What We May Be Getting Wrong About Philanthropy In Jewish Education

There has been a lot of ink devoted to different ideas for using philanthropic dollars to lower the costs that families bear in paying for their children’s Jewish education. These ideas include raising direct subsidy dollars, raising endowment funds, coordinating estate and life insurance gifts and other ideas in this vein. The problem with all these ideas is that they assume the next generation of schools will look and function in more or less the same way as they do today. The conversation tends to assume that the economic model and structure of schools generally, and Jewish schools in particular, will not change. But there are compelling reasons to consider that we may be on verge of a major shift in the educational industry that will completely reshape the product, content, method of delivery, metrics for success and economies of scale.

On the surface this is hard to imagine. The school as an economic model and the basic material underlying curricula has not changed all that much in the last 100 years. Chances are a young person in high school today is learning the same basic topics in math, science, English, and history that her parents studied. If something hasn’t changed in the system for so long, why would it change now?

But when we consider that nearly every industry has experienced or is poised to undergo significant disruptions as a result of disintermediating technological advances, there is no reason to assume education will be an exception. A growing crescendo of voices has been advancing this idea. To paraphrase two popular thinkers, Sir Ken Robinson and Yuval Noah Harari, the current model of education was built to serve the needs of the industrial revolution.

First, students are sorted and advanced by age, as if the most important purpose of learning was to graduate a new crop of workers each calendar year. Those who can master the material taught before an arbitrary date in June are designated as high performers relative to their peers, opening opportunities to do accumulate credentials and move to the next stage of education. Those who can’t master the material but can muster a passing measure are moved along for a time with the clear message that doors of advancement will eventually be closed. And then there are those for whom the doors are closed almost immediately. You can easily get the feel that we are educating to fill the hierarchy of the industrial machine, from executive to mid-level management to the worker on the factory floor.

To take this one step further, until recently the only way to make education broadly available and economically scalable was to put one teacher in charge of a large group of students. And success needed to be narrowly defined to focus on a standardized curriculum with achievement measured against the other individuals who happened to be born between January 1 and December 31 of the same  year.

To be fair, growing awareness of the multifaceted needs of students has generated large investments in additional personnel and resources to assist the teacher and student with learning. But this has a sort of square peg in a round hole feel to it, as teachers need to maintain fidelity to a fixed curriculum and grading scale while accommodating broadly different learning needs and skill levels. The result is a tug of war between the student conforming to the learning being offered and the school offering the learning an individual student needs.

Schools are also excellent institutions of socialization, and in this regard division by age group makes a lot of sense. Schools take responsibility for more than just knowledge; they form the first communities young people identify with. They are the place where children learn to live with each other, bond over shared ideologies and interests, and conform to the standards of behaviour needed for cooperation and collaboration. But this also has its downside, as again, large investments in student programming, clubs, and activities have stretched students thin and nearly eliminated what was left of adolescent free time.

All these additional investments – adding more educators with broader expertise to serve learning, student programming teams to provide excellent socialization, administrators to coordinate the complexities, and development teams to pay for it all – leaves us with a 100 year old model that has been suped up for today’s children, but comes with a suped up price tag too.

This edifice may be beginning to show cracks. Let’s start with universities, the pinnacle of the educational journey and the primary purpose for our course structures and grading metrics. Until recently, a university served two important purposes in preparing a young person for his or her future. First, it provided access to knowledge and ideas that were otherwise unavailable to the average person. Second, it provided a fertile ground for effective socialization and the skills needed to begin to engage effectively with others. Already, universities have lost their monopoly on the first role. Knowledge and ideas are freely available to anyone with a device, an internet connection, and some self-discipline. Even as universities can still claim a unique role as a socializing force, that place is challenged by a generation growing up on social media and redefining the social landscape.

It’s no wonder tech giants like Google and Facebook don’t seem to care if their engineers have a degree from a prestigious university, or even if they have any degree at all. This is not because they want to foment a rebellion against the monopoly of higher education, but simply because they have learned that a prestigious degree is not nearly as good a signal of success as the internal tests and interview methods they have designed to evaluate talent. What’s to stop other companies from following suit? As the cost of education grows and the amount of freely-available knowledge grows, students are bound to opt for free knowledge and, as such, companies are bound to realize the pool of talent is larger if they don’t narrow their job searches to elite university graduates.

So what does all this mean for the future of Jewish education?

For starters, investment in the future based on today’s school will, I think, amount to throwing good money after bad. Alternatively, I would suggest an investment model built on venture philanthropy and focused on investments in three key areas of development that will facilitate some of the disruptions and infrastructure needed to advance change and bring Jewish families a better product at a lower cost.

I. Artificial Intelligence Supported Online Learning

Imagine if classroom teachers had a machine that could tell them precisely how much focus and attention each student was providing at a given moment during class. This would be an amazing tool. A teacher could quickly remind a student who was fading to come back on task, or ask a provocative question to re-engage the student with the lesson. But ultimately, if the material chosen or method of instruction fails to engage the student, it’s only a matter of time before attention slips away again. Instead, what if the teacher could draw on thousands of available lessons and methods of delivery and provide individual packages to each student all while monitoring their attention in order to determine which content and  method best suits their learning style and interests? Of course a human teacher couldn’t possibly do that. However, a computer algorithm with a biometric eye sensor built into the screen camera could conceivably have no problem providing this customized educational feedback.

This type of development could not only cut back on the expense of teachers, administrators, and student support professionals, but it could achieve far better learning outcomes and superior diagnostics. Until this point, the best educational assessment can only identify the psycho-educational issues that may interfere with the delivery of standard curricular content. But it can not also provide the precise lesson and teaching style to mitigate those issues with immediate and ongoing measures of successful implementation. An AI driven online education could easily do everything from the educational assessment to solving for a student’s particular learning needs.

II. Significant Increases in Content Development for Judaic Studies

Online education only becomes a differentiator in educational outcomes when it can outperform a human teacher in providing customized and creative content. Right now if I wanted to learn about the French Revolution I could run a search and there would be hundreds of lesson and  videos instantly available to review, including videos with excellent production value that can rival the most charismatic history class. Alternatively, if I wanted to learn the first sugya in Sanhedrin, there is some content online, but few video lessons and nothing that would come close to being in class with an excellent teacher.

The Jewish community does not lack great educators. An exceptional Gemara teacher with a talented production team could design a “Crash Course” type series on the first perek of Sanhedrin for about one hundred thousand dollars and instantly provide superior content for hundreds of Jewish schools around the world with no ongoing expense.

III. Decoupling the Social from the Academic

Jewish schools often function as an awkward marriage between camp and school. As far as I can tell, this is a marriage of convenience. If our children are going to spend the better part of their days in one place because of the demands of a dual curriculum, and they are already grouped with their peers and friends, then it makes the most sense to provide trips, shabbatonim, colour war, chagigot, etc. during that time. These programs are critical in cultivating a sense of communal identity and socialization and providing our young people Jewish purpose and pride. But they don’t really have anything to do with the goals of an academic program designed to build certain aspects of knowledge and critical thinking skills. Colour War will not do much to help a student decode a pasuk and understand the positions of Rashi and Ramban, much as that knowledge will not help them lead an incredible cheer. But these goals will be forced to compete for time and attention packed together in a long and overscheduled day.

An alternative model could separate these two agendas with time to spare. An AI driven online educational program not hindered by the skill-gaps in traditional age groupings, or the divided attention problems of frontal teaching, will presumably afford students the opportunity to learn in far less time. Imagine Jewish High School students finishing their daily studies at 3pm without homework and ready to head over to their local shul, Bnei Akiva, N.C.S.Y. or a new Jewish youth program for hours of activities and socialization unencumbered by periods and bells.

Investments in these three areas could lay the groundwork and procure the path for Jewish education to undergo transformative changes ahead of the curve.

It may be time to rethink how we solicit and donate within Jewish education. Investing long term resources today to prop up yesterday’s school is missing the point. The changes are happening regardless of what our community does, but targeted investment in these trends could accelerate, focus and enhance the educational and economic benefits for our community.