Jason Bedrick on Jewish Day Schools and School Choice

The Tikvah Podcast

Tikvah

Judaism, Politics, Religion & Spirituality, News

4.6 • 620 Ratings

🗓️ 2 August 2016

⏱️ 42 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Jewish education is an important source of Jewish continuity in America. This is has been true in all times and places throughout the Jewish diaspora, but it is all the more so in the United States, a nation dedicated to the proposition that all are created equal. In America, with its individual freedoms, the most potent threat to the Jewish community is not anti-Semitic persecution of old, but assimilation. The threat of assimilation in modern America makes an education in Jewish particularism and Jewish peoplehood especially important, and yet the cost of Jewish education is a growing burden on Jewish families—entailing not only a financial burden, but a moral burden as well.

In this podcast, Eric Cohen speaks with Cato Institute policy analyst Jason Bedrick to delve into this issue and the larger question of what possible role the government might play in alleviating the financial burden to families of parochial school. Their conversation centers around Milton Friedman’s 1955 essay “The Role of Government in Education,” which argues that school vouchers promise both efficiency and freedom for families in the education arena. Bedrick and Cohen discuss the history of parochial schools in America, school choice options like vouchers and tax credits, and what these options mean for the Jewish community. What has the establishment of ostensibly “public” schools meant for the religious freedom of families and communities of faith, and what role might government assume in ensuring the blessings of liberty for all its citizens?

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Tikva podcast on great Jewish essays and ideas.
0:11.9	I'm your host, Eric Cohen.
0:14.4	Without question, one of the great challenges facing American jury today is the future of Jewish education.
0:20.6	What kind of schools should we build
0:22.2	and what should they be teaching? Should we be focused on trying to strengthen the day school model
0:26.6	or strengthen other kinds of supplementary Jewish schooling? And how do we finance all of this? Can we
0:32.2	create a model that is economically sustainable, both for the families that are already committed
0:36.6	to intensive and
0:37.7	serious Jewish education and to families on the outside who might be open to Jewish education
0:42.8	of an economically viable model existed. Our focus in this discussion will specifically be the
0:48.9	national debate about whether we should be seeking state funding for families who want to send
0:53.7	their children
0:54.1	to religious schools and what this great American debate has to do with the future of Jewish
0:58.7	education and the future of the American Jewish community.
1:02.2	We'll be guided by a classic essay on this subject by Milton Friedman, taken from his important
1:07.2	book, Capitalism and Freedom, which is really one of the earliest statements
1:11.4	and articulations of the case for vouchers.
1:14.6	I'm very privileged to be joined today in this discussion by Jason Bedrick.
1:18.8	Jason is an education policy analyst at the Cato Institute, and really one of America's leading
1:23.9	thinkers and writers about education policy in general and a special interest in his
1:29.6	case in what this means for the Jewish community. Jason, thanks for being here.
1:33.8	My pleasure. Thank you for having.
	...

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