Section archive - Education & Administration

These are trying and unsettling times. Mandatory closures, bans on in-person gatherings, and stay-at-home orders have all radically changed Jewish education across all sectors. CASJE has curated a set of resources below that look at how these changes are testing education in a variety of settings, including: K-12 schooling, after-school learning, early childhood education, and higher education. What key questions and best practices can guide decision-making as we seek to adapt to new circumstances?

In December, Ta’amod: Stand Up! launched its inaugural Train the Trainer program. Ta’amod’s mission is to help Jewish communal institutions develop cultures of safety, respect, and equity. This training equipped a cohort of educators to offer Jewish nonprofits legally compliant harassment prevention training as part of a larger discussion around nurturing respectful workplace culture through a Jewish lens. There is now an emerging national network of professionals certified to deliver training in the Jewish community to nonprofits, foundations, synagogues, and schools.

This paper examines evaluation data use practices of a network of schools implementing an internal, independent, school self-evaluation process for more than a decade. This network currently uses data on its strengths alongside data indicative of its weaknesses, collecting and utilizing both positive and negative data for improvement and accountability purposes. Our findings suggest that identifying strengths is one of the valid goals and outcomes of evaluation, shedding light on its potential to enhance school ethos, and to promote a positive attitude toward evaluation processes and their subsequent effects.

Jewish learning in the context of professional development for Jews working in the “disruptive”, or engagement sector has emerged as a domain into which millions of dollars are invested annually, with very little hard data on how those investments correlate to educational growth. This article considers the Sensibilities Framework, promoted by the Lippman Kanfer Foundation as an initial attempt to theorize this domain, and suggests further avenues for research by theorists of American Jewish education.