Original dataset · 86 Jewish day schools · IRS 990 + archives
86 Jewish day schools (Non-Orthodox and Orthodox K-8 cohorts), scored on a composite across operating margin, tuition discounting, endowment cushion, fundraising, enrollment trend and, where matched, head-of-school tenure. The figures are reconstructed by hand from each school's public IRS Form 990 income and expense totals, archived filings, and school and public web sources across 2023-24 through 2025-26, with head-of-school tenure drawn from Form 990 (2017-24). Grades are percentile ranks within this Jewish day school pool, not against the broader independent-school universe. Adjust the weights below to match what you think matters most.
How this dataset was built
An original dataset assembled by hand from public IRS Form 990 filings, historical and archived filings, Internet Archive / Wayback captures, and school and public web sources, reconstructed across eight years of filings. Every school's operating margin, tuition discounting, endowment cushion, fundraising, enrollment trend, and head-of-school tenure was rebuilt from the income and expense totals in those public filings rather than pulled from a single feed.
The grades rest on the assembled record above. Any comparable-school benchmarking appears only as a secondary cross-reference where noted.
Writing from outside this research, on the same question.
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Methodology
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Ḥeshbon
חשבון, an accounting
Evidence where anecdote has been doing the work: what a Jewish household or a Jewish institution actually pays, and who decides. Most of these datasets did not exist until a piece needed them. Each one is published alongside the work, with its sources and its limits, so you can check the arithmetic yourself.
The figures here are estimates built from public filings, published price pages and survey samples, and every piece states its own sources, sample sizes and limits in place. Tax filings run a year or more behind and get restated, posted prices change without notice, and a percentage describes the sample observed rather than the whole field. Several rest on small denominators or on voluntary reporting, noted where they appear. Where a number is our own arithmetic rather than a published one, the piece says so and shows the working.
Nothing here audits an individual institution or a person, and naming an organization is not a finding about its conduct. Ḥeshbon is independent of every body named on this site. None has reviewed, approved or funded the work, and where a ranking uses another organization's published figures as an input, that organization has not endorsed the result.
This is research rather than financial, tax, legal or immigration advice, and no one should decide about their own money on these pages alone. Israeli figures are current as of August 2026, at roughly three shekels to the dollar, and Israeli tax and benefit rules move faster than that. Corrections are made on the piece itself and noted there. If something here is wrong, write and it gets fixed.
© 2026 Ḥeshbon, Center on Data and Jewish Life. Research, writing and charts by Gavriel Brown.