What is the National Jewish Educator Census? 

The National Jewish Educator Census (Census) is part of The CASJE Career Trajectories Study, a national research effort designed to collect data to inform interventions for Jewish educators and Jewish educational organizations.

What is The CASJE Career Trajectories Study? 

The CASJE Career Trajectories Study is a multi-year, comprehensive research project addressing the recruitment, retention, and development of educators working in Jewish settings in North America. This study is funded by the William Davidson Foundation and the Jim Joseph Foundation. You can read more about the study here. 

What is CASJE? 

The Consortium for Applied Studies in Jewish Education (CASJE) is a research center based at the Graduate School of Education and Human Development at George Washington University. 

Who is leading the Census? 

CASJE has subcontracted with The Greenberg Team, led by Dr. Ariela Greenberg, to conduct this estimate of how many people are employed as Jewish educators in the United States.  

Who should complete the Census? 

Anyone who receives the invitation to complete the Census on behalf of their organization. The email invitations will be distributed on a rolling basis throughout the summer. Some organizations may receive more than one invitation if different people direct different educational departments. If you receive the invitation and are not the best person in your organization or department to complete it, please delegate to the best person on your staff to complete it. Alternatively, pass the email to a manager who can delegate it to the best person on the staff to complete the Census.

If you are a Jewish educational or engagement leader in the USA and have not yet received an invitation, and believe you should have, please see this form.

How long does it take to participate in the online Census? 

The online portion is estimated to take approximately 10 minutes of your time. You will be asked about your organization’s staffing in 2019 and anticipated changes in 2020.  The email invitation contains an attachment with information you can gather in advance to increase efficiency with the online platform.  

What will my organization be asked to do? 

Your organization will be asked to share how many Jewish educators they employed in 2019. They will also be asked some questions about how the current COVID-19 situation has affected staffing and educational efforts. We will also ask for some demographic information about your educational employees, which we refer to as Supplemental Data, such as their gender and year of birth. 

What data are you asking for? 

We are asking for: 

• Total number of staff
• Number of educators full-time, part-time, and seasonal
• Changes and needs due to COVID-19
• Supplemental Data: If possible and available, a file with de-identified individual data on gender, year of birth, employment status, direct instructor/supervisor, and partial ZIPcode to establish regions.
  
  

What if my organization does not have all the Supplemental Data you are asking for or cannot access it right now?  

It is OK if you do not have all the data or cannot gather it easily from existing data. Your organization can still participate and help with this effort. At a minimum, we are hoping you can provide the number of Jewish educators employed in 2019 on the online Census platform. This contribution alone is valuable. 

How should we share Supplemental Data? 

Those who were invited should have received instructions for setting up and uploading the Supplemental Data files. The instructions are available in the email invitation, on the last page of the Census platform, and in the follow up email after you submit the main portion of the Census. If you would like the instructions emailed to you again, please contact casjecensus@gwu.edu. 

How will you keep our organizations’ data private and confidential? 

The study team will follow several procedures to minimize risk and help keep your organization’s data private and confidential. We will store the Supplemental Data in a password-protected platform separately from your institutional data shared in the secure Census platform. 

How will data be shared? 

Data will only be presented in aggregate across sectors. We will not report on an organization's data separately. (For some organizations your letter may specify that your data may be shared with a respective national or umbrella organization. If your invitation did not mention a plan for data sharing with a national or umbrella organization then this does not apply to you.) 

Thank you in advance for participating 

We know everyone’s time and attention are limited. If possible, we hope that organizations can make some time over the next few weeks to share their count of Jewish educators. In this time of unprecedented crisis, tracking trends in the hiring and retention of Jewish educators allows us address needs for the field and for our educators. 

If you received an invitation, please know your organization’s participation is paramount to the success of this study and an accurate census on the current North American Jewish educator landscape. If you can participate, to the best of your ability, we would be incredibly grateful. 

Contact Us

If you have any questions, concerns, or limitations regarding the Census and data sharing process or the secure online data systems, please contact Dr. Ariela Greenberg, CASJE National Jewish Educator Census Study Lead at casjecensus@gwu.edu or 202-994-1359.

If you have questions about the larger study of the career trajectories of Jewish Educators in the United States, or regarding data privacy and confidentiality, please contact Dr. Arielle Levites, Managing Director, CASJE at alevites@gwu.edu. 

Looking ahead to 2021 

In our pre-COVID-19 Census study design, we originally planned to request more data on individual educators (such as educational credentials, degree/major, years of experience, race, ethnicity, and nationality) to help us develop a rich portrait of who Jewish educators are in the US today. We still believe these data are very important. We also want to be sensitive to the Jewish educational workforce and their workload during COVID-19 shutdowns and remote learning. Due to the time and effort required by staff to complete such a detailed request, we greatly scaled back the data collection for this year. We plan to run a second census in 2021 to capture these important demographic data as comprehensively as possible to help further inform the field.