Washington – Rabbi Zwiebel Addressed White House Summit On Faith Based Schools

Washington – Making good on a promise he made in this State of the Union speech in January, President George W. Bush convened a summit on faith-based schooling at the Reagan Center near the White House on April 24.

At the gathering, officially called the “White House Summit on Inner-City Children and Faith-Based Schools,” thoughts and analyses were offered by community leaders representing a broad swath of America, including Agudath Israel of America’s executive vice president for government and public affairs, Rabbi Chaim Dovid Zwiebel. Agudath Israel’s Rabbi Zwiebel echoed the President’s assessment of faith-based schools as a “critical national asset” and added that they are a “critical familial asset” no less – that they represent a singular opportunity for parents who judge their children in need of an environment that differs from that of the typical public school. In fact, two earlier speakers had recounted how, while one or more of their children had attended successful public schools, they felt that only a religious school would be an educationally appropriate choice for another of their children.

Rabbi Zwiebel also picked up the President’s theme of support for the “Pell Grants for Children” idea, although he challenged the assumption that support should be limited to parents of children already enrolled in failing public schools. Agudath Israel has long been at the forefront of defending, in both courtrooms and the arena of public discourse, the idea of “school choice,” the provision of educational vouchers, tuition tax relief and other forms of tangible assistance for all parents of school-age children. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that properly constructed educational choice programs are constitutional, and several such programs are functioning in various localities.

The main focus of the Agudath Israel representative’s remarks, though, was on harnessing private sector support for religious schools.

That is certainly true in the Orthodox Jewish community, he explained, the segment of American Jewry “most heavily invested in Jewish day schools, as Orthodox Jews tend to have a higher than average number of children per family and relatively low family income compared to other segments of the Jewish population. These demographic realities, he asserted, combined with the “dual curriculum” of religious and general studies programming at Jewish day schools, “make it necessary for most schools to set up generous scholarship funds for needy parents.”

Aside from creative fundraising projects that schools themselves have developed, Rabbi Zwiebel highlighted a number of broader initiatives in the Jewish community. Among the examples he cited were programs directed at grassroots donors, like the Kehilla Jewish Education Fund in Chicago, which encourages every member of the community to contribute regularly to the fund and divides the contributions among the city’s nine local Orthodox day schools on a per capita basis; and the “Five Percent Mandate” brainchild of George Hanus in that same community, which encourages Jews to leave five percent of their estates to an endowment fund of a local day school of their choice.