Section archive - Education & Administration

TalentEducators is a global initiative that aims to address the growing challenge of recruiting and retaining high-quality educators in Jewish education. To achieve their goals, they map the demand in Jewish formal and informal education, profile those who can deliver, and ultimately match them successfully while providing them with a support network and mentoring. Their long-term goal is to discover untapped talent, those who with the right training, mentoring and support can become excellent Jewish educators.

The purpose of this study was to better understand how Jewish day school leaders in Toronto perceive non-Orthodox Jewish day school financial sustainability. This multisite case study used a questionnaire, completed by 23 leaders of non-Orthodox Jewish day schools, and one-on-one interviews with all eight heads of school of the non-Orthodox Jewish day schools in Toronto to collect data.

This report touches on multiple themes, including the economic needs of disadvantaged households, how best to maintain the Jewish charitable sector, the importance of supporting local synagogue communities and Jewish schools, how to address the potential harmful effects of the pandemic on the community’s informal educational infrastructure, health measures that should be considered to help protect lives, intracommunal relations, and issues around the use of technology to help support and bolster Jewish life.

As a project of the Jewish Agency for Israel and the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs, TalentEducators is tasked with addressing a problem that has existed for decades in education: a shortage of talented educators. Our mission centers on recruiting, retaining, and supporting Jewish educators and Jewish education, and since March, we have consistently experienced and identified a shift that CASJE’s interim report reveal: that employers in day schools are building their benches and that experiential and early childhood employers are hiring fewer full-time staff. In this article, we would like to contribute a new finding from our experience in the field.