Where the questions came from

My father sat my older sister and me down and walked us through the full cost of Orthodox life: schools, shul (synagogue) dues, tzedakah (charitable giving), mortgage, cars, camp, utilities. By the time he reached the end of the list the total had climbed to something enormous, a figure that in my tenth grade head sounded like buying a very high end Porsche every single year, and I was sure the accounting had to be finished. Then he added the line that has stayed with me ever since.

And you haven't even bought a roll of toilet paper yet. My father, at the kitchen table

My sister and I still joke about it to this day. He was also, as it turned out, right on the money, literally and to the dollar.

I had already settled on working in schools, and I found myself in a conversation with a woman who could not understand why Jewish schools cost what they cost, or why an Orthodox life carries the price it does. Even at sixteen I tried to walk her through the arithmetic. A special education program is a choice, and it is a choice with a number attached to it. The same goes for a sports program, a second language, a small class size, a second adult in the room. What appears on the tuition bill is the sum of decisions someone made, most of them defensible, almost none of them visible to the families paying for them.

At Yeshiva University I majored in English, minored in architecture, and edited the student paper, and I pointed my honors thesis at the charter school movement under the title "What Works: Best Practices Research and the Charter School Movement." That project sent me deep into the work of Roland Fryer and Eric Hanushek, who built new evidence about education and opportunity by joining datasets nobody had thought to put beside each other and following them over time. I have read both of them closely ever since, and that remains the model I return to, along with a handful of visual economics blogs that showed me what the finished product could look like.

Teach for America put the same arithmetic in front of me directly, teaching English and founding journalism programs in Newark and then in New York, in schools that ran on a lean model and still do. The leanness shows up in the program as much as in the budget. The day school world is now cleaving along a similar line: full freight schools, most of them Modern Orthodox and college preparatory, staffed and programmed accordingly, alongside considerably less expensive schools, still expensive by any ordinary measure, serving the yeshivish community. Much of the distance between those two tuitions reflects a difference in what each has decided to offer rather than any difference in efficiency.

In Baltimore I became a director of curriculum and instruction, working with elementary, middle, and high school principals on hiring, scheduling, and what actually gets taught. I redesigned the high school program and stood up new courses in STEM, computer science, and Advanced Placement, and I watched how fast a schedule and a course catalog turn into a budget. Every offering I wanted to add carried a price, and someone always had to decide whether it was worth paying.

My doctorate, in education and statistics, came from Johns Hopkins, a school that leans hard toward the quantitative, and it left a mark. I took far more statistics than I ever meant to: linear models, ordinal regression, survey methods, statistical inference, and hierarchical linear modeling, which nearly did me in. Along the way I learned to build and manage astronomically large datasets, hundreds of thousands of rows and hundreds of columns, to test my methods rather than trust them, and to work out which analysis a given question actually calls for. My dissertation put those tools on principal job satisfaction across 48 countries and more than 40,000 school leaders, and it trained me in the unglamorous parts of large-scale work: building databases, cleaning them, testing them, and writing up only what they can support.

A large federation hired me to study the microeconomics of its own community, and the two halves of that training finally met. The question was housing. The community had grown quickly, young families were finding it hard to get onto the property ladder, and the federation wanted to know how communal resources might be directed at the problem. Answering it meant working in two registers at once, the quantitative one of prices and incomes and the qualitative one of what families actually believed they could afford.

In Chicago I served as an assistant head of school, running curriculum and professional development and sitting through more than six hundred classroom observations in the first two years alone. Outside the day job I kept collecting stories about affordability, gathering research questions, and assembling datasets that cross the usual boundaries between housing, tuition, salaries, and communal giving. Affordability in Jewish life does not sit in any one of those places. It sits in the space between them, which is exactly the space nobody measures.

Now I sit on the institutional side of the ledger, running a school in Memphis and living inside the give and take between fundraising, tuition, salaries, and programs, watching how fast one of those pulls on the others. The first years have been concrete work: closing a five-year run of deficits with a balanced budget, carrying the school through two accreditation reviews, and helping steer a building campaign and a renaming. My wife spent years working for Jewish federations and nonprofits, as have members of my immediate family, so I have also watched up close how communal money gets raised and distributed and how much our schools lean on that work. Some of that ledger is literal, a folding table or a delivery riding home in the bed of the old truck, which is its own steady argument for keeping it.