Educational State of the Union 5768: Portraits of Learning in the Reform Movement

Ever since Sinai the children of Israel have wanted to know how many we number and upon whom we can count. Since the original census in the Book of Exodus, researchers have had a tendency to focus on one number as the key finding until the next counting. From 600,000 at Sinai to 6,000,000 in the Shoah, from a 47 percent intermarriage rate in the 1990 American Jewish population survey to the 5.2 million and shrinking census of the same community 10 years later, numbers have been the source of dispute and controversy as well as the source of philanthropy and policy. In all of these cases, the context for the findings is complex and demands interpretive nuance and sophistication.

Nevertheless, it is apparently human nature to oversimplify the complex and to fixate on one finding from research, extrapolate from it and ultimately to take action because of it. The “Portraits of Learning Study” is susceptible to this same tendency, even though we will endeavor to provide multiple interpretations of findings that are indeterminate and inconclusive by themselves. The findings we believe to be most consequential today may look very different in a decade or in a generation. We have taken a snapshot of a living, mobile and fluid community, which we hope will prove informative and instructive as we strive to optimize the educational resources that will enable North American Reform Jewry to flourish. With this caveat in mind, which finding will prove initially to be most compelling?

The Babylonian Talmud offers a method of winnowing down information to its essence. In tractate Makot, Rav Simlai distills the 613 mitzvot to a single mitzvah in stages. Following his teaching, I propose to reduce the hundreds of findings from a study of the Reform Movement’s educational system funded by the Feld Family Foundation first to 10, then to three and ultimately to one that I believe should be our collective focus.

1. Nearly half (49 percent) of the children enrolled in URJ congregational schools have at least one parent who did not have a Jewish childhood.

2. Forty-five percent of educational leaders are not sure of or disagree with the proposition that the Reform Movement provides our students with an identity.

3. In 2006, 131,000 students attended URJ congregational schools, representing a growth of 11,000 since the last counting in 1996.

4. Approximately 27,000 children aged 2 to 5 are enrolled in 350 early childhood programs held in URJ congregations.

5. Nineteen percent of educational leaders in Reform congregations have earned the title Reform Jewish Educator.

6. Between 5,000 and 6,000 students attend a Reform Jewish day school.

7. URJ camps devote three hours a day on average to Jewish learning.

8. There are 36,000 active adult learners in URJ congregations.

9. Nearly 90 percent of URJ synagogues sponsor a youth group. On average, URJ youth group events have an attendance of 16 people (9,000 active participants across the URJ).

10. Ninety-two percent of congregations with schools have madrichim (teen teacher assistants).

Any of these 10 findings could be the topic of a synagogue committee or board meeting. How is your congregation doing with respect to outreach to families with children in the school? Is the student population shrinking, stable or growing? Why? What is the status of adult learning in your community? What about the support of a youth group? What is the nature of your teacher assistant program? Do you have an early childhood program? How are families with children in day school integrated into the synagogue culture? Does your educational leader have the Reform Jewish Educator title? These are some of the questions that the research study provokes. It is our hope that this type of inquiry will yield practical fruit in the field of Jewish learning.

The Joint Commission on Lifelong Jewish Learning is the body that brings together a coalition of educational forces in the Reform Movement. It includes representatives from early childhood to senior adulthood and from multiple settings in which Jewish learning takes place. The Commission leadership studied the research and selected three of the 10 findings listed above as having the most significant implications for the present and future of Reform Judaism:

1. The number of children in our education system with at least one parent who did not have a Jewish childhood – 49 percent

2. The retention rate of teens in the Reform education system – 47 percent after bar/bat mitzvah and 32 percent after confirmation

3. The number of active adult learners in URJ congregations – 36,000

Each one of these figures demands exploration and interpretation on at least three levels: personal, congregational and movement-wide.

a. How can each of us respond to the implications of these findings in order to optimize and deepen our own Jewish learning?

b. What can your congregation do to reach and teach people who may be marginal to the community of Jewish learners?

c. What can our professional and volunteer educational leaders do to enable and encourage a culture of lifelong Jewish learning throughout the Reform Movement?

These are not rhetorical questions. I pose them for consideration in your homes and in your congregations. Even these three questions may be overly ambitious. Consequently, I have decided to concentrate on a single finding of “Portraits of Learning,” a finding that is not new but a finding that is antithetical to the phrase “lifelong Jewish learning.” I am referring to the retention rate of our teens after bar/bat mitzvah (47 percent) and after confirmation (32 percent). That means, on average, for every 100 b’nei or b’not mitzvah, there are 47 who remain through confirmation (mostly after grade 10) and 15 students who remain through high school graduation.

The status quo is not inevitable. We need to learn from our successes and perhaps even more from our failures as we seek to increase the size and depth of teen communities in the Reform Movement. Nechemta (a potential source of comfort): Two factors already look promising in retaining teens in Jewish learning: madrichim (teacher assistant) programs and youth groups. We need to do further qualitative research in order to understand the implications of these findings.

The URJ has devoted much of the last decade to building a foundation of lifelong Jewish learning. We generated an early childhood movement epitomized by the birth and growth of ECE-RJ (Early Childhood Educators of Reform Judaism). Cathy Rolland has succeeded Nancy Bossov as our director of Early Childhood Education, further solidifying our presence as supporters and leaders of this most exciting development in Jewish learning. We have built a network of regional educators who have established themselves as exemplars of commitment to Jewish educational excellence. Many of them were instrumental in the initial phase of our most ambitious project—CHAI: Learning for Jewish Life, including Mitkadem for advancing Hebrew language learning. Phase 1 of CHAI is complete (Core Levels 1 through 7 and Mitkadem Ramot 1 through 23), and the resources are being used by more than 40 percent of URJ congregations with schools and more than 50 percent of the students in Grades 1 through 7. We are encouraged and we are proud of this accomplishment, but we are not satisfied with it. It is time for us to address as a Reform Movement the challenge of strengthening the teenage link in the chain of Jewish learning.

Schooling and learning are not equivalent. Other settings contribute to shaping a Jewish identity and building Jewish community. Jewish camping, youth group and Israel experiences represent three powerful and positive elements of Jewish education for teens in the Reform Movement. They all correlate to higher rates of engagement with Jewish communal life in adulthood. However, teens who go to Jewish camps and participate in Jewish youth groups and go on Israel experiences all are subsets of the teens enrolled in a Jewish school. They are complementary educational experiences. They supplement rather than supplant Jewish schooling.

Currently, we are not adding meaningfully to the size and breadth of the Jewish teen community with camps, youth groups and Israel experiences. Instead, we are adding to its strength and depth. We are enriching the Jewish lives of the teens who are most engaged and, thereby unwittingly, exacerbating the gap between the highly Jewishly educated and the poorly Jewishly educated in the teen community. Camps and youth groups and Israel experiences for teens that are not enrolled in Jewish schools should be a priority for the Reform Movement.

While there is only one Reform day school that includes a high school (the Milken Academy in Los Angeles), there is compelling evidence that a day school education during the high school years is a most significant indicator for a lifetime of Jewish learning and living. We need to cultivate the members of the teen community who are most committed to Jewish learning at the same time as we reach out to the least engaged members of that same community. Jewish education is a “both/and” proposition, not an “either/or” proposition. We cannot afford to invest only in the most active teens, as we are doing now, not if we intend to grow a new generation of Reform Jews who share identity-forming experiences during their teenage years.

The facts on the ground and in our schools undercut lifelong Jewish learning. Actually, they make a mockery out of lifelong Jewish learning. I consider the retention rates after bar/bat mitzvah, middle school and confirmation to represent the greatest educational failure in the Reform Movement and, therefore, to be our greatest educational challenge. Together, we can raise significantly the retention rates of students through high school, so that in 2017 we can speak about 50 high school graduates for every 100 b’nei/b’not mitzvah. And, in addition to the high school graduates, another 20 out of every 100 b’nei/b’not mitzvah would be engaged actively in other aspects of a teen Jewish community—youth groups, Israel experiences, camps, madrichim programs.

We cannot claim to be an effective Jewish educational system if more than half of our learners cease their formal Jewish education when they reach puberty. We will have no one other than ourselves as educational leaders, professional and volunteer, if we have enabled congregations that are populated with adult bodies that possess childlike Jewish minds. Perhaps there always will be a number of our people who will opt out of Jewish learning when they get the “service” (pun intended) they desire. They celebrate bar or bat mitzvah as a “right of passage,” an entitlement, instead of a “rite of passage,” a responsibility. But, the collective responsibility of the Jewish community includes making the case for lifelong Jewish learning.

Let us be the guardians of Torah, avodah (sacred service) and g’milut chasadim (acts of justice and love). While there may be overriding financial, social, intellectual, emotional and familial circumstances that require students to leave the Jewish educational system, it is up to the rest of us to do everything in our power to keep every bar and bat mitzvah (a status reached by Jew who lives at least 13 years) connected to the Jewish learning community.

We share a sacred obligation to retain at least another 2,000 students a year through Grade 10 and at least another 1,000 students a year through Grade 12 by 2017. We will need substantial resources—human and financial, in print and online—as well as an awful lot of good will to fulfill this ambitious commitment I am asking all of us to make. But, we are a people of covenants. There are numerous covenants in the Torah, universal and particular, time bound and timeless, collective and personal. We need to renew the covenant of learning with our teenagers. We need them and we need to prove that they need us. To succeed, this project will require movement wide support.

The URJ will need to provide:

1. More and better resources for teens, their teachers and their parents

2. Incentives for congregations to retain more teens and recognition when they succeed

3. Forums for training and supporting middle school and high school teachers in congregational and communal Jewish schools

4. Recognition for rabbis, cantors, educators, teachers, parents and volunteer leaders, as well as teens that dedicate themselves to Jewish learning for teens

5. Opportunities for teens to influence what they learn and how they learn when they make the commitment to be active, ongoing Jewish learners

6. Support for congregations that cooperate and collaborate in building teen learning communities

7. Rewards for quantitative and qualitative excellence in teen Jewish education

To be sure, this project likely will require changes in staffing and training as well as budget at the Union for Reform Judaism, and while I cannot make unilateral or categorical statements in this regard, I promise to work diligently in pursuing the human and financial resources that will enable the Jewish educational system in the Reform Movement to succeed with teens. This promise includes identifying and nurturing educators who share the knowledge, passion and compassion to advance and enhance Jewish teen learning communities. Because a covenant involves pleas as well as promises, I look to potential partners, professional and volunteer leaders, who are willing to act on the following recommendations:

1. Writing and speaking publicly and repeatedly about the unacceptable status quo in which bar or bat mitzvah signifies the end of formal Jewish learning.

2. Expanding budgets for teachers of teens and teen programs because budgets reflect priorities.

3. Devoting more time at staff meetings and board meetings to Jewish teen education, including with teens themselves to learn directly and personally about levels of openness, interest and commitment to Jewish learning.

4. Sacrificing some measure of congregational autonomy and sharing resources, human and financial, for the sake of building Jewish teen communities. Specifically, this means giving up possessive talk of “my kids,” “our teens,” “my teachers” and “our buildings.” All of this rhetoric is counterproductive to retaining teens as active, engaged learners. Indeed, the language is both shortsighted and wrong-headed. Instead of feeling congregationally possessive about teens, we can nurture teen communities from many congregations. Ever since Sinai and Delphi, education has been understood as preparation for life. We may be doing a great disservice to our teens when we limit the size of their community to a single congregation. This aspect of what I am proposing may be the most audacious and heretical, the idea that once someone becomes a bar or bat mitzvah that their membership is more horizontal than vertical, more in association with their peers than with their parents. But there is significant warrant to consider this idea. Zionist youth groups were indispensable to the birth of the State of Israel. The URJ camps have been instrumental (pun intended) in shaping the professional and volunteer leadership of the Reform Movement. This attitude has serious educational, social and economic implications that would require thought before action, but I believe it is a crucial dimension of the project if we are to succeed.

5. Writing and giving grants to teen educational projects.

This endeavor to retain teens in the Reform educational system will be expensive in time and in money, but the prices will be worth the prizes. We need to raise our own disciples, teen leaders of today and adult leaders of tomorrow. The potential reward for taking action is enormous, but the risk of inaction is even greater. I am asking you to join me in making a commitment to Jewish teens. We want and need active teen engagement in Jewish learning.

Get Involved Now

The URJ is seeking representation on 10 task forces by region and size of congregation to make this process inclusive. The task forces will be no larger than 20 people, and they will have varying timelines in which to accomplish the tasks they set out for themselves. To sign up, send your name, email address, congregation and chosen task force number (selected from those listed below) to nseltzer@urj.org by December 31, 2007.

1. Resources for Teens (in print)

2. Resources for Teens (online)

3. Resources for Teens (in person)

4. Teacher Education

5. Parent Education

6. Communication (annual updates on project status)

7. Identifying and Adapting Teen Communities of Excellence (rather than trying to replicate)

8. Teen Assessors (teenagers willing to weigh in on the process and the project of this endeavor)

9. Reality check (identifying other ways the Reform Movement can retain teens as part of the learning community)

10. Planning for the Future (What does it mean to be a lifelong Jewish learner as a Reform Jew? What are the multiple paths available for a Reform Jew who aspires to be a perpetual Jewish learner? What is a realistic curricular map? What can congregations provide? What teachers do we need? What resources do the teachers need?)

I consciously chose to couch this year’s Educational State of the Union in the first-person because as much as this statement is an attempt to be responsible and responsive professionally, it also is very much a personal statement, a commitment to an organization and a movement that have been very kind to me and given me a chance to improve the URJ’s learning system. If we are serious about improving the status quo of Jewish teen education in the Reform Movement, it is time to act. I am asking for your help.

Rabbi Jan Katzew, Ph.D.
Director, URJ Department of Lifelong Jewish Learning
jkatzew@urj.org
212-650-4110