Making good on a promise he made in this State of the Union speech in January, President George W. Bush convened a summit on faith-based schooling at the Reagan Center on April 24.

At the gathering, officially called the “White House Summit on Inner-City Children and Faith-Based Schools,” thoughts and analyses were offered by community leaders representing a broad swath of America, including Agudath Israel of America’s executive vice president for government and public affairs, Rabbi Chaim Dovid Zwiebel.
 
President Bush took the opportunity of the summit to bemoan the fact that the country’s inner-city faith-based schools are closing “at an alarming rate” and called on Congress and elected officials at the state and local levels to help preserve such schools and extend “lifelines of learning” to the children they serve.

Calling religious schools “a glorious part” of the nation’s history, the President asserted that “it’s in the country’s interest to get beyond the debate of public/private, to recognize this is a critical national asset…”

He went on to note that religious schools not only provide “a good, solid academic foundation for children” but also “help children understand the importance of discipline and character.”  And Mr. Bush reiterated his support for initiatives like the one he calls Pell Grants for Kids, which would grant assistance in various forms to parents of poor children in failing public schools, to enable them to enroll in schools, including religious ones, that can offer them a better chance at educational success.

Agudath Israel’s Rabbi Zwiebel echoed the President’s assessment of faith-based schools as a “critical national asset” and added that they are a “critical familial asset” no less – that they represent a singular opportunity for parents who judge their children in need of an environment that differs from that of the typical public school.  In fact, two earlier speakers had recounted how, while one or more of their children had attended successful public schools, they felt that only a religious school would be an educationally appropriate choice for another of their children.

Rabbi Zwiebel also picked up the President’s theme of support for the “Pell Grants for Children” idea, although he challenged the assumption that support should be limited to parents of children already enrolled in failing public schools.  Agudath Israel has long been at the forefront of defending, in both courtrooms and the arena of public discourse, the idea of “school choice,” the provision of educational vouchers, tuition tax relief and other forms of tangible assistance for all parents of school-age children.  The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that properly constructed educational choice programs are constitutional, and several such programs are functioning in various localities.

The main focus of the Agudath Israel representative’s remarks, though, was on harnessing private sector support for religious schools.

Although “in the abstract,” Rabbi Zwiebel noted, “it might be expected that parents who seek such specialized schooling should be expected to cover the costs… through their tuition payments,” the reality is that “the cost of educating a child is often beyond the means of a tuition-paying parent.”

That is certainly true in the Orthodox Jewish community, he explained, the segment of American Jewry “most heavily invested in Jewish day schools, as Orthodox Jews tend to have a higher than average number of children per family and relatively low family income compared to other segments of the Jewish population.   These demographic realities, he asserted, combined with the “dual curriculum” of religious and general studies programming at Jewish day schools, “make it necessary for most schools to set up generous scholarship funds for needy parents.”

Aside from creative fundraising projects that schools themselves have developed, Rabbi Zwiebel highlighted a number of broader initiatives in the Jewish community.  Among the examples he cited were  programs directed at grassroots donors, like the Kehilla Jewish Education Fund in Chicago, which encourages every member of the community to contribute regularly to the fund and divides the contributions among the city’s nine local Orthodox day schools on a per capita basis; and the “Five Percent Mandate” brainchild of George Hanus in that same community, which encourages Jews to leave five percent of their estates to an endowment fund of a local day school of their choice.

Rabbi Zwiebel also spoke about initiatives like the Avi Chai Foundation’s matching grants program, aimed at those who can afford to offer more substantial assistance to schools; programs that encourage corporate giving, including those that can take advantage of laws that establish tax incentives for such purposes; and a broad variety of  “specialized giving” programs, such as the Fund for Jewish Education’s subsidization of the costs of health and life insurance for teachers in New York-based Jewish schools.

Rabbi Zwiebel suggested that if other faith-based school populations across the country wish to replicate some of the models developed in the Jewish community to encourage private giving, “the first challenge is to foster communal recognition of the critical role” religious schools play in their respective communities.

“If today’s summit,” he concluded, “serves no other purpose but that of stimulating recognition of that vital role, it will already have made an enormous contribution.”