Back to School: Jewish Day School in the Lives of Adult Jews

Introduction: Why Study Day-School Parents?

Introduction why study day-school parents? A Different View of Parents and Schools There is something unsettling about the frequent bipolar depiction of the relationship between parents and schools. More often than not, the two parties are portrayed as “adversaries or advocates,” as “partners or protagonists,” or as “enemies or allies” (Crozier 2000; Cutler 2000; Webb and Vulliamy 1993). These multiple dichotomies bespeak an assumption of difference—of parents and schools as “worlds apart,” in Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot’s phrase. The two worlds might be bridged, but without great effort, it seems that they will dangerously collide (Lawrence-Lightfoot 1978). What brings these worlds into overlapping orbit is, of course, children. Children provide the occasion and site for their interaction. Given the source of their connection, it is not surprising that the relationship between parents and schools has been of interest to researchers and policy makers almost entirely in terms of the consequences for children, or, to be precise, insofar as the presence or absence of parents shapes the quality of children’s education. While over the last ten years there has been a proliferation of research literature that explores mothering and parenthood as forms of adult identity, few attempts have been made to connect these states with research on schooling (DiQuinzio 1999; Lewis 1999). Instead, it is as if two assumptions dominate when it comes to parents and schools: first, that most parents have already spent many years in school and are unlikely to find their adult associations with their children’s schools to possess any special importance for their own lives; second, that the role of children’s education in the life of the 1 family possesses little significance in comparison to the role of the family in children’s education. Although in recent years there has been increasing recognition that schools not only function to prepare children for life within particular religious, social, or occupational communities but also may influence the lives of parents, this recognition tends to focus on what may or may not ultimately benefit children. Thus, in the United States, with the emergence of charter schools, magnet schools, and school vouchers as educational options for millions of parents, there has been a modest move toward a more dialectical appreciation of the relationship between parents and their children’s schools (Driscoll 1995; Smrekar 1996). In England, too, with the enactment of legislation establishing new roles for parents as consumers choosing schools and as governors managing schools, there has been a new interest expressed in making sense of the ways parents relate to their children’s schools (Hughes, Wikely, and Nash 1994; Munn 1993). Yet such inquiries have not freed themselves from a paradigm that assumes a more or less unidirectional sequence of cause and effect in the relationship between parents and schools. This paradigm (one that can be traced back to the Coleman Report of 1966, which found that the home environment was of much greater influence on student learning than school-level effects such as organization, resources, and governance) minimizes the consequences of parent involvement in schools in terms of its meaning and significance for parents themselves (Gamoran, Secada, and Marrett 2000). The gap that separates the study of Jewish schooling from the study of adult Jewish lives may be even wider than that in the disciplinary paradigm just described. While there is a venerable (and hotly contested) tradition of sociological inquiry into the impact of different modes of Jewish schooling on adult Jews, the intent of such research has been to consider the impact of Jewish education experienced during one period of time on Jewish identification expressed during another (Barack Fishman 1995; Cohen 1995; Lipset 1994). Usually retrospective in orientation, this research can be likened to a forensic scientist’s attempt to reconstruct an event long past from the scars on a corpse. Similarly, while there is no less a substantial body of ethnographic and anthropological 2 Introduction work that explores the place of various institutions, such as synagogues , charities, community agencies, and families, in the lives of Jewish adults (Furman 1987; Kugelmass 1986; Myerhoff 1979; Prell 1989), the notion that schools may play a significant role for the Jewish adults whose children they educate has been rarely considered, certainly not in the context of a book-length study. The few exceptions to this pattern have been either preliminary or limited in scope (Beck...