Which Jewish communities prioritize their day schools?

The list is not the one you would guess

Every federation files a public list of the grants it makes. We read all of them, sorted the Jewish day schools out by name, and read each federation together with its own foundation arm. That gives 35 communities. The measure is simple: out of every dollar a community granted to anyone, how much went to its day schools.

In the chart below each row is one community, ranked by where it stands today. The pale dot is its share in 2014 to 2016 and the yellow dot is 2022 to 2024, and the line connecting them carries the direction: green where the community raised its schools' share over the decade, pink where it pulled back. The number in the right-hand column is the community's Jewish population.

Read down the population column as you go.

Small communities give four times as much per person

Share of a budget can mislead, because a small federation has a small budget. The fairer test is dollars, divided by the number of Jews in the community, so a big city and a small one can be compared on the same footing.

One definition matters here. The denominator is every Jewish resident of the community, every man, woman and child, whether or not anyone in their household is enrolled anywhere. It is a measure of communal effort, of what the whole community carries per member. What the money amounts to per enrolled student, a much larger figure, is the subject of the section after this one.

The chart below plots every one of the 35 communities as a dot, sorted into three columns by Jewish population. Height is day school spending per Jewish resident per year, in today's dollars. The yellow stroke through each column is that group's median community.

Compare the yellow strokes first, then find Buffalo before you leave the first column.

One honest correction to make here. This is not new, and it is not a surge. The rank correlation between a community's population and its per-person school spending is minus 0.46 today, the strongest relationship anywhere in this data, and a decade ago it was minus 0.56, slightly stronger still. If anything the small-community advantage has eased. The right description is that this is how it has always been, and that nothing in the intervening decade changed it.

In a few towns a school's budget. In most, a gesture.

Per-person spending is still an abstraction, so follow the same money to the other end, into the budget of the school that receives it. The Heshbon project collects budgets for about ninety Jewish day schools, and roughly forty of them can be matched by name to the grants in the federation filings. For each matched school the question becomes concrete: what share of everything this school spends in a year arrives from its federation? One definition to hold onto: federation money here means every grant from the community's federation and its foundation arm, including grants that individual donors directed out of donor-advised funds held there. A grant line in the filings does not say who made the decision, so these bars measure what the federation system delivers, not what an allocations committee chose.

At the median matched school the answer is about five percent, or $1,400 per enrolled child. The chart below shows why that median describes almost nobody. Each bar is one school, and the right-hand column is federation dollars per child.

Read the community names as you go down.

There is very little in between. A school either sits inside a community that budgets for it, in which case the head of school can plan around the allocation, or it receives a sum that rounds to a gesture. The aggregate statistics describe a middle that barely exists.

The table where someone decides is disappearing

The obvious explanations are demographic, and they fail. Rank the 35 communities by Orthodox presence, by Sunbelt geography, by how much of their money arrives in donor-advised funds, and none of it predicts school funding: every one of those correlations lands within 0.15 of zero, where roughly 0.33 would be needed to count as reliable across 35 communities. What leans the right way is structure. Communities that concentrate their giving on a short list of institutions fund schools more, and communities that still fund the same organizations they funded a decade ago fund schools more. Both describe an allocations committee: a fixed set of institutions, funded every year, with the school on the list. A small community can run that arrangement because it has one school, or two, and everyone at the table knows them. A federation serving 300,000 Jews across forty institutions becomes a platform instead, where the money follows whatever each donor picks, and day schools do badly there.

The national numbers show that machinery being dismantled in real time. Watch three series move together.

Who decides is the part that changed. On the campaign side, federations cut day schools' share of their grants from 6.3 to 5.0 percent over the decade, while the foundation arms, the donor-advised side, held roughly level. One donor-advised sponsor in Manhattan, the Jewish Communal Fund, now carries a quarter of all federation-system day school dollars by itself. The money did not leave the category so much as it changed hands, from a committee that asks what the school needs this year to the aggregate of thousands of individual account holders whose median grant is $34,000.