators Program grow out of this reality.
To complement our field research, we consulted with twenty experienced Jewish educational leaders, beginning with current fellows and recent graduates in our Educational Leadership Program. These informants included an education school dean, religious school directors, founders of educational start-ups, directors of professional development fellowships and leading researchers of Jewish education. We also conducted a series of focus groups with early career Jewish professionals, many of whom are participants in Hillel’s Springboard Fellowship.
The results of these consultations were affirming. Every one of the twenty experienced professional informants agreed that there is demand for a program that retains early career talent in the field of Jewish education. Likewise, the early career educators we spoke with expressed a real thirst for a program like the one we’re planning. Most of them had little contact with talented teachers or directors from other schools, and little sense of the field of Jewish education as a field at all. The vast majority were uncertain whether they would stay in the field. They expressed genuine excitement about the idea of connecting with other talented educators and delving deeply into Jewish content and theories of Jewish education.
The responses of these early career educators align with “Enabling opportunities,” defined as “frameworks and programs designed with the specific intent of translating an already stimulated appetite to work as a Jewish educator into a willingness and ability to be one,” are an important factor in retaining Jewish educators in the field. Jewish educators who have experienced an enabling opportunity are more likely to commit to long-term careers in the field. We hope that this program will serve as a significant enabling opportunity for talented early career educators, inspiring them to long-term, impactful careers in the field.
Our research led us to conclude that there is indeed the space, need, and interest for a new program that lifts up talented early career Jewish educators, keeps them in the field, and empowers them to become the master educators and educational leaders of the future. Although there is still much work to be done in the design of this program, we have made some preliminary decisions about its broad contours. Several early career professionals in the focus groups spoke of a desire for greater Jewish content knowledge, and we believe that Jewish literacy is essential for Jewish educators. Exploring different visions of and approaches to Jewish education is essential for conveying the richness of the field, and for empowering the fellows to develop educational visions of their own. And although fellows will be quite early in their careers, working to develop their leadership capacities can lay the groundwork for a future career of effective leadership. Thus, we anticipate that the new program will be comprised of three curricular strands: Jewish literacy, educational theory and practice, and leadership development.
We intend for the new program to both engage with and draw fellows from a wide range of educational settings, just as our mid-career program does. Fellows might hold such roles as: synagogue youth director; teacher at Jewish afterschool program; year-round Jewish camp employee; Hillel engagement professional; day school Jewish life coordinator or classroom teacher; youth group regional advisor; and more. The new program will not replace the current mid-career Educational Leadership Program, but rather supplement it. In the long run, we plan to alternate cohorts: mid-career cohort, then early-career cohort, then mid-career, and so on. We see great opportunity to build connections between these cohorts and foster a culture of exchange and mentorship within an intergenerational network of educators.
We are very excited about the development and launch of this new program! We hope that as we grow and refine this program, it will become a powerful lever for retaining and developing top talent in the field of Jewish education, thus strengthening the field as a whole. More information about the program, including eligibility requirements, will be available in late spring. If you would like to receive updates about the program, please fill out this brief form.
Jethro Berkman
Director, Educational Leadership Program