Odelia is Prizmah's Director of the Knowledge Center. Learn more about her here.

Data, Ah Data!

What can data do for you and your school?  What types of data are you looking at and thinking about? 

Your school’s enrollment trends? How about fundraising targets or percentage of expenses covered by tuition revenue? Are you using MAP or ERB? Are you thinking about standardized test scores? 

There are so many ways Jewish day schools and yeshivas are collecting, analyzing, making meaning of, and presenting data. Kudos to you—it can be hard work!

As the director of Prizmah’s Knowledge Center, I’m privileged to receive weekly data requests from the field. Here are some of the questions that I’ve been asked by Jewish day schools and yeshivas just this week:

  1. Comparable salary data for principals, assistant principals, development directors, admissions directors and heads of school in New York and Chicago

  2. Field-wide financial aid statistics

  3. Average parent giving

At Prizmah, we recently began a partnership with the National Association for Independent Schools to use their data collection and analysis tool called DASL. DASL is a central component of the Prizmah Knowledge Center’s work to provide resources, data and research about the field of Jewish day schools and yeshivas.

We’re creating a specialized cohort of Jewish schools within DASL so that schools and professionals like you and your peers can easily access field-wide data on financial aid, enrollment and attrition, development, salary, and other financial metrics. The tool allows for customized benchmarking cohorts, too. We plan to publish an aggregate report on all this data that should prove a valuable resource for schools looking for information on issues of financial management. 

If you want to access this data, and data that is relevant to your school in terms of school size, budget size, region, and denominational affiliation, then consider participating in DASL this year. The more schools that participate, the stronger the results that will be generated and the greater their utility for all schools. 

Data collection ends October 9th. Let’s do this, together, b’yachad.

If you are looking for data and resources on affordability and day school finance, check out those sections on our knowledge center. If you can’t find what you’re looking for we’re happy to help, just shoot me an email at [email protected].